Time - now - for Plan B for the Paris 2024 opening ceremony

Time - now - for Plan B for the Paris 2024 opening ceremony

From the front lines of campus unrest here in the United States, this dispatch from the University of Southern California, where the mood decidedly is, to be gentle, unsettled.

One of my best students in last year’s sophomore news writing cohort was personally called out, by name, at an on-campus protest—right in front of the j-school building that, you should know, is due to be the main press center at the 2028 LA Games. One of my current sophomore standouts, 19 years old, covering a rally, was so rattled by taunts she asked to be driven home in a police cruiser. She called me, her professor, from the back of the car, saying, am I going to be OK? 

This, so we are all clear, is the key demographic — teens, college kids — the International Olympic Committee is seeking to draw to the Paris 2024 Games in eight short months. Prediction: uphill climb.

Casey Wasserman at the IOC and unequivocally in solidarity with Israel

Casey Wasserman at the IOC and unequivocally in solidarity with Israel

MUMBAI — Presenting Monday to the International Olympic Committee at its 141st assembly, Casey Wasserman, chair of the LA28 organizing committee, said, “I unequivocally stand in solidarity with Israel.

“But let me be clear. I also stand with the innocent civilians in Gaza who did not choose this war.”

Wasserman’s remarks marked part of a stirring one-two combo in which he and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, now the U.S. ambassador to India, served noticed that sports and politics assuredly do mix.

AI comes to the IOC and says it and Olympic movement need, uh-oh, 'radical overhaul'

AI comes to the IOC and says it and Olympic movement need, uh-oh, 'radical overhaul'

MUMBAI – International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s manta, change or be changed, is apt. 

The challenge facing the IOC, the Olympic Games, indeed the wider Olympic movement, is both fundamental and existential. All of it is a 19th-century construct. Owing to broadcast television, U.S.-driven corporate sponsorship and, to some extent, Cold War rivalries, it found its footing in the 20th century. Now it is struggling to find a way in our 21st century. 

Television ratings are down. The sponsor program needs a far-reaching re-do. Change is not an option. It’s a must. It’s why, as part of his speech Saturday night here opening the IOC’s 141st session, Bach for the first time made extensive reference to the possibilities of artificial intelligence and, too, announced the IOC would study the creation of an “Olympic Esports Games.”

Change is one thing. But the IOC is furiously slapping at different currents, trying to find direction, not least about its own rules and about whether Bach or someone else ought to be in charge come 2025, when Bach, in theory, is due to step down.

Taylor Swift has what the Olympics needs. These five sports for LA28 are not it

Taylor Swift has what the Olympics needs. These five sports for LA28 are not it

MUMBAI – Squash? Really? That’s part of a purportedly cool plan to draw in tweens, teens and 20-somethings? Weed is legal in California, no problem out of competition, thank you doping control, but that is the idea? Seriously? Squash?

I teach college students at the University of Southern California, a key piece of the International Olympic Committee’s target audience. When the discussion came up this week in class about the five new sports the Los Angeles 2028 said it was proposing, squash, yay, and four others, a package the IOC executive board ratified here Friday for confirmation by its assembly in a few days, one of my students who consistently sees right through institutional BS called it the way it is:

“What,” he said, “is squash?”

Raging and kabuki theater in Lausanne: again, the Valieva matter

Raging and kabuki theater in Lausanne: again, the Valieva matter

The raging and political posturing in Lausanne outside the Kamila Valieva hearing is, like almost everything about this case except for the one thing that matters most, absurd.

You would think, listening to the American figure skaters, that seemingly no one in the United States of America has ever committed a doping violation, and that by trying to pressure the Court of Arbitration panel hearing the case that they – and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, willing participants in this kabuki theater – are standing up for truth, justice and the American way.

What silliness.

Here is what matters: Valieva, as this column has pointed out time and again, was 15 years old when all of what happened went down. 

How to win, and how to lose with grace ... on being a role model, and true sportsmanship

How to win, and how to lose with grace ... on being a role model, and true sportsmanship

In his keynote address Thursday to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic assembly, Gene Sykes, the chair of the USOPC board, offered a few words about the role of U.S. athletes. A few minutes later, the USOPC bestowed its Jack Kelly Fair Play Award on Hunter Armstrong, an American swimmer.

 The Olympic movement can often seem rough around the edges. It carries with it the attributes of a very big – a billion-dollar – business. The geopolitics of it all can be wearisome to many. Then there’s the doping, the corruption, the hard realities of living in a world often at odds with the aspirational ideals, the best of each and all of us, that the Olympics stands for.

It served then as a genuinely lovely reminder Thursday to listen first to Sykes, and then to Armstrong, to remember what’s at the core of the Olympics. Why it matters so very much in our broken and fragile world. Still.

Gene Sykes says the quiet part out loud: Olympic business model needs reinventing. Like, now

Gene Sykes says the quiet part out loud: Olympic business model needs reinventing. Like, now

Gene Sykes, chairman of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, said Thursday in public what everyone who is anyone in U.S. and worldwide Olympic leadership has been saying quietly in private: the financial models that have sustained the movement since 1984 need to be reimagined. 

Like, now. If not sooner.

Is the Olympic movement at a history-making inflection point?

Is the Olympic movement at a history-making inflection point?

Is the Olympic movement at an inflection point?

Let’s face it, the Games are prone to strong sentiments and strong statements. It’s easy to get swept away by the passion and the emotion that the Olympics evoke – after all, that’s the source of their appeal. 

But if that question has ever been worth asking, perhaps it’s now.

This week, on September 10, it will be a full 10 years since Thomas Bach was elected president of the International Olympic Committee.

A triple jump gold medal, an electrical engineering Ph.D. -- and hope in west Africa

A triple jump gold medal, an electrical engineering Ph.D. -- and hope in west Africa

BUDAPEST – If their lives depended on it, the bet here is that 99 out of 100 Americans – maybe most Europeans, too, for that matter – could not find Burkina Faso on the map. 

The capital of Burkina Faso, which is in west Africa and until two generations ago was called Upper Volta, is Ouagadougou, and as of these 2023 world track and field championships its most famous citizen is Hugues Fabrice Zango, who is not only a star athlete but also one small step away from getting his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at a university in France. 

The guy is handsome, beyond intelligent and articulate in both French and English. He is destined to be a star at the Paris 2024 Games. Sportswriters are not supposed to say these sorts of things but, after talking with him for well over a year, here we go: he is a fundamentally decent human being who cares about our broken world. His country is in a bad way. He knows this. He knows, too, that what he represents, especially now, after these championships, is the one thing his country needs more than anything.

One in five U.S. athletes not tested before Eugene, and other nuggets

One in five U.S. athletes not tested before Eugene, and other nuggets

BUDAPEST – Americans often take a holier-than-thou position when it comes to the anti-doping system. Indeed, U.S. athletes are typically heard to say something like, we get tested more. The upshot: you can trust our results more – we’re clean. The implication: others may not be.

New data from the Athletics Integrity Unit, a deep dive of out-of-competition tests from last year’s track and field world championships in Eugene, Oregon, makes plain that Americans – and fans of the U.S. team – ought to reconsider deeply held devotion.