Change or be changed, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach says.
Seb Coe, the head of World Athletics, must feel right now as if he’s living in parallel worlds.
He’s got his athletes telling him he’s, like, the greatest — amid a plan to pay $50,000 to winners at the Paris Games. That’s change. Big change.
Then he’s got critics. Lots of critics. Including institutional critics within the Olympic world.
In December, after a man with a knife and hammer killed a German tourist near the Eiffel Tower, the French sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castréa told France Inter radio, looking ahead to the opening ceremony for the Paris 2024 Summer Games, that there was no Plan B.
Of course, there was.
On Monday, the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, said there was in fact not only a Plan B but a Plan C: Plan B would be “limited to the Trocadero,” across from the Eiffel, Plan C, “even moved to the Stade de France,” a traditional stadium-style event.
Let’s save face and get to Plan C. Now.
A few weeks back came the announcement of the Friendship Games, to be held in Russia in September. Total prize money across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third: $17,000.
On Wednesday, World Athletics, the No. 1 sport in the Olympic landscape, made a precedent-setting move, announcing it would pay gold medalists at the Paris Games. Total prize money: $2.4 million. Winners across each of the four dozen track and field events will receive $50,000 each. Relay teams will split the $50k. Starting in Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid.
The timing may seem like World Athletics is following the Russians. To be clear, very clear: it is not.
“I have to accept the world has changed,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Wednesday in an interview with Steve Scott at ITV.
But that does not mean Caitlin Clark is single-handedly growing the game.
With South Carolina having defeated Iowa, 87-75, in the NCAA women’s tournament final, these conclusions:
Caitlin Clark is a very good basketball player. But not, not hardly, the greatest of all time.
There’s a fantasy world in which people want to believe stuff. It feels good, sure. And then there is reality.
Four months ago, in the first week of December 2023, I wrote that the Paris 2024 opening ceremony needed a Plan B.
Since then, I have had dozens of conversations with people inside and outside the Olympic movement. No one has said the idea of a flotilla of boats, the athletes of the world floating down the River Seine for six kilometers, or three-plus miles, is good. Almost everyone has said the same thing about this idea: it’s flawed.
For the sake of all that is decent in our world, the hope here is that they pull it off. But it so obviously seems the farthest thing from safe.
The No. 1 complaint athletes have about the Olympic movement is that they can’t make money.
Meet the International Olympic Committee-disapproved Friendship Games, coming this September in Russia: 36 sports, 21 venues, 17 in Moscow, four in Ekaterinburg (including track and field Sept. 18-22).
Total prize money, across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third, $17,000. No ‘Olympic village.’ Instead, you’ll be welcome in three- or four-star hotels.
Push, meet shove – brought to the world in some significant measure by Umar Kremlev, arguably one of the most provocative and interesting figures in world sport in 2024.
The problem with track and field is not the long jump.
To be honest, if you know who Miltiadis Tentoglou is, you are a real junkie and ought to be attending Track and Field Anonymous Meetings. With me, maybe.
The problem with track and field is that it is both anchored in tradition and traditionalists, and while traditionalists love the sport, and that’s all good, track and field is dying a very noticeable death with the audience it needs to resonate with, 18 to 34 year olds.
As we get older in life, we learn a few things. Human beings need hope. And we need each other.
This is the story of Ed Hula, a pioneering Olympic journalist in the United States, and Miguel Hernandez Mendez, who for most of his life has been a journalist in Cuba and is now, in significant measure because of the goodness of Ed Hula, a new American citizen.
“Olympic brothers,” Miguel said in a recent telephone call.
From the get-go, there was never any question there was a substance in the Russian skater Kamila Valieva’s 15-year-old body that shouldn’t have been there.
The issues all along were: 1/ where did that substance, the banned substance trimetazidine, or TMZ, come from, 2/ and what to do about it, since she was 15, and in theory someone who is 15 ought not be treated the same under the rules, anyone’s rules, as someone who is, say, 32.
Put aside everything else – and there’s so much connected to the Valieva matter, which threatened to all but eclipse everything that wasn’t Valieva at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games – and those two keys make up the core of Monday’s Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport judgment, which said those rules mean Valieva deserves to be treated like a grown-up.
So, it said, she got what she deserves, the usual: a four-year ban.
For, let’s note, a first offense.
In 2024, it would make for an excellent debate at an Oxford or Cambridge about what constitutes a World Athletics-driven “boycott” of Russia and what amounts to a punitive exercise in keeping them out that is indisputably and irrevocably at odds with the fundamental principle of the Olympic charter, which calls for inclusion.
Because, in the end, who gets punished? Vladimir Putin? Or the athletes?
What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe say? What would the 1980 version of Seb Coe tell the then British Olympic Assn. chair Denis Follows, who defied the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ensured a British team went to Moscow? Maybe, you know, thanks for letting me live my dream? Which is what an athlete asks?
