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.
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.
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.
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, it has been entirely unclear why so much vitriol has been directed at Kamila Valieva.
She is still just 16.
Here is yet another call for everyone — repeat, everyone — to dial down the rhetoric, the anger, the urge to put Valieva front and center as proxy for everything Russian or Putin and the war. She is none of those things.
She is a 16-year-old figure skater who, when last seen, was performing at the Russian national championships with a charming down-to-the-move celebration of Jenna Ortega’s viral Wednesday Addams dance from the hit Netflix series.
Twelve things about the flurry of pronouncements and announcements over the past several days about the Russians and whether they will or won’t be at the Paris Summer Games in 2024.
OK, 11 about the Russians and one about Salt Lake City.
The Russians and Salt Lake. They’re the Olympic gifts that keep giving.
1. Don’t delude yourself. Don’t be naive. Don’t be a hater, either. The Russians will almost surely be in Paris in 2024. Except they won’t be identified as Russians. They will be neutrals. The way they typically had been at World Athletics meets — something like ANA, or Authorized Neutral Athlete.
François Carrard has died, and the world of international and Olympic sport has lost a giant. He was 83.
Carrard knew seemingly everyone and everything. Perhaps most important, he frequently knew how to find and reach consensus in a world too often marked by polarizing disagreement.
Beyond, he was a renaissance man, learned in letters and music, especially jazz. He was unafraid to speak his mind. And he could be wickedly funny.
A small note about which some but not many people knew. When he was young, Carrard spent a year as an exchange student in the States, in Pasadena, California. There he was not “François” but “Frank.”
Early last Saturday morning, our nephew — my wife’s sister’s son, Shayne Rebbetoy — fell to his death. He was just 16.
Flying back to California as soon as possible, landing Sunday afternoon at a very foggy Los Angeles International airport, the news: Kobe Bryant and eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, had been killed just hours earlier in a helicopter crash near Calabasas.
We have spent this week in shock and grief, and in preparing for the seemingly infinite number of details that attend Shayne’s memorial service, which is set for Saturday. It is a fascinating thing to be very intensely mourning the passing of a teenage boy, a sweet and gentle soul you have known since he literally came to life, with the very public outpouring around the globe for a basketball icon who for some 20 years, since he came into all of our lives, inspired countless hopes and dreams.
Shayne’s mother, Lisa Hudson, my wife’s sister, was one of the early pioneers on the women’s pro beach volleyball circuit, and has for many years been active in the action sports industry. Her friends include Olympic medalists and skateboard legends, and they have rallied around her and her husband, Jack Rebbetoy. A GoFundMe campaign that asked for $10,000 (for grief therapy, among other things) is now five times past that; if you’d like to contribute, here’s the link.
The end of a decade naturally brings with it a slew of “best-of” lists.
When it comes to the Olympics, there’s really only one best-of from 2010 through 2019. It’s easy, actually.
It’s Kenya’s David Rudisha winning the men’s 800 on the track at the London 2012 Olympics. It was, and is, the single greatest performance amid the single greatest race in Olympic history from the past 10 years.
Maybe ever. Discuss. (Jason Lezak in the men’s 4x100 freestyle final in Beijing — rignt up there.)
For the last month, it has been all Winter Olympics in South Korea. Now, amid a blowing snowstorm in Birmingham, England, the world indoor track and field championships are on. All this cold, wind and snow — there’s time to think about this and that:
1. Of course the Russian Olympic Committee was reinstated just days after the close of the PyeongChang Games.
To reiterate a point made in this space frequently, sports doping is bad. But sports doping is not the measure of all things. Also, sports doping happens in every country.
It is way more important to the International Olympic Committee, and has been since the days when Juan Antonio Samaranch was president, to keep the so-called Olympic family together. This proposition is key. Indeed, when he was running for the office, the current president, Thomas Bach, made it his motto: “Unity in diversity.”
