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.
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?
EUGENE, Oregon — On Sunday, the United States won nine medals, four of them gold, at the world track and field championships.
As track nerds knew and organizers helpfully reminded, this was statistically the greatest single-day haul by any nation in the nearly 40-year history of the championships.
On August 31, 1991, the Soviet Union won eight. The previous American best had been seven, on August 10, 1983. Kenya won seven medals on August 27, 2011. There have been 14 times a nation has won six.
The question is: does this nine/four performance move the needle when it comes to growing track and field in the United States? Nine and four are great, no question. But unless this meet kickstarts the sport, with an eye toward the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, then nine and four are just — nine and four. Numbers. Like those in that third paragraph. Stats. For freaks and nerds. Who are already on the I-love-track train.
One of my favorite memories of Gianna Angelopoulos, the dynamic businesswoman who rescued the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, came the year before, at an International Olympic Committee session in Prague.
Holding court in the mezzanine area of the Prague Hilton, smoking a cigar (for real), she explained that running an Olympic organizing committee is, in fact, all about crisis management. In Athens, there were untold numbers of crises. Her job was bringing those crises to heel. Which she was doing — and, ultimately, did.
“The moment you understand that you actually do crisis management,” she was saying, “then it’s good.
“Then you feel control things. You can always expect the unexpected.”
The crisis right now in Tokyo, where the 2020/1 Games are due to open in five short months, is that the longstanding president of the organizing committee, 83-year-old Yoshiro Mori, will resign Friday over a sexist remark he made at a Feb. 3 meeting. He said that women talk too much.
Greetings anew from Manhattan Beach, California. And how are things? Thanks for asking! People are sick and dying because of the coronavirus. Also, a chunk of the state — bigger than Rhode Island — is ablaze after a siege of spectacular lightning strikes, some 12,000 over the past week, 100 on Friday; on the ground, the destruction is already savage; the air smoky and unhealthy; beyond, it’s only August and fire season has weeks to go. Meanwhile, the utilities are ordering rolling electricity blackouts. School started again but, you know, not in person so no one is happy about that.
Then there’s the political angst, President Obama finally going off on his successor. Here’s a fact: the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s running mate makes her the first person in the history of the Democratic Party to be nominated — as president or vice-president — as a representative of a state west of the Rocky Mountains.
We are living in weird times. In all of this, there seems to be an element of the apocalyptic. Even the setting sun is not yellow but an iridescent red. Thus the mind quite naturally goes, especially as the red sun sinks into the Pacific, to matters existential or, at the least, consequential.
We take you back to the halcyon days of 2015, when Eugene, Oregon, that college town in the middle of nowhere, was abruptly awarded — without the usual formal competitive bid process — the 2021 world track and field championships.
The United States has never staged the track worlds. The international governing body, then called the IAAF, now known as World Athletics, has always been keen to have it in the States. The soon-to-be-outgoing IAAF president, Lamine Diack, and the president of USA Track & FIeld, Vin Lananna said the stars aligned, Lananna calling the awarding of the 2021 championships a unique “one-time opportunity.”
Diack is now under house arrest in France, the focus of a criminal inquiry into a wide array of track- and Olympic-related matters. U.S. Justice Department officials, meanwhile, are reported to have taken an interest into the awarding of the Eugene bid.
But wait.
The whole idea of staging the track worlds in Eugene, per Lananna especially, was to grow the sport in the United States.
MONACO — The headline in The Times (the one in London) a few days ago proclaimed, “Lord Coe’s plan will lead to slow death of athletics, says Olympic champion Christian Taylor.”
Uh-huh.
Track and field is not dying, not even a slow and unremarkable death, because the triple jump will not be featured on television. You can take that to the bank.
This story, like so many others recently, underscores a trend, particularly as it relates to track and field, that would be particularly distressing if it wasn’t so transparent. The American and British media in particular in recent weeks have been filled with story upon story summoning the spirit of Chicken Little.
DOHA, Qatar — So much to unpack from two hours of voting here Wednesday at the IAAF congress, so let’s get to it:
1. Seb Coe was unanimously re-elected as president. He gets four more years.
In 2015, Coe ran a tough race against Sergey Bubka of Ukraine. This time, Coe ran unopposed.
He got 203 votes, out of 203.
This was a secret ballot. So for any of you who thought there might be even a single dissenter in a world body that over Coe’s first four-year term has seen multiple controversies — among them, the Russian doping matter and a legal dispute over differences of sexual development personified by the South African 800-meter champion Caster Semenya — think again.
