The Russian Ski Assn. -- and, by extension, all of Russian Olympic sports -- is under significant scrutiny because numerous Russian athletes have been caught doping. With the next Winter Games in 2014 in Sochi, the Russians have been making a big show of being committed to competing doping-free. Yet this report from fasterskier.com raises significant questions about whether, in fact, it's just a show -- whether the Russians truly are committed to clean sport or they have now found an end-around the rules.
Why didn't Westerners hear much about the Asian Games?
The just-concluded Asian Games in China were a big deal, arguably bigger than the Commonwealth Games a few weeks back in India. The Western press played up the Commonwealth Games but paid hardly any attention to the Asian Games. Why? Here's a pretty good take from the Christian Science Monitor.
Sportsmanship the way it's supposed to be
If your competitors, your rivals, showed up for a big canoe and kayak meet, and the boats that she and her team thought they had waiting for them suddenly weren't ready as billed, and if you had boats you could lend, would you? If you said no, you would surely deny those rivals, the American racers, a key qualifying opportunity on the way to the London Olympics in 2012.
If you said yes, sure, you might complicate your own Olympic qualification.
Well?
A few weeks ago, when this exact situation presented itself at an event called the Sprint PanAms, held in Mexico City, officials from the Canadian canoe and kayak federation didn't even hesitate.
Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.
Fighting to make her mark in a man's world
When they were little girls, Hazzauna Underwood was, she says, "a girlie-girl." She was the sort who went on to be a high-school cheerleader Little sister Queen - not quite.
"She was the one who ran around with dogs, who played basketball, who did weightlifting," Hazzauna recalled with a laugh. "If she could have played football, she would have done that, too."
The first women's boxing tournament in Olympic history is set for the London 2012 Games. Queen Underwood, 26, has emerged this year as one of the United States' prime contenders.
And among many great stories in the Olympic scene, Queen Underwood has one of the most compelling. She is a woman fighting to make it in a man's world, in and out of the ring.
Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.
Number 50 in your game-day program, Steven Contreras
The thing about Steven Contreras being back on the football field, which of course is extraordinary, is that it's really not. Eight months to the day after doctors amputated the lower part of his left leg, Steven, who is a 16-year-old high school junior, got back in for about a dozen plays in the game that clinched the league championship. Last week, even though that knee was sore, he played again as his school, Rolling Hills Prep, moved to 8-1.
Five or six or 10 years from now, when Steven is bigger and stronger, maybe he competes for the United States in the Paralympic Games. Or maybe not.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is the change the Paralympic movement has wrought. That change has come incrementally and surely has yet to be fully realized -- there being some 21 million people in the United States with a physical disability.
The years have nevertheless ushered in that change. And it is powerful and undeniable. It is emphatic and it is real. It does nothing less than give young people like Steven hope.
"That," he said of the Paralympics, "is something I would definitely love to do."
Yes, Steven has lost part of a leg. No, he won't ever again be the same. But he can -- he will -- still be "normal," able to live his life to the fullest, just like the able-bodied kids around him -- who, and this is a key part of the change, too, treat him "normally."
That is the power of the Paralympics. It makes it all -- whatever it is, even something as definitively American as football, a sport that isn't even part of the Paralympic scene -- so much more "normal."
"It has been really inspiring," sophomore Kevin Kole, Rolling Hills Prep's punter and place-kicker, said of Steven's determination to get back into uniform, a testament to Steven's own mental fortitude, Steven's faith and the love and support of his parents, coaches, teammates and others.
The way that inspiration manifested itself, and the way Kevin describes it, is the telling part: "He was always trying, always at practice every day. But his leg wasn't ready," by which Kevin meant both Steven's left leg and one or another of the prostheses Steven would be trying.
"He kept getting new legs," Kevin said. "They kept breaking because he kept jumping and running. This one now, it works -- but we had to wrap it in all this foam."
Just a matter-of-fact recitation about how to solve what is, well, an equipment issue.
Because once that was solved, of course Steven would be playing -- right?
Rolling Hills Prep is an independent co-educational secular school for grades six through 12 in San Pedro, Calif., about a half-hour south of downtown Los Angeles on the eastern slope of the Palos Verdes peninsula.
It was during football season last year, Steven's sophomore year, that his left ankle started bothering him.
He couldn't figure it out. He would just fall, for seemingly no reason. One time, he recalled, he fell after he thought he'd gotten hit. No, someone said -- you just fell. "I said, you've got to have this looked at," the football coach, Frank Frisina, recalled.
Steven's mom, Valerie, 46, is a longshoreman. His dad, Steve, 47, is a Los Angeles County welding foreman. They took him to one of those urgent-care facilities to check out the ankle. It's not broken, they were told there, but you really have to see an orthopedic specialist, and right away.
The day before Thanksgiving, the specialists told Steve and Val that their son had a bone tumor, a kind of cancer called Ewing's sarcoma, in his left ankle.
Last Dec. 5, Steven started chemotherapy.
Over the next four months, he became very good friends with a little boy, Nathaniel Robert Arteaga, not yet even in kindergarten, who was also undergoing chemo. "If this little boy is doing it, we can do it -- we can beat it," Steven would tell his mom.
For those months, Steven and his little buddy carried each other through the routine of chemo. For all that time, Steven wasn't in significant pain. He could get up and around. He could dance.
But the cancer wouldn't go away. The fear was it would spread.
On March 5, doctors amputated Steven's left leg, about where the calf muscle ends.
"The only time he was down was right after the surgery," Val said. "They didn't have his meds quite right. He looked down and said, 'Oh, it's really gone.' "
Steven remembers that. But he also describes it like this: "That was the turning point for me. Okay, it's gone. They need to do this to save my life and I'm okay with it."
How quickly, he wanted to know, could he play ball again? "That was my main goal," he said. "To get back on the football field with my brothers."
Understand that Rolling Hills Prep is not one of those mammoth California public high schools that produce reams of Division I scholarship athletes. In all, about 235 kids attend all seven grades. The school plays eight-man football. About two dozen boys are on the team.
This is Frisina's sixth year as head coach. When he started, he brought with him a saying: "Hold the rope." He meant to teach the boys that they were in it, football and life itself, together: "If you're falling off a cliff, you're dangling off a cliff, who's going to hold that rope for you? Your teammates."
After Steven's diagnosis, with the okay of teammates and alumni, they took the original rope and put it in a frame and gave it to him. The team also held a car wash and some other events to start a fund for the upgraded and expensive prosthetic Steven wants, made by the same company that makes the device sprinter Oscar Pistorius runs on.
"He didn't want to let anyone down," his mother said. ""His coaches, his friends, his parents -- he knew everybody was watching. I think he just wanted to prove to himself, too -- he saw other amputees do it, and he felt that if they could do it he could do it.
"I don't know," she said, marveling at her son's willpower. "He's so young. The thought of losing his life at such a young age -- he had so many hopes and dreams yet to accomplish. The thought of not reaching those goals -- he wasn't going to stand for that."
Hardly.
"He said, 'Coach, as soon as I get the stent out of my chest, I can play -- they're going to clear me,' " Frisina recalled. "I said, 'Steven, as long as you get cleared by the doctor and the parents, we'll get you back in shape and make sure you put in the time and if it's okay for you to play -- you've got it.' "
Learning to walk again with a prosthetic device can take weeks. "I only used crutches that first day," Steven said. "I was determined I was going to be playing football this season. Within three weeks to a month, I was walking without a limp."
Frisina said, "You talk about there being heroes -- this kid has faced everything head-on. But this kid doesn't see that. He says there are other people out there who are stronger. I tell you, if there are, I haven't met them."
A couple weeks ago, Steven brought Frisina a doctor's note. It said he was cleared to play.
In eight-man ball, there's a 45-point mercy rule. In its final regular-season game, against an L.A. school called Ribet Academy, Rolling Hills Prep roared out to a big first-quarter lead. After that, in came Steven, the prosthetic wrapped up in all that foam.
"You could tell the buzz along the bleachers," Frisina said. "He was fired up."
Steven played a few plays, then came out. He came right over to Frisina.
"He said, 'Can I go back in?'
"I said, 'You can go back in but let's do this right.' "
After the game, a 47-0 Rolling Hills Prep Huskies victory, Steven was sporting a big bruise on his right arm. Pretty normal.
This past weekend, in the Huskies' first-round playoff game, Steven got in for about a half-dozen plays in the Huskies' 47-14 defeat of Nuview Bridge, from Nuevo, Calif., near Riverside.
Maybe Rolling Hills Prep gets by Windward, another L.A. school, this week. Maybe not.
Does it really matter?
Val didn't even get to see her son play last weekend. She was manning the snack shack, cooking burgers and hot dogs. "It felt like things were normal," she said.
She also said, "It's happening so fast. I can't believe he's pushing himself to not just get back to normal but pushing himself to help other people. I'm, like, maybe you shouldn't be doing all this. Let's breathe a little. Let's make sure your health is good."
"He has a lot of people praying for him. He has a lot of support. I just told him," and here she laughed because she knew that what she would say next was exactly what you'd expect, so very normal, "make sure your grades stay good."
London 2012: construction progress
As the International Olympic Committee's inspection team comes to town for a routine visit, London authorities on Tuesday released a series of photos that underscore the undeniable progress made at Olympic Park. Here's one showing the central stadium. The Olympic Delivery Authority, as the construction oversight entity there is called, recently announced that work is 75 percent complete, with the main venues on track to be completed next summer, a year before the Games. The opening ceremony is set for July 27, 2012.
Gymnastics: yeah, that's cool
Football players -- yeah, it can be cool to play ball. Basketball players -- yeah, that's cool, too.
Gymnasts -- um, all you football and basketball players: did you notice who it was doing handsprings on the runway and cuddling up later for snapshots with lingerie-wearing super-models at the Victoria's Secret 2010 fashion show Wednesday night in New York?
Did all you football and basketball players notice those ripped, buff guys with six-pack abs?
Those were, for the most part, U.S. Olympic and national-team gymnasts, past and present, and that -- at the intersection of sports and American pop culture -- makes for one of the best advertisements the sport could ever ask for, a reminder that men's gymnastics is for guys who are as tough as steel and that, too, men's gymnastics deserves way, way, way more attention than it usually gets.
Which is, to over-simplify, once every four years.
And, even then -- the men are often overshadowed by the girls.
Formally, that would be the "women's events," but as everyone understands those are -- with exceptions -- teen-age girls out there, not women.
The men -- they're men.
David Durante -- the 2007 U.S. all-around champion, he's a Stanford grad who just spent the last year burnishing his renaissance-man chops in Italy.
Morgan Hamm -- a two-time Olympian, now married, now in pharmacy school in Wisconsin.
John Macready -- the youngest member of the 1996 Olympic team, he has gone on to make a career out of hosting gymnastics and other events. "I never dreamed gymnastics would take me to the places I've seen or the things I've done," he said.
The full list of the nine who now go down in Victoria's Secret, and gymnastics, lore: Durante, Hamm, Macready, Stephen McCain, Sasha Artemev, Alexei Bilozertchev, Chris Brooks, Wes Haagensen and Derek Shepard.
"This was definitely an opportunity that when I saw it, I thought, you're not going to get many of these types in your experiences in your life. I'm like, all right, I'm doing it," Hamm said.
And talk about an understanding wife -- asked how his bride of 18 months, Megan, reacted when she first heard about what was up, he said she responded, "Wow, cool."
"I heard that Blaine turned it down," Durante said, meaning Blaine Wilson, the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympic-team mainstay, "and it will probably be the biggest regret of his life."
Because this is just a partial list of who else was at the show Wednesday night, which airs Nov. 30 on CBS:
Katy Perry, who arrived flaunting considerable cleavage and "looking eye-popping in pink," as one celebrity website put it. Akon, the R&B star. Tennis star Serena Williams. "Entourage" actor Adrian Grenier. "Blondie" singer Debbie Harry.
Oh, and did we mention there were scantily clad models?
"Obviously," said Shane Geraghty, the link between the show and the top U.S. gymnasts, "Victoria's Secret has the hottest models in the world. To have them interacting with these top gymnasts, and making the gymnasts sexy on the same level the girls are -- that was great.
"The girls would come down the runway and give the guys props, a wink or a high-five. They were very excited about it -- the girls, that is. All that makes gymnastics look cool."
Geraghty is now 37. In college, he was twice captain of the Syracuse gymnastics team. He and Jonathan Nosan, who has a theater and circus-training background, run a production and event-management company in New York City called Acroback.
Originally, Geraghty said, the thought was to recruit some local gymnastics-type talent for the Victoria's Secret show.
Quickly enough, though, it became apparent that they needed more. They needed guys who could handle the intensity of a demanding rehearsal schedule and still be able to go at show time.
They needed national- and Olympic-caliber gymnasts.
"The rehearsing was intense," Durante said. "We got there," to New York, "on Saturday night. We rehearsed all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday," from 10 in the morning until 9 at night. "We went through two dry-runs Wednesday morning with the models. Then we had two shows Wednesday night."
Macready said, "We're coming back into the building for the second show, two or three of us, and I heard out of the side of my ear someone say, 'Those guys are the gymnasts who are so absolutely amazing.' To have someone in that environment make a comment like that -- it was like, wow, this is cool."
Macready also said, "When we first got there," for the first rehearsals, "one of the ladies who was a stage coordinator said, 'I bet everyone made fun of you in high school for being a gymnast. Now they're going to see you and say, I want to be a gymnast.'
"It funny," he went on. "When you're growing up in that environment," meaning high school, "it's all about what is cool and not cool, what is tough and not tough. When you get older, and I'm now 35, you have people who in football and other tough sports show you respect and show you how amazing they think your sport is."
All along, it was critical to Geraghty that stylistically the gymnasts be perceived on the runway as -- well, gymnasts. That is, not as dancers or Cirque du Soleil-style characters.
"It was such a great thing for the gymnasts to be able to do something on this scale," he said. "It was great to involve the male gymnastics, who can be overlooked outside of the Olympics. And I hope it gets boys excited to be involved in gymnastics."
You think?
As the Huffington Post reported: "Longtime model Isabeli Fontana did enjoy a fully engaging moment during this show when she strutted in a silver bra and sequin swim bottoms carrying an oversized barbell and tossed it to a group of bare-chested male gymnasts."
"Just being around such amazingly beautiful women and being able to perform on stage with them -- that was pretty exciting," Hamm said.
"The only way I can put it," Durante said as the sun came up on another morning and it was no longer a day in which he was hanging around a bunch of hot models, "is that it's depressing today."
The star of America's fencing renaissance
If fencing was football, Mariel Zagunis would be a star on the order of Peyton Manning. There would be gauzy slo-mo half-hour TV features on her and everyone would know all about her Olympian parents (both on the 1976 U.S. rowing team), the Notre Dame connection, the two Olympic individual gold medals. That is, two so far. If fencing was basketball, Mariel Zagunis would be like MJ, Kobe and LeBron. MJ? MZ! A couple days ago, MZ took her talents to France and won yet another world championship in the sabre.
If fencing was boxing -- well, maybe there can only be one who is eternally The Greatest. But Zagunis, with this latest world championship, won Saturday at the famed Grand Palais in Paris, has made it abundantly plain that she holds a singular place in the annals of American Olympic sports.
She's great, and she has led an American renaissance in the sport. Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.
New face in U.S. Olympic Training Center cafeteria line: Paul Hamm
It was just a couple days before the start of last month's gymnastics world championships that Paul Hamm, the 2004 Athens Games all-around gold medalist, moved into the U.S. Olympic Training Center. His sky-blue Acura TSX, the one with Wisconsin plates, pulled up to the center, in Colorado Springs, Colo., and thus launched the most anticipated comeback in U.S. men's gymnastics history.
Bring on London and 2012, because with a healthy Paul Hamm on board, the U.S. men -- who finished fourth in the team competition at the 2010 worlds -- immediately become contenders, and not just to place but to win.
Paul turned 28 in September. He will be closing in on 30 in the summer of 2012. If he can stay healthy, he will -- appropriately -- be seen as a medal favorite in the all-around and in a number of individual events as well.
Understand: If he were to never make another appearance in red, white and blue, Paul Hamm has already secured his place in gymnastics history. He is the first American male to win the Olympic all-around (2004); he is also the first American male to win the all-around at the world championships (2003).
This comeback, though, could secure his legacy as not just one of the greatest American gymnasts ever; he could be the greatest. Indisputably, unequivocally -- the greatest.
Click here to read the rest at TeamUSA.org.
The truth: Marion Jones is a liar
Sometimes you read something in the newspaper or hear it on television and it's just incredible. Honestly, it's so tempting to just let the moment pass. Marion Jones, again? Still?
But when there's such a serious distortion of the truth, it's imperative that the record be set straight. And repeatedly in recent days such revisionism has been at work, most pointedly in a lengthy interview she gave the Associated Press and in a Los Angeles Daily News column.
Both deserve special scrutiny because here is the truth: Marion Jones is a liar.
That's the prism through which Marion Jones ought to be viewed. She lied, and lied, and lied, and she spent time in federal custody for it, and she still can't -- or won't -- fully come clean.
It's sad, really, because she does have a message for kids, which -- as she tries to sell her new book and as the promotion gears up for a new ESPN documentary about her -- is why she's back in the newspapers and on TV.
Don't make the "mistake" I did -- that's her message, and that was the exact word she used in an appearance a few days ago on ABC's "Good Morning America." But she didn't make a "mistake." That suggests a one-time thing. Marion Jones lied, repeatedly, about taking performance-enhancing drugs and she has yet to disclose the full extent of what she did, and why, and how.
Until she does that, her advice is as empty as a howling wind.
At issue in the AP story is what Jones said. In the LA Daily News piece it's mostly what filmmaker John Singleton has to say about the matter.
In the AP interview, Jones recounted the moment on Nov. 4, 2003 when she lied to federal authorities about whether she had taken performance-enhancing drugs.
Shown a vial by investigating agent Jeff Novitzky, she realized it held a designer steroid called "the clear" that she had taken before the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
She denied it.
"I made a decision that took less than 45, 30 seconds," she told the AP, "to lie, to lie to them. And that was my crime."
Except that's not the extent of her criminal conduct.
She lied several times that day in 2003, as she herself says in the book.
Jones lied to federal authorities about her role in a check-fraud scheme, too, on Aug. 2, 2006, and again on Sept. 5, 2006, according to the government's sentencing memorandum in the case against her. The AP story responsibly and credibly mentions that facet of the case.
The truth is that it took those 2003 and 2006 exchanges with authorities for someone to hold her accountable in a way that ultimately would impact her liberty interest.
She had been lying to the rest of us for years.
"I have always been unequivocal in my opinion," she wrote in her 2004 autobiography, and in big red capital letters. "I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them and I never will take them."
This week to the AP, about her use of performance-enhancing drugs: "Sure, it was my choice to take it without asking any questions but it was never my intent to take it."
"I've openly acknowledged that I personally educated her about the use of growth hormone and watched her inject the drug right in front of me," Victor Conte, the central figure in the BALCO scandal, wrote in a piece published Sunday in the New York Daily News.
Here, in a Yahoo! Sports story, is grand jury testimony from Jones' ex-husband, the shot-putter C.J. Hunter:
"Prosecutor: Did Miss Jones know what this was, this Clear?
"Hunter: Yeah, I mean, she knew before I knew ...
"Prosecutor: Did she ever refer to it as flaxseed oil?
"Hunter: No, Victor made a comment, and I think Trevor [Graham, Jones' former coach] made the comment, that if anybody ever asks you what it is, say flaxseed oil, because I guess it just looks like flaxseed oil."
Jones, to the AP: "You talk about a tiny, little lie, and it gets you here," meaning in custody. "There's nothing tiny about not doing the right thing. It can really have you land in some of the worst places you could ever imagine."
A "tiny, little lie"?
Again from the government's sentencing memorandum:
"The defendant's use of performance-enhancing drugs encompassed numerous drugs (THG, EPO, human growth hormone) and delivery systems (sublingual drops, subcutaneous injections) over a substantial course of time. Her use of these substances was goal-oriented, that is, it was designed to further her athletic accomplishments and financial career. Her false statements to the [investigating] agent were focused, hoping not only to deflect the attention of the investigation away from herself, but also to secure the gains achieved by her use of the performance-enhancing substances in the first place. The false statements to the [investigating] agent were the culmination of a long series of public denials by the defendant, often accompanied by baseless attacks on those accusing her. regarding her use of these substances.
"The context of the defendant's use of performance-enhancing substances, as detailed in the documents seized from BALCO, shows a concentrated, organized, long-term effort to use these substances for her personal gain, a scenario wholly inconsistent with anything other than her denials being calculated lies to agents who were investigating the same conduct."
In sentencing her to six months in custody, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas emphasized that what Jones did was not a "momentary lapse in judgment or a one-time mistake but instead a repetition of an attempt to break the law."
When she came out of the courthouse nearly nearly three years ago, "I felt so sad for what she was going through," the film director John Singleton said.
Singleton's remarks appear in a column written by the LA Daily News' Tom Hoffarth. The column revolves around a documentary that Singleton prepared on Jones for ESPN's "30 for 30" series, due to air Tuesday.
After Hoffarth quotes Singleton as feeling "so sad" upon seeing Jones on the courthouse steps, he writes it's immediately after Jones had "just been told she'd have to serve the maximum sentence of six years in a federal prison …"
Six months. Not six years.
The column goes on from there to quote Singleton at length.
"I think she was in denial," Singleton said in reference to Jones' use of performance-enhancing drugs, "but when she was using them, they weren't illegal."
For starters: Did Singleton ask Jones whether she had a prescription for, say, human growth hormone?
If Singleton's reference in is only to "the clear," there's this, from a Conte manuscript, and see how it tweaks a point in the government's sentencing memo:
"There were actually two different species of The Clear from 2000 through 2003. The first was the anabolic steroid norbolethone, which was used successfully through the 2000 Sydney Olympics, helping Marion Jones win five medals that year, including three golds. It was only when I found out that the testers had identified strange metabolites in the urine samples of some of the athletes associated with BALCO at the Sydney Olympics that we moved on to the second designer steroid THG."
In connection with Jones' sentencing, Novitzky filed an affidavit that said a BALCO ledger included "multiple notations" for the "Marion J" entry "indicating the use of both norbolethone and THG during the time period from September of 2000 through June of 2001."
This much is true: neither norbolethone nor THG were illegal when Jones was using "the clear." Of course not. The entire point of using a designer steroid is that authorities don't know about it, and thus can't test for it until they do; similarly, you can't list something as illegal if you don't know it exists.
So that's the Singleton argument? That Jones used a performance-enhancer that at the time was undetectable, and because it was undetectable that should absolve her of culpability?
Both norbolethone and THG were included in 2004 amendments to the 1990 federal law that regulates certain steroids.
Back to Singleton: "That's the whole thing that rubs me wrong about steroids versus performance-enhancing drugs. It's not like you get some kind of shot in the arm that allows you to fly like Superman and stop moving trains. None of what she achieved wasn't without training."
The central reason an elite athlete takes performance-enhancing drugs is that they allow him or her to train longer and harder. As Jones herself said, in open court, on the day in October, 2007, that she pleaded guilty to lying about her doping, she "felt different, trained more intensely" and experienced "faster recovery and better times' while using "the clear."
"If you're going to be real, this goes beyond Marion Jones," Singleton said. "Nothing has happened to Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds, and no one is going to take away their achievements."
Nothing has happened to Clemens or Bonds? Each has been indicted.
Singleton: "Are people going to take down Lance Armstrong for as much as he's done for the sport and helped people afflicted with cancer?"
We don't know yet what the future might hold for Armstrong.
Singleton: "But they put her in jail? They put the black woman in jail. I mean, let's be real about it."
Okay, let's.
That assertion is as irresponsible as it is unsupported.
Troy Ellerman, the lawyer who leaked Bonds' grand jury testimony to the San Francisco Chronicle, served 16 months behind bars.
To say that Jones went to prison because she's black is like saying Ellerman went, and for a longer time, because he's white. Both are ridiculous.
The absurdity of the assertion that Jones went to prison because she's black is further highlighted when surveying other cases that, like Jones', grew out of the BALCO affair. Those brought into court have been black, white, male and female -- everyone from Bonds to Conte to Graham to cyclist Tammy Thomas.
In a thoroughly unrelated case, Martha Stewart served five months in custody. She is not black. Lying to the feds is an equal-opportunity disaster.
They didn't put Marion Jones in prison because of what she looks like. They put Marion Jones in prison because of what she did. Marion Jones is a liar, and she -- and we, everyone with an interest in sports -- would be better off if she would come completely clean.
And that is the truth.