Sochi corruption allegation

Gian Franco Kasper, the president of FIS, the influential international ski federation, says one-third of the more than $50-billion cost of the upcoming Sochi 2014 Winter Games has simply been embezzled. A Swiss member of the International Olympic Committee, Kasper made the provocative assertion in an interview Wednesday with Switzerland’s state broadcaster, SRF.

Kasper did not provide details. Instead, speaking in German, he said corruption appeared to be an “every day” matter in Russia.

The question now — to evoke a famous aphorism in Russian history — is what is to be done with Kasper’s remarks.

And, of course, what, if anything, is behind the timing of such allegations. As of Friday, the Feb. 7 opening ceremony is 28 days away.

In a follow-up interview Friday with Associated Press, Kasper stood by his remarks: “I didn’t say anything which I wouldn’t have said two years ago.”

He said the one-third figure for corrupt spending is “what everybody says in Russia,” not based on inside knowledge or direct evidence.

In Friday’s telephone interview with the AP’s Graham Dunbar, a respected Geneva-based sports correspondent, Kasper said, “One-third is disappearing. It’s not only in Russia that in certain businesses there is always a part disappearing.”

Kasper said money purportedly diverted for illicit reasons involved Russian sources, not the IOC or its commercial partners. He said $13 billion was specifically allocated toward the Games; the rest, he said, was for separate transport or construction projects.

In the SRF interview, Kasper noted that security at the 2014 Games would likely be intense.

He declared, too, that Russian president Vladimir Putin had an “ice-cold” personality. He said the recent release of prisoners — such as two members of the feminist band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, as well Greenpeace activists and the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky — were PR stunts aimed at boosting Russia’s image ahead of the opening ceremony.

Kasper said he feared “heartless Games.”

In speaking Friday with the AP, Kasper said Putin was a passionate sports fan but politically calculating: “He is [a] very strong, ice-cold man. That was not negative.”

Kasper has been an IOC member since 2000. He sits on the Sochi 2014 coordination commission, the IOC’s primary link to the project, a panel led by France’s Jean-Claude Killy, the 1968 triple ski gold medalist, himself an IOC member since 1995.

Again, Kasper leads the ski federation, arguably the most important of the seven winter sports. That lends his remarks a certain gravity.

It was just a little over 15 years ago that another Swiss, Marc Hodler, himself the FIS president from 1951 to 1998, launched the corruption scandal tied to Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Is this the start of another such episode?

Activists and critics of the Sochi project have for many months now sought to gain the world’s attention about cost overruns connected with the 2014 Games. Examples abound.

It can be very different, however, when a member -- particularly a very senior member -- of the IOC levels such an accusation.

The Christian Science Monitor on Friday reached out to Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who has since turned Kremlin critic, the author of a study that alleges up to $30 billion has been stolen in the lead-up to the 2014 Games. He said of the IOC, “They are obliged to pay attention to this.”

In Salt Lake City, it must be noted, accounting was transparent. An open media and the pressure of a vibrant court system helped lead, too, to the truth. Can the same circumstances be said of Russia?

Moreover, of Kasper’s credibility it must be observed he is the gentleman who said in 2005, when women ski jumpers were vying for a place in the Winter Games he was not sure it was suitable for their bodies.

“Don’t forget,” he said then in an interview with NPR, “it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

Women’s ski jumping makes its Olympic debut at the 2014 Sochi Games.

Figure skating's got problems

If you are lucky enough, as I am, to be the father of teenage daughters, you learn quickly that teen girls are the knowers, indeed the arbiters, of all things. The 19-year-old is back at college, enduring the frozen winter quarter of her sophomore year at Northwestern. So the 14-year-old ruled the dinner-table focus group. Just the way she likes it.

The Sochi Winter Olympics, as we all know, are just weeks away. Name a figure skater, I said. Just one. She couldn’t do it. Now, I said, name a snowboarder. She perked right up. “The ginger guy,” she said. “Shaun White!”

Ladies and gentlemen, in journalism school long ago, they cautioned us not to rely on anecdotal evidence. In this instance, that axiom must give way to the teen-girls-know-everything rule.

Which is why, as the U.S. figure skating trials get underway Thursday in Boston, it has to be said: figure skating has big, big problems.

Figure skating is seemingly so stuck in the past it doesn’t know what it is now or what it wants to be. The generation gap is immense, intense and profound.

A Sochi prediction or two: Yuna Kim of South Korea, the ladies’ champion from Vancouver 2010, will again be ethereal. The ice dancing competition will be fine, with Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White fighting for gold with their training partners in Detroit, Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada. Aside from that — what?

All these anniversary stories this week about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and the specials yet to come — people, that was 20 years ago. My college sophomore wasn’t even born yet! She doesn’t know about either of them and, frankly, why should she?

To turn the infamous tagline from the sordid affair around, my sophomore might as well ask if confronted with a Tonya-Nancy story: why me?

Snowboarding, snowboardcross, slopestyle — those are the events that are now, that are fun, that are riveting. At the Sochi Olympics, these are the disciplines that are going to go flying across cellphones and tablets. It’s no wonder Shaun White’s new trick, the Frontside Double Cork 1440, is already up on YouTube.

In a little-noticed decision taken at its general assembly in South Africa in the summer of 2011, the International Olympic Committee approved the introduction of a variety of new events for Sochi 2014, including (for both men and women) ski halfpipe and ski slopestyle as well as snowboard slopestyle.

For the unfamiliar, slopestyle requires a rider to execute tricks for amplitude and style while ripping through rails, jumps and other obstacles. White is trying to make the U.S. team riding the snowboard in the halfpipe and again in slopestyle.

Math for a moment: in all, there will be 10 medal events in both snowboarding and freeskiing … multiplying 10 (medal events) across those two disciplines equals 20 … three medals apiece times 20 means 60.

In this instance, the IOC understand the teen-age girl rule, too. It gets where the action is at. It’s in action sports.

You know who else gets it? Bob Costas. The longtime NBC host made a joke about it in a conversation earlier this week with Matt Lauer on the Today show:

“Basically,” Costas said, “I think the president of the IOC should be Johnny Knoxville. Because basically this stuff is just ‘Jackass’ stuff that they invented and called Olympic sports.”

Lauer, laughing: “You mean that in the best possible way, though?”

Costas: “I mean it in the kindest possible sense, yes.”

Lauer: “We could see Shaun White, though, take center stage in slopestyle.”

Costas: “We could very well — and, god knows, if there’s anyone who knows slopestyle, it’s me.”

You know who should have gotten that — who should have appreciated the in-joke — but didn’t? The snowboarders, especially the slopestyle riders. The round of social-media criticism that ensued seemed aimed primarily at Costas. Dudes, it was a joke — lighten up. He gets you. Stay tuned. Or would you rather be at the figure-skating rink?

True, figure skating did get one new gig for 2014, a “team event.” That upped the number of figure-skating medals events in Sochi to all of five, meaning 15 medals.

If you were running things and your job was to win medals and you had to allocate resources … just looking at those numbers alone … 60 opportunities against 15 … what would you say is more relevant? Action sports, or figure skating? Where would you cast not just the present but the future?

Doubtlessly, however, figure skating will be at the core of most television production of the 2014 Games — whatever network. Another life rule: no sensible dad grabs the remote when mom declares, let’s watch skating. That said, the metrics charting the sport’s decline are irrefutable, particularly in the United States, and especially at the elite level:

Eight years after Tonya-Nancy, the French judge scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake Games put figure skating in worldwide disrepute.

In response, the sport did away with perhaps the one thing that everyone understood come the Olympics, the 6.0 scoring system. Scoring now is somewhat more fair. But who — aside from coaches, skaters and a few broadcasters and sports writers — understands it?

Skating retains significant allure in South Korea — any appearance by Kim sells out in, literally, minutes — and in Russia.

Here’s how much of a challenge it now faces in North America:

At last year’s world championships in London, Ontario, in purportedly ice-crazy Canada, they couldn’t even fill a 7,000-seat arena to capacity for any single event until more than halfway through the competition. The president of the international skating union didn’t go. The event wasn’t televised live in the (neighboring) United States. Of course there was, inevitably, a judging controversy.

As for the U.S. team, it has traditionally been so strong that you have to go all the way back to 1936 to find a Games with no medals for the Americans in men’s and women’s singles. It might well happen in Sochi.

The top American woman, Ashley Wagner, has said she would have to be nearly perfect to reach the Olympic podium.

At those 2013 world championships, the two best Americans, Wagner and Gracie Gold, went 5-6. In 2012, Wagner finished fourth; the next-best American, Alissa Czisny, 22nd. In 2011, Czisny took fifth while Rachael Flatt managed 12th.

No American woman medaled in Vancouver,  the first time a U.S. woman had not won a medal at the Games since 1964.

On the men’s side in 2010, American Evan Lysacek won gold. He won’t skate in Sochi because of injury. At last year’s worlds, the two best Americans finished seventh and 14th.

In Vancouver, the contrast between the way Lysacek won and Shaun White’s win in snowboard halfpipe speaks volumes.

Lysacek skated a technically brilliant but safe program. He could have opted to but did not throw any quadruple jumps, only triples. His main rival, Russia’s Evgeny Plushenko, did throw some quads, on the theory that he was — as they would say in snowboarding — progressing the sport.

Plushenko’s quads were slightly off-axis. The judges went for Lysacek.

At the pipe, White won gold with the first of his two runs.

For his second, he chose to unveil a new trick, the Double McTwist 1260, three and a half spins inside two somersaults. He did not have to do it but did so, anyway; at issue was an ethos, the snowboarder’s quest to be ever better through progression; he was thinking not just of the sport’s present but its future.

White landed the McTwist.

For Sochi, White has added another 180 degrees of revolution inside the somersaults. Thus it’s now the Frontside Double Cork 1440.

You want to know why teenagers want to be like Shaun White? Why the IOC shrewdly wants to tap into that energy?

Here’s why: because, standing on top of that hill that night in Vancouver, Shaun White dared to dream big, and then he went big. That is what the best of the Olympic spirit is all about. And that is why snowboarding, and slopestyle, and snowboardcross are where it’s at.

What does figure skating have that even begins to match that?

Sequins? Dreamy music? For real?

Four years after Vancouver, the best male skaters are seemingly all trying to throw quads. Some can even land them.

Is it already, however, a case of too little, too late?

My 14-year-old couldn’t tell you who Max Aaron, the 2013 U.S. champion is, if her life depended on it.

Shaun White — he’s the cool ginger guy.

Vonn to miss Sochi

No one on Planet Earth — repeat, no one — has more heart, will, desire, call it what you will, than Lindsey Vonn. So her announcement Tuesday that she won’t be able to ski next month at the Sochi Games can reasonably mean only one thing, and by this no one should draw any conclusions about any NFL players who have made incredible comebacks but under their rules don’t get tested for, say, human-growth hormone:

It is absurd, far-fetched indeed, to come all the way back from a world-class knee injury in under a year when you must comply with Olympic-style drug-testing protocols.

Four years ago, at the Vancouver Games, Vonn became the first American woman to win the Olympic downhill. In an announcement she posted Tuesday to her Facebook page, Vonn said she was “devastated” she would not compete in Sochi.

The “reality,” she said, is “my knee is just too unstable to compete at this level.”

Last February, at the world alpine ski championships in Austria, Vonn tore two ligaments in her right knee and broke a bone in a spectacular fall. In November, she crashed again; that tore the surgically repaired ACL. In December, she sprained her MCL during a downhill in Val d’Isere, France.

Vonn also said she is having surgery now in a bid to be ready for the 2015 alpine world championships in her hometown, Vail, Colo.

Since no one works harder, she will — barring any more setbacks — be ready.

A few more realities:

Vonn was widely expected to be the biggest star on the U.S. team in Sochi.

She — like short-track speed skater Apolo Ohno in 2010 — is one of the few who have crossed over from the comparative anonymity of winter sports to become a mainstream celebrity. And then there’s the whole Tiger Woods thing.

She will be missed.

That said, the U.S. alpine team should still be very, very good.

Ted Ligety is the best giant-slalom skier in the world, and won three golds at last year’s alpine world championships. Bode Miller is simply the best male skier the United States has ever produced and, after taking last year off, has shown signs of coming back strong this season.

All six of the women on the U.S. “speed” team — that is, downhill and super-G — finished one, two or three in a World Cup event last year. Teen Mikaela Shiffrin is last year’s slalom champion. Julia Mancuso has not had a top-10 finish this season, true, but does have three Olympic medals and a track record of consistently rising to the pressure of the big stage.

Math for a moment or two:

The U.S. alpine team won eight medals in Vancouver. Vonn won two, that downhill gold and a super-G bronze. Would she have won medals in Sochi? Was the U.S. Olympic Committee counting on Vonn in its medals calculations (which it insists it doesn’t do)? Again, realities here.

Same deal with Evan Lysacek, who won gold in men’s figure skating in Vancouver but hasn’t  competed since. Do you really, seriously think the USOC was counting on him to win in Sochi? When he bowed out a few weeks ago, did that alter anyone’s projections?

Reality, everyone.

The U.S. Ski Team — everyone from the Nordic combined guys to snowboarders to the alpine racers — won 21 medals in Vancouver.

Overall, the U.S. team won 37. That topped the medals table.

In Sochi, the U.S. team could legitimately figure, conservatively, to win 30. Aggressively, 40.

For real.

For sure the Vancouver Games were akin to a home Olympics, and that probably helped the U.S. team. But here is what is going to help the U.S. team in Sochi:

In Vancouver there were 24 snowboard and freeski medal opportunities. In Sochi, 48. These are the actions-sports events in which Americans typically rock.

In Vancouver, moreover, the Americans didn’t win even one medal in cross-country or biathlon.

To return to football, as it were: it is an enduring football cliche that when one guy goes down, another steps up.

Translation: the U.S. Olympic Team itself is still loaded with talent. Barring further injury:

Shaun White, who threw the Double McTwist 1260 to win gold in the snowboard halfpipe in Vancouver, has now added another 180 degrees of twist. The thing is now called a Frontside Double Cork 1440.

A simple explanation: the winning run in Vancouver was two flips and three and a half spins. White has now added another half-revolution of twist inside the two somersaults.

The U.S. women’s cross-country team, led by Kikkan Randall, stands ready to win its first-ever Olympic medals. The Americans haven’t won a medal of any kind in cross country since Bill Koch in 1976.

America, meet Nick Goepper. He is 19 years old, 20 in March, and does slopestyle — skiing, not boarding. (White does it boarding as well.) Slopestyle is when you navigate a course filled with rails, jumps and other obstacles and do tricks for amplitude and style points.

Did you know you can become a champion slopestyle artist from Lawrenceburg, Indiana? Growing up on a hill with a vertical drop of all of 400 feet?

Goepper won gold at the X Games in Aspen last January.

On Dec. 21, Goepper became the first skier to grab a spot on the first-ever U.S. freeski Olympic team by virtue of his second-place finish in a Grand Prix slopestyle event at Copper Mountain, Colorado. The third of five Olympic qualification events gets underway Wednesday and runs through Sunday in Breckenridge.

When he qualified for the Olympics, Goepper was naturally asked about it.

“It’s not grueling at all,” he said. “It’s a dream come true. It’s super-fun. The Olympics add a bit more pressure but we’re just out here trying to get creative and have fun.”

The thing is, every Olympics produces its own history. One of the new realities of the 2014 Olympics is that slopestyle — in both its board and ski iterations — is poised to explode in super-fun on television screens, tablets and cellphones across not just the United States but the world.

It won't be the same without Lindsey Vonn in Sochi.

But she would be the first to tell you — it’s not all about her.

One more reality: it never was.

Sochi and security

If bombs went off in San Francisco, would that stop you from making a trip to Los Angeles? The Bay Area is roughly 400 miles — 640 or so kilometers — from LA.

Volgograd, where a suicide attack Sunday rocked the train station and another Monday destroyed a trolley bus, is roughly 400 miles northeast of Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Games, which begin in 36 days.

Experts have suggested the attacks might signal the onset of a wave of terror attacks directed by Russia’s most-wanted militant, Doku Umarov. Last July, he vowed to disrupt the Olympics. He called the Games “satanic.”

“Dear friends,” the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in televised remarks amid visits to the Russian Far East and then Wednesday to Volgograd itself, where the death toll in the two attacks has reached 34, “we bow our heads to the victims of violent terrorist attacks.

“I am sure we will continue to fight against terrorists harshly and consistently until their complete destruction.”

What the Volgograd attacks have done already is add another layer of complexity to what may be —this is no hyperbole — the most complicated project in the history of the modern Olympic movement.

Thirty-four years ago, the Olympic Games were held in Moscow. The United States, and several other countries in the west, boycotted, under intense pressure from Jimmy Carter’s White House.

Now, of course, we are within weeks of the first-ever Winter Games in Sochi, in the country that was the main part of the Soviet Union, that is now Russia.

The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, is new to the job, elected in September. That said, he has in his first few months on the job shown formidable energy and capacity, and he and Putin also appear to have a remarkable relationship; Putin tracked Bach down within minutes of Bach’s election at the IOC meeting in Buenos Aires, on a cellphone, to wish Bach good luck.

Putin has been involved from the outset in oversight of these 2014 Games. They will have cost a reported $51 billion, the most-ever, at least $10 million more than the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

These Games have always marked a vehicle to assert Russia’s standing in our world — and, perhaps even more important, within Russia and to Russians, as the nation finds its way in these first decades after communism.

The 2014 Games have been enveloped for months in political controversy.

How much of that, one wonders, is left over from the old Cold War days, when the Soviets were “them” and the west was “us”?

How much, as the controversy over the Russian law purporting to ban gay “propaganda” aimed at minors has underscored, is because some Russian cultural values may be more conservative than in some quarters in the west, and yet many activists in the west believe Russians must be just like our most progressive precincts?

How much from the simple fact the Russians use a different alphabet?

Russia can be different.

Different, however, doesn’t mean worse. Or, for that matter, better. It just means different.

And that is entire purpose of the Games, indeed of the Olympic movement.

We are all, each of us, different.

The point is to celebrate our humanity. You can’t do that at separate world championships. You can’t do it unless you all come together in one place, at one time.

The reality is that security at the Sochi 2014 Games is going to be highly visible and, probably, heavy-handed. The feeling of being there is probably going to be akin to being in an armed camp, and the Volgograd attacks will probably ratchet things up a degree or two more.

It’s going to be something like being in Salt Lake City at the 2002 Games, five months after the 9/11 attacks.

The difference for most visitors to Sochi is that the language and cultural barriers are bound to be ferocious. And there’s yet another layer to the security system for many in Sochi, a pass system to get in and get out of whatever it is they’re going to see. In all, the scene is likely to be tense, perhaps even intense.

Is it going to be safe? Life holds no guarantees. The probable reason the bombs are going off 400 miles away is because Volgograd is the sort of “soft” transport center a terrorist can target to sow fear when the harder target — Sochi — would be far, far more difficult to strike.

Have the perpetrators of the Volgograd attacks done their job? Now my mother, across the time zones, wants to know whether I’m still going to Sochi.

Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for a second. The 2014 Winter Olympics are going to be the place to be.

This is not bravado talking. I went to Iraq in 2003 and have no need to see more war zones. Beyond which, I have a wife and three children and for sure want to come home safe and sound.

Here, though, is the reality: Life must hold passion, and meaning. You have to play your part in things that are meaningful. The idea that people from around the world can come together and perhaps find not only a way to talk to each other but common ground, even if in our mixed-up world it takes some soldiers and rifles to do it — that’s worth finding a way to make happen. Then to be able to tell the story when something good happens — that’s great stuff.

As Bach said in his New Year’s message, the enduring appeal of the Games is that they provide a means for the athletes of the world to “experience first-hand the ability” to “build bridges and break down walls.”

He also said, “The Sochi Olympic Games should be a demonstration of unity in diversity and of remarkable athletic achievements — not a platform for politics or division. This is even more important after the cowardly terrorist attacks in Russia, which we utterly condemn. Terrorism must never triumph. We trust that the Russian authorities will deliver safe and secure Olympic Winter Games for all athletes and all participants.”

The Russians will get their next likely test of whether they can, indeed, deliver safe and secure Games on Jan. 20. On that date the Olympic flame relay goes to Volgograd. The swim school there has produced such notables as Alexander Popov (four gold, five silver medals), now an IOC member; and Evgeny Sadovyi, who won three gold medals at the 1992 Barcelona Games swimming for the Unified Team, including the 400 freestyle, in 3:45, a time that would have gotten him fourth at the 2013 world championships. The pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva (two gold, one bronze), was born in Volgograd.

Sadovyi is due to be one of those running Jan. 20 in his hometown.

Marius Vizer, the president of the International Judo Federation as well as Sport Accord, the umbrella organization for the international sports federations, wrote a year-end message as well. His words, too, are on-point:

“The Sochi Winter Games,” he wrote, “represent not only a magnificent financial effort from Russia and the exclusive attention of President Vladimir Putin but they are also an outstanding effort of respect and solidarity towards humanity, a noble gesture of appreciation from the Russian people towards all the countries of the world that will participate in this event. These Games are staged to welcome all those who have a special role in sports, politics, media and human values.

“I consider that athletes, politicians, media and all the entities that define the human values must be not only [in] solidarity with Russia’s efforts of respect, but on the occasion of this event, they should also support and celebrate together a total gesture of solidarity, unity and appreciation in order to become themselves an example for humankind.”

Dennis Rodman and North Korea

The former NBA star Dennis Rodman is not engaging in “sports diplomacy” by going to North Korea and hanging out, or not, with the dictator Kim Jong Un. All he’s doing is creating publicity for Dennis Rodman.

No one is stopping Rodman from going, not even — apparently — the U.S. State Department, as Rodman apparently proceeds with a plan to play a basketball exhibition Jan. 8 in North Korea. It purportedly features ex-NBA players against the North Korean men’s national basketball team, its erstwhile Olympic team. Jan. 8, it should be noted, will be Kim's 31st birthday. How special.

This ought to be clear: Kim is using Rodman in a bid to deflect attention from the brutal reality of life in North Korea. Rodman, meanwhile, is using Kim to generate attention for the Dennis Rodman brand. As he said in a cover story in Sports Illustrated in July, “I haven’t had a job in years, yet I’m talked about more than ever.”

It can be funny to dye your hair or get a bunch of piercings or show up in public in a wedding dress or show up at the Wife-Carrying World Championships in Finland. It can be cool, maybe, to hang out with Carmen Electra or Madonna.

North Korea is isolated, its people impoverished.

An estimated 1 in every 120 people there is imprisoned in gulags.

On his birthday last year, Kim reportedly handed out copies of "Mein Kampf" as gifts -- allegedly to promote a study of Hitler's economic reforms.

The United States and South Korea have consistently registered serious concerns about North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs as well as its chemical weapons capabilities.

Rodman made his first visit to the North Korea in late February, accompanied by three members of the Harlem Globetrotters. Weeks before, North Korea had conducted a nuclear test, its third in seven years.

Some 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea. Query: did Rodman visit them? Why not?

Kim, educated in Switzerland, reportedly grew up a basketball fan, especially of the Chicago Bulls, for whom Rodman played during their championship run along Michael Jordan in the 1990s. During that February visit, Rodman called Kim a “friend” and said, “I love him — the guy’s awesome.”

That trip was sponsored by Brooklyn-based Vice Media, filming along the way for a documentary. In September, he went back to Pyongyang, underwritten by Paddy Power, the Ireland-based online gambling concern. After that first North Korea trip, Paddy Power sent Rodman to Vatican City in March, where he pushed a black cardinal from Africa as his preferred candidate for the next pope, a company spokesman saying Rodman was there to “spread the gospel of pope betting.”

One of Rodman’s many problems now is that he has been all over the map — so to speak — when it comes to whether going to North Korea is, in fact, all about him or changing the world by effecting peace through sports.

In July, to Sports Illustrated:

"My mission is to break the ice between hostile countries. Why it's been left to me to smooth things over, I don't know. Dennis Rodman, of all people. Keeping us safe is really not my job; it's the black guy's [Obama's] job. But I'll tell you this: If I don't finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something's seriously wrong."

In November, to Associated Press:

"Just think, it's up to Dennis Rodman to break ground with North Korea. I’m the only one in the world who will go talk to this guy and try and find some common ground with these people. I'm hoping that gap between America and North Korea can close. Those guys love a lot about America. They love it. That's why I go over there.

"People don't believe that."

In December, to Reuters, in Beijing, en route to Pyongyang, after the execution of Kim’s uncle and mentor, Jang Song Thaek, who had been considered the regime's second-most powerful man, in response to an open letter in the Washington Post about human-rights abuses in North Korea:

"People have been saying these things here and there. It doesn't really matter to me. I'm not a politician. I'm not an ambassador.

"I'm just going over there to try and do something really cool for a lot of people, play some games and try to get the Korean kids to play.

"Everything else I have nothing to do with. If it happens that [Kim] wants to talk about it, then great. If it doesn't happen, I just can't bring it up because I don't (want) him to think that I'm over here trying to be an ambassador and trying to use him as being his friend and all of a sudden I'm talking about politics. That's not going to be that way.”

One might have thought Rodman would have had more common sense after Jang’s Dec. 12 execution. But no. He went to North Korea, anyway.

This last time, there was no meeting with Kim.

When Rodman got back, Paddy Power abruptly announced it had had enough — it was backing out of the Jan. 8 game. In an email, it cited “changed circumstances.”

The reality is that true sports diplomacy takes time. It takes resource. Almost always, it happens out of the spotlight.

The International Olympic Committee knows this. This is why, among other initiatives, it developed Olympic Solidarity, overseen now by Kuwait’s Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah. Solidarity seeks to identify promising young athletes around the world and get them to the Games.

The State Department knows this, too. Its International Sports Programming Initiative is even now seeking grant proposals — the deadline is Feb. 28 — for one- to three-year projects around the world.

These one-one-one endeavors are hugely more likely to effect change and produce good than Rodman in North Korea.

The conundrum is that he is likely to get more press.

The challenge is that even writing about it — and him — gives him what he wants.

But unless this gets written, this, too, can’t be relayed:

None of the ex-NBA players due to take part in the Jan. 8 project have been identified.

Now is the time for any of those players to themselves develop a strong dose of common sense. And for the league, and the commissioner, to strongly advise any and all of those players: stay home.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the influential Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. In a recent open letter, he put it perfectly:

“… Please: forget Rodman. Don’t give Kim Jong Un an easy PR layup he doesn’t deserve. Instead, join decent people everywhere and become a part of the growing global zone defense trying to help the defenseless people of North Korea.”

The White House Sochi delegation

President Barack Obama 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

It is with great respect for you and your office that I write this open letter.

I have covered the Olympic movement for 15 years. The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics will be my eighth Games.

I will remind you that in 1980, the last time the Olympic Games were in what is now the Russia, what was then the Soviet Union, the United States team did not go amid intense pressure from the White House. Today, Mr. President, the official U.S. delegation to the Sochi Games that you have announced does not include yourself, the First Lady, the vice president nor any member of your cabinet.

This marks the first Olympics since the 2000 Sydney Summer Games that the president, vice president or a former president will not be a member of the American delegation for the opening ceremony. A White House statement said your schedule simply doesn’t allow your to travel to Sochi.

Throughout the 1990s, it was typical for First Ladies to lead the American delegations. In 1996, of course, President Clinton led the U.S. delegation at the Atlanta Summer Games.

Again with respect, Mr. President, what you have done today is disrespected the Russians — and in particular the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — big time.

Mr. Putin has for years taken a personal interest in the Sochi project. He even came to the International Olympic Committee’s all-members assembly in Guatemala in 2007, at which Sochi won the 2014 Games, to lead its campaign. When Mr. Putin became president again for the third time on May 7, 2012, his very first meeting that day was with the-then IOC president, Jacques Rogge.

To be obvious: Sochi matters, a lot, to Mr. Putin.

And Mr. Putin is a very big deal within the Olympic movement. The Russians are spending at least $51 billion to transform Sochi from a Black Sea summer resort to a Winter Games destination. That’s at least $10 billion more than the Chinese spent in 2008 for Beijing, and Beijing was a Summer Olympics. For $51 billion, you get a lot of attention.

Mr. President, you have also sparked potential problems for the athletes on the U.S. team and, looking ahead, for the possibility of an American bid for the 2024 Summer Games, because in this matter of protocol you have also made clear your disregard for the International Olympic Committee.

All of this in the name of politics.

If we’re being straight with each other, this centers in some measure around the new Russian anti-gay law. That’s why you’re sending an icon like Billie Jean King as part of the official U.S. delegation. It’s why a White House spokesman said the delegation, headed by former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, now president of the University of California system, “represents the diversity that is the United States.”

Also, too, it assuredly has to do with leverage. You want it. There are complex geopolitics at issue, like your relationship with Mr. Putin, the interplay with the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and other matters that we, who do not have access to the daily White House security briefings, have no idea about.

Mr. President, you are a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You know full well the Olympics are a time when nations are supposed to give politics a rest, if only briefly.

You know, too, that sport has the power to bring people together. Just a few days ago, you were in South Africa, at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela, who understood that ideal perhaps better than anyone in our time.

You flew to South Africa aboard Air Force one with former President President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Obama, sir, if you were looking to make a statement about “the diversity that is the United States,” why not send Mr. Bush and Mrs. Clinton to Russia as your delegation leaders? Both are Olympic delegation veterans — Mr. Bush in 2008, Mrs. Clinton as First Lady in 1994 and 1996 — and that would have sent a very different signal of respect, indeed.

These things matter.

Instead, what you have also signaled — and this is unpleasant to acknowledge — is that, frankly, you don’t respect the American athletes themselves. The statement you’re making to them, loud and clear, is that they’re not important enough for you to step above politics.

Thinking this through to its logical conclusion, sir:

Compare your action Tuesday with President Bush, who cheerfully demonstrated his unity with American athletes in 2002 by literally sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the stands at the opening ceremony in Salt Lake. You have put politics ahead of the athletes in a way that could potentially compromise the U.S. team’s success in 2014 if the Russians take the next steps. What might those steps be? This is not difficult. The Winter Olympics involve a multitude of judged sports. (Think back to the ice-skating controversy in 2002.) Moreover, any Winter Olympics involves transport issues. (It’s a long way up a winding road from the ice cluster in Adler to the snow cluster in Krasnaya Polyana.)

Things have a funny way of happening on snow and ice, Mr. President. It can get slippery.

Is your busy schedule — or, indeed, the First Lady’s — payback for Chicago’s first-round exit in 2009 for the IOC voting for the 2016 Summer Games? Rio de Janeiro won that day. It was historic; you were the first sitting U.S. president to ever appear before the IOC, at the general session in Copenhagen. Yet most of what the IOC members remember about you being there has nothing to do with your fine speech, or even the First Lady’s, for she was there, too. It was the Secret Service sweep and the delay it caused them in getting to their seats.

If that seems petty to some — what about this now?

If the fact that the U.S. Olympic Committee is weighing a bid for the 2024 Games is not foremost on your agenda, be sure that it is high on the IOC's list. The new IOC president, Thomas Bach, and his key advisers, are keenly seeking a U.S. bid. But the USOC is willing to jump in only if it has a high likelihood of winning, because Olympic bids in recent years have run to $50 million and more.

The IOC will pick the 2024 site in the summer of 2017. By then, you will be out of office.

Even so, within the IOC memories run long. And in 2015, three or four dozen IOC members, maybe more, are due in Washington, D.C., for a key assembly, a meeting of the 204-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees.

There they will be reminded vividly that you are there. And that in 2014 you threw this in their face.

All in the name of gay rights? Some of us may see gay marriage as a civil rights measure, Mr. President. But if you were to look at this from afar, it’s still the case that only 16 states and Washington, D.C., permit gay marriage. That’s not exactly a majority.

This controversial Russian law passed the Duma, their lower house, by a vote of 436-0. We can disagree with the measure, but there can be no question about the numbers.

Which begs the question: who are we Americans to be using the Olympics to lecture the Russians about how to run their country? To be sending Billie Jean King over as a symbol of — what? The purported progressiveness of our society or our moral superiority? Isn’t that presumptuous or, worse, arrogant?

After Sochi, are you planning to send Billie Jean King next to states such as Ohio (which you won in 2012), Virginia (ditto) and Colorado (same) to lobby for gay marriage? It’s banned there now in all three. And Colorado is home to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

How would we like it if the Russians — or, for that matter, anyone — came over here and told us what to do? Would we welcome their advice on matters such as the death penalty, which virtually every nation in western Europe now considers morally abhorrent? (Should that be an automatic disqualifier for a U.S. 2024 Summer bid? Or just disqualify, say, Texas?) What about our laws regarding assault rifles? Or legalized marijuana? And on and on.

Mr. President, the concept of American exceptionalism is not altogether popular around the world. But it’s often the case that we Americans are indeed held to a different standard. Here, you should have gone in a different direction in deciding who was, and was not, going to Sochi in the official White House delegation.

Too, you should have made this decision sooner. It was announced Sunday that France’s president, François Hollande, would not be going to Sochi.

Surely, sir, you were not taking your lead from the French?

Respectfully,

Alan Abrahamson

3 Wire Sports

Los Angeles, California

IOC's signals of change

There are two ways to look at the announcement Saturday from the International Olympic Committee that sports such as skateboarding and sport climbing will put on "performances" at next summer's Youth Games in Nanjing. If you are the sort who recognizes that the IOC is and always will be, no matter what, a traditionally minded organization, where change moves at a stately pace, the fact that these sports are being reduced to demonstrations doubtlessly will provoke, yet again, exasperation. It's 2013, almost 2014. Come on, IOC. Get with the program. Skateboarding, right? And climbing is huge, particularly in Europe.

Then again, if you are the sort who sees that the new IOC president, Thomas Bach, has in three months launched an ambitious reform agenda designed to usher in change, and that getting skateboarding and climbing in particular before the members in Nanjing is a way to get them to see such sports with their own eyes so that both sports can get into the mainstream Games program sooner than later -- ah, well, then you understand how he is moving.

"We want to send a signal we are open for new and younger sports," Bach said.

In a teleconference Saturday that wrapped up a four-day "brainstorming" session at the Swiss resort of Montreux, up Lake Geneva from IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Bach announced a string of initiatives that together fit together as part of what he is calling "Olympic Agenda 2020."

In all, he intends to present a wide-ranging reform package to the full membership for discussion at the Sochi session in February and then for a vote at what the IOC is calling an "extraordinary session" to be held Dec. 6-7 in Monaco.

The entire list is likely to encompass the wide range of topics that dominated last summer's presidential campaign, which Bach won in September, everything from what sports are on the Games program to the age limit of the members (currently 70, with a move to lift it to 75) to whether the members ought to be allowed again to visit cities for the Olympic Games.

Such visits were banned in the aftermath of the Salt Lake City scandal of the late 1990s. That scandal ushered in a 50-point reform plan in 1999. Many of the issues now on the table have been percolating through the years since, through the presidency of Jacques Rogge, whom Bach succeeded.

Asked Saturday whether during the Montreux retreat the 15-member executive board discussed issues such as the age limit, the program and visits to bid cities, Bach demurred, saying that had to wait for public airing in just a few weeks.

He did say of the four days together: "This was a good experience with regard to team building because being together for four days and discussing for four days long, there you could expect you may see some hiccups in this discussion. It just did not happen. It always was very constructive. And, frankly, for four days long."

It is not clear whether, in the IOC's 117-year history, the Montreux retreat was something of a first. But for Bach it assuredly was: "This is a first brainstorming meeting I have lived in my time as an IOC member or as an IOC executive board member. I can not speak for the others."

The concepts -- as well as the details -- of what Olympic Agenda 2020, as Bach made plain repeatedly, are going to have to wait for Sochi and Monaco. A number of agenda items, however, he disclosed Saturday:

The executive board urged the 2022 Winter Games bid cities to "make the broadest possible use of temporary facilities," the IOC perhaps finally getting about  holding down costs, recognizing that Beijing 2008 ran to at least $40 billion, the Sochi project is north of $50 billion and such sums are entirely unsustainable. The IOC will pick the 2022 site in 2015. The six candidates now in the race: Almaty; Beijing; Oslo; Stockholm; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland.

The IOC is putting up $10 million to develop new anti-doping tests and methods and asking governments to match.

The World Anti-Doping Agency's annual budget is roughly $28 million. So -- a little math here -- $10 million is roughly equal, rounding up, to 36 percent of WADA's entire annual budget.

This shows what happens when sport takes over the WADA presidency -- IOC vice president Craig Reedie becomes WADA president as of Jan. 1 -- and is prepared to make this sort of intelligent investment. Now let's see whether eternally cash-strapped governments, who are always proclaiming they want to see a level playing field and are very public advocates for clean athletes, are willing to step up and match the IOC's $10 million.

More simple math: $20 million would equal just over 71 percent of WADA's annual budget. With that kind of money, the agency could afford to find the best and brightest researchers. Money typically has a way of solving problems that often can seem intractable.

In his role as incoming WADA boss, Reedie, incidentally, would have been just as surprised as anyone by this newest IOC initiative. Bach, in contrast to Rogge, is running the IOC  in the manner of a hands-on chief executive; Rogge had more of the style of a chairman of the board. For his part, Reedie is on his way to snowy Montreal and WADA headquarters for meetings there the next few days; with the promise of at least $10 million, he surely will receive a warm welcome amid the blizzards blanketing the eastern seaboard of North America.

The IOC, meanwhile, also is putting up another $10 million in a bid to protect athletes from "any kind of manipulation or related corruption," a match-fixing initiative. Early next year, Bach said, the IOC will sign an agreement with Interpol to set up a monitoring system aimed at guarding against illegal betting at the Games.

As for the anti-doping initiative, Bach noted that of course today's tests rely on blood and urine samples. What if, he said, there was another way? Hair? Or other cellular matter? "It would of course be very helpful if there would be another test method if we could find … prohibited methods for a longer time," he suggested, adding "This is another issue we want to address in particular."

On another issue, Bach, who during the campaign raised the idea of an Olympic television channel -- a notion that all but killed Chicago's 2016 bid because of the incredible complexities involved with NBC's multibillion-dollar support of the movement -- said the executive board during the retreat "took a first decision" by authorizing a "feasibility study."

The TV plan would be subject to discussion in Sochi and Monaco, according to the IOC.

Eugene: track ghetto or capital?

Eugene, Oregon, is a beautiful little town. It has many virtues. The issue at hand is whether it ought to be the track and field ghetto of the entire United States. A more charitable way to put it, of course, would be to call it the track and field capital of the United States.

Because after the announcement this week that the NCAA Division I outdoor track championships from 2015 through 2021 will be held at venerable Hayward Field, there's little doubt that Hayward, and Eugene, and for that matter, Oregon, are poised to be -- if not flat-out are -- at the epicenter of the track and field scene in the United States for essentially the next decade.

Query: is that a good thing?

Hayward staged the 2013 NCAAs. It will play host to the meet next year. Going through 2021 will make it nine straight.

Each year in late May or early June, Hayward puts on a Diamond League meet, the Prefontaine Classic. In 2014, Hayward will be the site of the world junior championships; in 2015, the USA nationals; and in 2016 -- just as in 2012 and 2008 -- the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Meanwhile, Portland -- just up the road -- recently won the right to put on the 2016 world indoor championships.

In Portland, the Oregon Project, with coach Alberto Salazar, is home to some of the world's leading runners, including Mo Farah, Galen Rupp and, now, American teen sensation Mary Cain. Olympic and world decathlon champion Ashton Eaton and Nick Symmonds, silver medalist in the 800 meters at the 2013 Moscow world championships, headline the list of athletes who in recent years have come out of Eugene.

Depending how you see it, this week's NCAA announcement is either brilliant or yet another turn in a disturbing trend to further niche-ify track and field -- to consign the sport to a distant corner of America, to a remote college town in the late-night Pacific time zone where the sport is destined to get noticed every so often, if then.

It must be noted, of course, that track and field in Oregon revolves around Nike. Without Nike there is virtually nothing.

In its elation over the 2021 thing, the University of Oregon put out a news release that maybe was just a little bit over the top. It quoted athletic director Rob Mullens as saying, "Being the birthplace of running in the United States, Track Town USA offers the most unique experiences for both student-athletes and fans alike."

When the biographies of Jesse Owens, Glenn Cunningham, Jim Ryun, Billy Mills and other greats get around to claiming Eugene as the "birthplace of running," that will surely be news. As will the fact that the University of Chicago played host to the NCAA championships virtually every year, 13 times, from 1921-36 (they were at USC in 1934, Cal-Berkeley in 1935).

Meanwhile, giving credit where it is due: boosters of the move to see so much action in Eugene, like Vin Lananna, the farsighted senior university associate athletic director who is also president of the entity that is itself called TrackTown USA, envision Hayward being a permanent site for the NCAA championships, like Omaha, Neb., is for men's baseball, or Oklahoma City for softball.

And that's fine.

But there are two key distinctions.

One, Omaha's convention and tourism bureau, for instance, recognized that it was unlikely to be a so-called "big-league" town like nearby St. Louis or Kansas City. Those cities actually really do have NFL and Major League Baseball teams.

So to build the Omaha "brand," they aggressively sought the College World Series and have bid successfully in recent years for events such as the U.S. Olympic Trials in swimming. They are concededly after a wholesome, family-style vibe.

Eugene is hardly in competition with Portland or Seattle. And maybe track and field is after the family scene and maybe it's after the die-hard -- nobody is quite sure what audience it's after. That's for sure one of the challenges. Another of the many issues facing the sport is that, if you've never been to an evening at the track before, you often leave after three -- or more -- hours feeling you're not quite sure what you've just seen.

At any rate, the key distinction is this:

Track is the No. 1 sport at the Summer Olympics. You can like it or not, Omaha and Oklahoma City, but baseball and softball are no longer in the Games.

Moreover, everyone in Eugene and, for that matter, Oregon, you can this it or not as well, but the IAAF, track's international governing body, wants more in the United States. Way more. They look at this country, and they see New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, big cities, all these huge and important markets, and the only activity seemingly going on of note is in Eugene, or Portland, and Portland is hardly a top TV market, and they ask -- huh?

And that, friends, is altogether a reasonable question if you want track and field to stop being a niche sport in the United States.

Bach's very busy first IOC EB

LAUSANNE, Switzerland --Russian organizers will set up protest zones in Sochi, the new International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach said here Tuesday. Whether they will work, or anyone will have the courage to want to step into them amid what is expected to be a ferocious security presence, remain very much an open question. The IOC president took the high road:  "It's a measure we welcome," Bach said of the protest area, "so that everybody can express his or her free opinion."

With an emphasis on such immediate challenges and even a nod to ceremony, the first executive board meeting of Bach's IOC presidency commenced here Tuesday and then, no surprise, broke up after a few short hours, the focus on Sochi, on the Rio 2016 project and even on a long-term plan that Bach has taken to calling "Olympic Agenda 2020."

The former president, Jacques Rogge, handed over the keys to the presidential office at the IOC's lakefront headquarters, the Chateau de Vidy. Later Tuesday, the Olympic Museum, just down the road along the lake, was officially re-inaugurated.

But, first and foremost, Sochi.

The 2014 Winter Games are now just 59 days away. A host of other pressing near-term issues loom large on the agenda.

Despite the massive security presence due in and around the Sochi venues, activists purportedly now will be free to protest, for instance, the Russian law that purports to ban "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to those under 18.

In August, Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a decree banning "gatherings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets" for 2 1/2 months in Sochi around the Olympics and Paralympics. It is due to go into effect on Jan. 7. The Games start Feb. 7.

Bach said Sochi 2014 organizers informed the IOC of the decision to set up protest zones during their report to the board on Tuesday.

As a point of comparison: protest zones in Beijing in 2008, miles away from Olympic venues, largely went unused. Bach said he was unsure where the 2014 protest site is to be located.

Without making explicit reference to the gay controversy, Bach noted that IOC rules about what athletes can -- and can not -- do and say under the Olympic charter are going to be sent out shortly to the more than 200 national Olympic committees. Rule 50 bars political statements within Olympic venues. Rule 40, moreover, limits what athletes can do in regard to individual sponsorships. "They," meaning the rules, "are there to protect themselves," meaning the athletes, Bach said.

Bach noted that there is "still a lot to do" in Sochi "with regard to infrastructure, accommodation and other issues." Even so, he said, the IOC remains "very confident" that "everything will be in place and we will have really an excellent stage for the best athletes of the world."

The Rio 2016 Games, widely seen in Olympic circles as an "adventure," have already drawn the new president's sharp attention. He said he plans to travel to Brazil -- before Feb. 7, and Sochi gets going -- to meet with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and other officials. And after Sochi, the "top priority" of Gilbert Felli, the outgoing Games' executive director, will be Rio, Bach said, a recognition -- if not admission -- the project needs special attention. Even though Felli is formally retiring as of Aug. 31, he will continue long after to "work closely" with Rio organizers, Bach said.

"We have to realize, and also the organizing committee has realized, there is not a single moment to lose," Bach said. "Every effort has to be made, every single day, to bring the construction of Olympic sites and infrastructure forward."

Beyond all that, there already is in the works the makings of a long-term strategic plan. This is what Bach has taken to calling "Olympic Agenda 2020."

Indeed, the executive board -- after holding the briefest of meetings Tuesday morning with the Assn. of National Olympic Committees and then convening itself for the rest of the day -- is now due to head off for a four-day retreat up Lake Geneva in Montreux, better known as the site of the famous summer jazz festival, for a think session to sketch out Olympic Agenda 2020.

Everything -- for emphasis, everything -- not only should be but appears to be on the table.

As Bach has described it, this "brainstorming meeting" essentially breaks down into four categories:

One, sustainability. This includes everything from bidding for the Games to the 28-sport limit at the Summer Olympics to the management of the Games to "legacy," or what to do with Olympic venues post-Games to avoid so-called "white elephants" like the stadiums in Athens or Beijing.

Also: should the members be allowed again to the visit cities bidding for the Olympics? Should baseball and softball be allowed into the Tokyo 2020 Games? How, broadly speaking, to jazz up the program? Should tug-of-war be allowed in as a sport? Skateboarding? Surfing?

Two, credibility. This revolves around issues such as doping and match-fixing as well as issues of autonomy and governance.

Three, youth and the Youth Games. As Bach said, the notion here is how to " get the couch potatoes off the couch." What if the Youth Games, which came to life under Rogge, were used as a laboratory, just to see what worked and, perhaps, more intriguingly, what didn't? Above all, the IOC's No. 1 challenge is to remain relevant with young people.

Four, the structure of the IOC itself. Here, there are bound to be discussions revisiting some of the reforms that were enacted in 1999 amid the Salt Lake City scandal -- such as, for instance, the rule that now forces IOC members out at age 70 (it used to be 80). Fourteen years after that rule came into effect, there appears to be widespread consensus that 70 is too soon, that considerable talent and networking is being forced out in a world where being 70 is not necessarily old anymore.

This big-picture think is, frankly, long overdue. Every organization ought to go through something like it periodically. For the IOC, the change in the presidency is the natural time.

Bach has cautioned that the Montreux retreat is not designed to and will not produce decisions. There may be a new president but, as ever, the IOC moves at a deliberate pace.

In this instance, that makes sense. There are stakeholders of all sorts to consult. At the outset of his presidency, Bach enjoys considerable goodwill. Even so, he will want time to pursue that buy-in.

The timetable:

December 2013 -- Montreux retreat.

February 2014 -- Sochi session.

Fourth quarter 2014 -- probable extraordinary session, somewhere, to review and presumably enact Olympic Agenda 2020. "I hope we will need one," Bach said.

The other advantage of this Montreux retreat, of course, is that while it can be assumed, politically, that the 14 others on the board are with the new president, the four days together will give him the chance to see who is all the more with him.

These next few days and weeks also will give everyone the chance to see -- with the elections in Sochi coming right up, by a quirk of the IOC calendar -- who is vying for authority in Bach's early years.

If, for instance, Zaiqing Yu of China isn't a candidate for the IOC vice-presidency, that would by most accounts be a surprise.

Similarly, if Turkey's Ugur Erdener doesn't run for the board, that would be unusual. Same goes for Canada's Dick Pound, who lost out by a mere one vote in Buenos Aires in September.

In just under two months, it's Sochi. Now, though, it's off to Montreux. No press allowed. No outsiders.

"I'm really looking forward to a brainstorming meeting in Montreux," Bach said. "Don't expect any kind of decisions from this meeting. It will be brainstorming."

Ligety wins, Bode's back

All successful sports teams need stars. Quick. Name the quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Easy. He's the guy who did a hilarious interview a few days ago with that Ron Burgundy fellow. Now -- who's the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Right.

The U.S. Ski Team's alpine racers get noticed most -- particularly when it's almost Olympic time -- when the likes of Ted Ligety, Bode Miller, Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin are rocking it. Except for Shiffrin, the teenage slalom sensation who is newly showing promise across the board, the season had started slowly. Until Sunday.

Ligety and Miller went 1-2 in the giant slalom at the men's World Cup stop at Beaver Creek, Colo., while Vonn, who had gone a cautious 40th and then 11th in the downhills Friday and Saturday in making her return to the women's tour in Lake Louise, Canada, rocketed to fifth in Sunday's super-G and afterward declared she was "ready for Sochi."

Shiffrin didn't race this weekend. She did, however, sum up the excitement that seized the scene.

"I'm crying right now," she tweeted out. "My favorite racer is back on the podium. #gobode"

This was Miller's first top-three finish since February 2011 (a second in the downhill in Chamonix, France). It marked his first giant-slalom top-three since March 2007 (at the World Cup finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland).

The last time two Americans were on the GS podium together? Bode and Daron Rahlves, at the 2005 GS in Beaver Creek.

Ligety, meanwhile, is without question best in the world in the giant slalom. And he emerged last year, with three gold medals at the world championships, as the rock of the U.S. team.

Sunday's victory marked Ligety's fourth straight World Cup victory in the GS; that ties him with Italian great Alberto Tomba, who won four straight in 2001.

Ligety is so good at this particular event that he has finished on the podium in his last 10 GS races. That is the second-longest streak of GS podiums in World Cup history. With it Ligety joins Tomba, Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden and American Phil Mahre.

This was, moreover, Ligety's third GS win in a row on the Birds of Prey course at Beaver Creek.

Ligety's winning combined time Sunday: 2:35.77. He won both runs, and easily.

The surprise -- unless you were keenly paying attention to Miller earlier in the week -- was that Bode took second. He finished 1.32 seconds behind Ligety. Austria's Marcel Hirscher took third, 1.82 back.

It's not that Miller isn't capable. He is the most successful alpine racer the United States has ever produced, among other things a five-time Olympic medalist as well as the 2005 and 2008 World Cup overall champion.

But after taking last year off to mend a bum knee, you would have to have been a true student of racing, and of Bode, to see this coming.

In Friday's downhill at Beaver Creek, Miller finished 13th. In Saturday's super-G, he held a huge lead of more than a second on the top part of the course before nearly missing a blind gate after a jump; he then -- typical Bode -- made an amazing recovery to finish 14th.

After Friday's race, he said, "I skied the way I need to. Maybe we picked the wrong skis. Maybe it was just weather or nature."

After Saturday, he said, "Yesterday and today I hit the thing really well, so I think that's really encouraging."

Bode is -- finally -- back in shape, as he emphasized after Sunday's finish.

So anyone who has been listening carefully to him for years can easily explain what he was, in his way, telling everyone over the weekend:

The thrill show is back on. He is now a legitimate threat to win any and every race he's in.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is good for ski racing. Bode is not just the best the United States has ever thrown out there, he is the most interesting because every race is an exploration of what it's like to throw yourself out there without fear.

He's on new skis in every one of his events, he cautioned. Even so, the knee feels good.

"I"m ready," he said. "I'm skiing well in every event. It hasn't come out in the races yet. But it will."

The U.S. Ski Team is loaded with talent. Six American women, for instance, finished in a World Cup top-three last last season in the downhill or super-G. And, of course, beyond Miller, Ligety, Vonn and Shiffrin, there is Julia Mancuso, a big-game racer if there ever was one.

That said -- to have Bode Miller back injects a different dynamic. To pretend otherwise is just silly. Everyone knows it.

He took second Sunday, for instance, after starting the first run as the 31st skier down the hill. That is very hard to do.

Whether Miller -- who knows only one way, to ski all-out -- can over the next weeks and months be consistent is the thing. "Sharing the podium with Bode is awesome. I'm a little surprised, actually," Ligety noted. "He probably doesn't like it when I say that, but it was impressive how he was able to bring his intensity up and put down some impressive runs."

"It's a little bit of redemption today," Miller said. "It shows that I'm coming back in GS. I think I can do it in slalom, too," adding a moment later,  "The idea is to be able to ski four events the way I like to do it."

He also said, "There's little tiny pieces that are missing. It's just timing … just little parts that have to come back," adding after, "I feel like I'm ready."