Relay this, out-of-the-box thinkers

NASSAU, Bahamas — The first race has not even been run. Action gets underway Saturday at jam-packed Thomas A. Robinson Stadium. But, already, barring a security breach or unforeseen disaster, this inaugural edition of the IAAF World Relays can already be proclaimed a fantastic success.

Track and field needs innovation, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. These relays are that, and more.

As Wallace Spearmon, the U.S. 200-meter specialist, said at a news conference here Friday, “As an athlete, I just want to say thank you because this is the first time this has been done,” adding a moment later, “The sky is the limit for this event.”

The IAAF can often, and fairly, be accused of being cautious in its nod to tradition.

But let’s give credit where it is due.

It is light years ahead of almost every other international sports federation in the Olympic movement in its understanding and its use of the digital space to promote its sport. The IAAF website is way better — broader, deeper, loaded with stats, more accessible — than anyone else’s. The IAAF’s phone app is superb. There’s now a Diamond League phone app that gives results — provided by Omega Timing — in real-time.

The overwhelming problem with track and field is the presentation of the sport itself. That is, on the field of play.

To make a long story short — a meet now is the same as a meet way back when.

Like, way, way, way back when.

For the track freak, it’s like renewing a long-running love affair.

The overwhelming problem, again, as time and experience have proven, is that there aren’t enough track freaks. To the average consumer, meets are cluttered, confusing and far too long.

Thus the genius of these relays.

Two nights. Easy schedule — 4x100, 4x200, 4x400, 4x800 and 4x1500.

Your mother can understand that, people. Even your grandmother. And there are likely to be a lot of Bahamas grandmas at this meet.

The stadium is sold out. Both nights.

The IAAF has arranged for extensive live television coverage — in the United States, on Universal Sports.

More interestingly, it will for the first time in its history be live-streaming. In Europe, the stream is available here.

If you’re not in Europe, you can find the live-stream via the Eurovision Sports Live app. It’s available both for iOS and Android.

Beyond all that, the mood here is light, easy — genuinely anticipatory.

For one, the weather and scenery are as you’d expect.

For another, pretty much everyone expects two, maybe three, world records to go down — the men’s and women’s 1500s and the men’s 800.

Maybe — though it does seem like a stretch — the sprints as well. “If I’m running 19 [seconds] and having to do a start, imagine what i can do in a relay,” Jamaican star Yohan Blake said of the 200.

All in, there’s a total prize package of $1.4 million, put up by the national sports ministry. Any world record is worth $50,000.

Teams are here from more than 40 nations — with more than 500 athletes — including the U.S., Jamaica, Kenya and Russia.

The unique twist to the upbeat mood is one that took U.S. middle-distance runners Morgan Uceny and Leo Manzano to explain. At the Olympics or world championships, she said, yes, everyone comes as a team. At the same time, you’re still competing against your teammates. Here — it’s truly a team atmosphere.

The last time it felt like this, Manzano said, was college. He said, “I’m excited to be out there and lay it on the line.”

How long before this sort of relay event becomes a fixture on the FINA swim calendar?

How long, too, before the track people take a clue from the swim people, who themselves have an innovative event coming up, the Singapore Swim Stars, a series of match races in September among the series of events opening the new national stadium and aquatic center there.

It’s clear that the Olympic Games and traditional world championships are fixtures, and rightfully so, on the sports calendar — swim or track. But in between there’s room to experiment.

Track needs the energy and excitement of the relays; it already has proven, in places like Manchester, England, that street racing is the way to go. The way forward would seem obvious:

Why not a series of street races — say, five. Pick your venues: Fifth Avenue in New York. Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Outside LA Live. The whole thing would culminate on the Strip in Las Vegas, at night, under the lights, with the Bellagio fountain roaring.

Line the worlds great athletes up and let them run for 150 meters.

You don’t think people would watch? Isn’t that made for TV?

If he — or she — wins all five events, it’s worth a grand prize. The Michael Phelps experience with Speedo has taught that a $1 million bonus gets people talking.

Just thinking out of the box here. That’s what track and field needs.

Like these relays.

Now, nothing is perfect. These first Bahamas relays for sure won’t be.

For sure there are bound to be glitches.

Already, there’s a major one in the run-up: Usain Bolt isn’t here. In the same way that Phelps has made it clear he understands fully his responsibility to promote swimming, Bolt should be here promoting these relays.

This, though, isn’t so much on organizers as it is on Bolt, who is for all intents and purposes the global icon of track and field. Even if he’s not running, he should be here as an ambassador of the sport.

“It is the role of our top athletes to do this,” Lamine Diack, the IAAF president, said at Friday’s news conference. “But we also know that he is not there. But we have a full stadium — two days. we have a world championship. We have a lot of athletes who will be competing — very good athletes, who will be competing against each other.”

He quickly added a moment later, “I can’t focus on the one who is not there.”

Or the ones.

The U.S. team is hardly the A team. Missing for a variety of reasons: Justin Gatlin, Carmelita Jeter, Allyson Felix, Mary Cain, Nick Symmonds, Jenny Simpson, Matthew Centrowitz.

All of these absences, individually, can be explained. Nevertheless,  if you are the U.S. delegation and Eugene is bidding for the 2019 world championships, which the IAAF will award in November, Doha and Barcelona also in the running, and everyone who is anyone in track and field leadership circles is going to be here, wouldn’t you, you know, want to put on a red, white and blue smiley face?

It’s not as if the Bahamas is a long flight from the continental United States. Like 30 minutes from Miami.

Which brings us to another matter, way more significant, in fact, for Eugene’s hosting of the World Junior Championships this summer, for its 2019 track and field bid, even for a potential U.S. Summer Olympics bid in 2024, because this exemplifies the chronic refrain you hear from around the world about border, customs and transit difficulties involving the United States:

“I would like to inform you that concerning IAAF World Relay Bahamas 2014, we cannot be able to participate because of we [tried] to get the transit visa USA and other country,” Bililign Mekoya, general secretary of the Ethiopian track and field federation, said in a note emailed May 12 to agents and managers around the world.

At the end, all the Ethiopians could get, for reasons of timing, were visas through the United Kingdom — via historical connections — for one men’s 4x1500 team.

For U.S. sports leaders, indeed for all of world sport, this sort of visa and transit challenge must be addressed.

Of course we live in the real world. At the same time, the 9/11 attacks were more than 12 years ago and, as the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has made clear, sports can prove a constructive tool for dialogue.

The way it is here in the Bahamas.

Keith Parker, the local organizing committee chairman, noted that there are all of 350,000 people in this island nation,. The relays are to be preceded by events featuring local, junior racers.

“We hope,” he said at the news conference, “this great event will influence them to strive for greatness. If you find any shortcomings, please let us know.

“We will do everything possible to correct them and make the event as good as it possibly can be and keep the standard up to other world championships,” he said, adding, “I wish you all welcome …”

Ping-pong for paz, paix, ba dame

There are many versions of the story of the starfish on the beach. This is the one that over the past 15 or so years has guided the remarkable work of the International Table Tennis Federation as it has grown to become a powerful force for one-on-one change and, as well, a vehicle for the notion that sport can help promote peace in even the farthest reaches of our world:

A storm washes up thousands upon thousands of starfish on the sand. An older man walking along the shore notices a boy who seems to be dancing. The gentleman comes close and sees the boy is not dancing but throwing starfish, one by one, back into the sea.

“Why are you doing that?” the older man asks. “You can’t save them all. You can’t possibly make a difference!”

At that, the boy bends down and throws a starfish into the water. And then another. And yet another.

He says: “Saved that one. And that one. And that one.”

Earlier this month, at its annual general meeting, which this year was held in Tokyo, the ITTF brought both Mali, in Africa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands on board as national associations. Those two lifted the total of member federations on the ITTF roster to 220, tying the international volleyball federation, FIVB, for most in the world.

Afghanistan, for instance, became a member in 2005; Papua New Guinea in 2009; Chad in 2012.

Just for comparison: track and field’s global federation, the IAAF, has 212 member federations.

Only five outliers have a national Olympic committee — for context, again, there are 204 formally recognized NOCs — but are not yet recognized as an ITTF national association. Four are African: Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tome & Principe and Eritrea. The fifth: Bahamas.

The ITTF goal is to have all five in the fold by the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics.

To show you the reach of table tennis:

The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu sent five athletes to the 2012 London Games. Two of the five played table tennis.

Until 2012, the Middle Eastern state of Qatar had never before sent women to the Summer Games. It sent four women to London. One was a 17-year-old table tennis player, Aia Mohamed.

The ITTF story is all the more notable because table tennis — in the aftermath of 1970s ping-pong diplomacy — became an Olympic sport only in 1988, at the Seoul Summer Games.

It wasn’t until 1999 that the ITTF’s formal development program got underway. By then, the ITTF had 180 members. The program was launched with $60,000 — $30,000 from the federation itself and $30,000 from the Oceania confederation of Olympic committees.

Now it has grown, all in, to nearly $2 million annually.

At the beginning, the program had a “staff” of one.

Now it has a full-time staff of 10, part-time of 100, serving over 100 nations -- all of it part of the ultimate goal, according to ITTF chief executive Judit Farago, of table tennis being recognized as a top-five sport in the Olympic movement.

To be obvious:

Soccer is the easiest game to organize, because all you need, really, is a ball. Then come basketball and volleyball, because you need a ball and a net. Then table tennis, because you need the rackets, a ball, a net (or a board or even boxes); and then anything, literally almost anything, can serve as the table, including a door, a table (to be even more obvious), a sheet of marine plywood (widely available throughout the world), school desks pushed together, whatever.

In comparison to the other sports, however, table tennis has an incredibly enviable upside. It doesn’t take up much room. It can be played indoors or out. And it doesn’t take a dedicated space; the “table” can be packed or folded up and put away. Thus it is, practically speaking, a complete winner.

Too often, the administration of sport is derided as (mostly) men in suits. In this instance, some forward-thinking suits recognized the elegance inherent in table tennis. Over the years, they have included:

Monaco-based Peace and Sport, directed by Joel Bouzou; the German table tennis federation, and in particular its president, Thomas Weikhart, and secretary general, Matthias Vatheuer; Butterfly, the Japanese table tennis company founded by Hikosuke Tamasu, who as a young soldier in 1945 was but two kilometers away when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; and the Foundation for Global Sports Development.

So, too, the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace, headed by its special adviser, Wilfried Lemke.

In particular, the ITTF project has been guided by the vision of Adham Sharara, its president since 1999, and his “P4” philosophy for the federation— popularity, participation, profit, planning — now expanded in recent years to a fifth p, promotion.

Mostly, however, the project has been implemented from the start — and is even now overseen — by Glenn Tepper, an Australian, a former school teacher, national team player and coach whose passport has many, many pages. He’s at nearly 100 countries, most of them developing nations.

It might sound romantic beyond imagination to be doing a table tennis course in Bora Bora, in French Polynesia. This was not, however, a honeymoon. Tepper slept in a hammock on a balcony. The mosquitoes were ferocious.

In the early years, there was a lot sleeping in hammocks. Or open-walled huts. Or cement floors. He rode a lot of local buses. He hitchhiked. He walked, a lot.

Tepper was that staff of one, and that $60,000 had to go a long way.

The payoff was in breaking down barriers. In providing something not just different but potentially better — to help even one kid see that a bigger world was out there. In maybe offering a glimmer of hope.

Kiribati is a collection of 33 islands in the central tropical Pacific. Its permanent population is now about 103,000. It was one of the first places Tepper went on this mission. He was struck while there how many people lived in thatched huts — no walls — on platforms raised above the sea and how many had their entire worldly belongings in a single box in one corner of the hut. Most people he encountered lived on a subsistence diet of tuna and tarot. They also thought — and maybe they were right, he said — that they were rich beyond words.

While in Kiribati, a picture was taken of Tepper running a clinic; in the foreground is a 4-year-old boy. About a dozen years later, that boy, Karirake Tetabo, would go on to represent Team Oceania at the ITTF Global Cadet Challenge.

In a story two years ago Tetabo is quoted as saying, “My aim is to become firstly Pacific Games champion and later become one of the best in Oceania and, who knows, maybe the world?”

One of the first collaborative projects, it turned out, would be in 2003 in rural Egypt, Tepper and others working with village leaders in a bid to change perceptions of girls who according to tradition were being married off in their early teens and believed at risk for ritual circumcision.

One such leader, in a short ITTF video, calls the project an “excellent initiative” and gives thanks to God, saying it “increased activities” in the village community center, “especially for young women.”

Over the last Olympic cycle, 2009-12, ITTF organized 492 courses; 98 were done in accord with the International Olympic Committee’s Solidarity initiative; around the world, these 492 courses reached 24,000 people, 38 percent of whom — up from 33 percent in the previous four-year cycle — were women.

Of those 492, 206 — or 42 percent — included education about Para Table Tennis. That was up from 14 percent in the 2004-08 cycle.

In 2009, a notable ITTF initiative included “Ping Pong Paz.” It focused on children from displaced families living in slums in three cities in Colombia — 600 kids.

In 2010, it was halfway across the world, in Dili, East Timor, for “Ping Pong Ba Dame,” with the Swedish champion Peter Karlsson, a relentless promoter of table tennis as an agent for good.

In Dili, Jose de Jesus, president of the local Action for Change Foundation, after recounting the civil war there four years before, asserted that the program would promote  “tolerance, discipline, morals and respect for each other.”

In 2011, the ITTF launched one of its most ambitious projects, “Ping Pong Paix,” reaching across borders in central Africa, two villages in Burundi, two across the line in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area had been marked for some time by conflict and, indeed, outright skirmishing.

Again, Karlsson was on hand.

“The kids,” Tepper said, “found out they were exactly the same. They weren’t so different. They could have fun and become friends.”

Ultimately, the ITTF would take kids from each village to the 2012 world championships in Germany. Needless to say, these kids had not been on airplanes before. They didn’t have passports. Some didn’t even have shoes. It all got figured out.

At those championships, the kids watched the action, mingled with the sport’s stars, got all wide-eyed. They also presented Sharara with pictures they had drawn from their villages. Tepper said, “There were a lot of people with tears in their eyes who are normally tough customers.”

There’s a video that, in part, features one of the kids at those championships.

Billy Quentin Nkingi, then 12 years old, looks into the camera and, speaking in French, says, “Hello, I am Billy. I am from Burundi. I am happy to be here. This is the first time I have been to such an occasion. I am here for peace.”

The Oslo 2022 conundrum

The International Olympic Committee finds itself early this week in Oslo in a conundrum of its own making. On the one hand, it is assuredly the IOC’s responsibility to encourage strong bids to come forward. Thus Oslo 2022. On the other, in politics – even, perhaps especially, sports politics – perceptions can matter as much as reality. Thus, again, Oslo 2022.

A high-powered IOC delegation, led by the president himself, Thomas Bach, visits Norway Monday and Tuesday for a series of meetings revolving primarily – there are other sessions – around preparations for the 2016 Winter Youth Games in Lillehammer.

The timing comes at a fraught juncture for the Oslo 2022 bid, which all involved are keenly aware.

Thus the dilemma:

Is this good for the IOC? For Oslo 2022? Or, owing to layers of complexities, is this trip ultimately not likely to prove helpful for an Oslo 2022 campaign?

To set the stage:

The IOC agreed to these series of meetings in Norway weeks if not months ago.

As the longtime Olympic British journalist David Miller spelled out in the newsletter Sport Intern in a column published Saturday, the two-day itinerary begins Monday with meetings at the Olympic Sports Center and the Norwegian School of Sports Science.

The IOC president is due thereafter to take lunch with Norway’s King Harald at the Royal Castle along with Norway IOC member, Gerhard Heiberg. After that, Miller reports, the IOC delegation – which includes the likes of senior IOC member Ser Miang Ng, who is the new finance commission chair as well as Singapore’s ambassador to Norway for many years, and Angela Ruggiero, chair of the Lillehammer 2016 coordination commission – is due to “exchange ideas” with Norway’s culture minister, Thorhild Wedvey, and Oslo’s mayor, Stian Berger Rosland.

More meetings Monday are due to follow, with three NGOs, with four labor groups and, finally, with members of parliament.

On Tuesday, the scene shifts to Lillehammer itself, Miller reports, for a series of meetings, including with Ottavio Cinquanta (head of the skating federation), Rene Fasel (hockey federation chief) and Gian-Franco Kasper (ski and snowboard federation No. 1).

Also due to be on-hand from the IOC side, according to Miller: the outgoing Olympic Games executive director, Gilbert Felli, and the IOC director general, Christophe de Kepper.

Wow.

Assuming, indeed, that everyone shows up -- that is some serious IOC star power.

A bit more background:

There are five applicant cities in the 2022 bid race: Oslo; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Beijing; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland.

It’s not clear Krakow will make it past a May 25 referendum.

Lviv, of course, is struggling with enormous turbulence in the eastern part of the country. The IOC last week gave Ukraine’s national Olympic committee $300,000 just so its athletes could make it to training camps and meets this year.

The IOC’s policy-making executive board is due in early July to decide which of the five “applicants” will become “candidate” finalists. The IOC will pick the 2022 winner in July, 2015.

Almaty and Beijing would seem to be shoo-ins. They are both, of course, from Asia.

So who is going to make it from Europe?

It’s not exactly a secret that Norwegians love winter sports, indeed the Winter Games. The 1994 Lillehammer Games are often cited as the “best-ever.” Norway leads the overall Winter Games medal count, with 329, and the gold count, too, with 118 (the U.S. is second in both categories, 282 and 96).

The athlete who has won the most Winter Games medals? Biathlon king Ole Einar Bjorndalen of Norway, the new IOC member, with 13. He won two gold medals in Sochi in February -- just a couple weeks after turning 40.

Next? Cross-country ski god Bjorn Daehlie of Norway, with 12, eight gold.

Next, three athletes, one of whom is female Norwegian cross-country ski legend Marit Bjorgen, with 10 Olympic medals, six gold. In Sochi, age 33, she won three gold medals, among them the grueling 30-kilometer event.

Look, any Oslo bid for the Games would understandably be taken very seriously. For obvious reasons.

Two weeks ago, however, one of two Norwegian government parties voted against supporting Oslo’s 2022 bid. At issue now is whether the government will offer the needed financial guarantees.

The imperative – at least for now – is that the IOC would seem to need Oslo for the 2022 race more than Oslo needs the Winter Games. That is the box. And everyone in Olympic circles knows it.

At the same time, while Norwegians may love the Winter Games, it’s pretty clear there are some strong feelings about the bid, and they may be directly tied to the IOC. And those feelings may not be so positive.

A new poll conducted by the research firm Norstat for NRK, the Norwegian Broadcast Corporation, suggests that 60 percent of the Norwegian public is against an Oslo 2022 bid – with only 35 percent in favor.

“No, it is a considerable skepticism, and I think a lot of the information that has been around the IOC has increased that skepticism,” Christian Democratic Party leader Knut Arild Hareide said.

Bach has been in office for about nine months. He has shown an inclination to lead in a style that evokes some of the ways of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980-2001, who understood – appropriately – that the IOC is not just a sports institution but one that moves with nation-states and with influential political leaders.

Thus, for instance, the lunch with the Norwegian king as well as the exchanges with, for instance, the culture minister.

Too, Bach is possessed – this is meant to be a compliment – of first-rate confidence. You have to have such confidence to direct the IOC, a global institution with a multibillion-dollar budget. By definition, the position lends itself to high-pressure decision making. Bach took a decision to have this two-day meeting, and it is on.

He is also riding a wave of can-do. Sochi is in the rear-view mirror. The IOC and NBC just struck a $7.75 billion deal through 2032.

Even so, does the IOC president himself need to assess what’s going on in Lillehammer with regard to the 2016 Youth Games, when those Games are nearly two years away -- Feb. 12-21, 2016 -- and, besides, it’s well-known the Youth Games are way down the IOC priority list?

For this purpose, doesn’t he already have a coordination commission? And the chair of that commission is, you know, in Norway for this trip?

If this trip were just about Lillehammer, why meet with the mayor of Oslo?

It is also the case that the Norwegians doubtlessly would have some interesting – perhaps even some constructively provocative – ideas to offer regarding Olympic Agenda 2020, the far-reaching IOC study program the IOC president has launched that is now working its way toward the all-members session in Monaco in December. That would explain the sessions with the NGOs and the other Monday afternoon meetings, for instance.

But are the Norwegians the only ones in the entire world with suggestions so potentially clever that the president has to hear them in person?

And, this, coincidentally enough, before the July meeting at which the 2022 applicants are going to be passed through?

Earlier this year – the deadline was April 15 – the IOC took email submissions from anyone, anywhere who wanted to weigh in relating to Olympic Agenda 2020. Yet the Norwegians get an in-person audience with the IOC president himself?

Over the years, the IOC has gone to great – some would say extraordinary – lengths, particularly in the aftermath of the late 1990s Salt Lake City scandal, to keep its distance from anything that sniffed of even the hint of the appearance of conflict of interest in the bid cycle.

For instance, the IOC would not entertain sponsorship discussions from the Russian concern Gazprom while Sochi was bidding for the 2014 Games. Similarly, when Doha was trying, it would not entertain an approach from Qatar Airways even between bid cycles.

No one has suggested misconduct or wrongdoing in the slightest by either the Norwegians or the IOC. To repeat: nobody has said anybody is doing anything wrong.

And nobody is likely to.

The only people who would be likely to complain would be rival bid teams, in this instance most likely Almaty or Beijing.

How do you think it is going to go over when they read that the IOC president is in Oslo, and before the July executive board pass-through meeting?

If you were them, how would you react?

In private?

Now – what would you do about it?

Exactly.

Isn’t this, too, the dilemma?

Living in the moment: track's It Couple

The world’s greatest athlete is taking his first outdoor runs of the season in the pole vault. His coach, Harry Marra, is here, of course, at the Westmont College track, in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. His wife, Brianne, herself the reigning indoor and outdoor silver medalist in the women’s versions of the all-around event, is here, too, practicing her javelin throws and running some hard sprints.

Ashton Eaton is the 2012 gold medalist at the London Games in the decathlon. At the U.S. Olympic Trials earlier that year, he set the world record in the event. He is the 2013 Moscow decathlon world champion. He is also the 2012 and 2014 gold medalist in the heptathlon, the indoor version of the multi-discipline event. He holds the heptathlon world record, too, and missed setting it again at the 2014 indoor worlds by one second in the 1000 meters.

On this day, a bungee cord takes the place of the bar at 5 meters, or 16 feet, 4 ¾ inches. Eaton takes his practice runs. He doesn’t go one after the other, in sequence. No. He shares pole vault time, and graciously, with a 54-year-old doctor of holistic health, Victor Berezovskiy, and a 77-year-old clinical psychologist, Tom Woodring.

This scene summarizes perhaps all that is both sweet and unsettling about the state of track and field in our world in 2014.

It’s sweet because the fact that Ashton Eaton would so willingly, humbly take practice runs with these two guys speaks volumes about his character. Obviously, neither is coming anywhere close to 5 meters. It’s no problem. Eaton patiently helps them both with their marks. In turn, they watch his take-off points.

Sweet because Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen Eaton – he’s now 26, she’s 25 – are, by every measure, track and field’s It Couple. They are at the top of their games. Yet here they are, at the track, just like everyone – anyone – else, practicing. And practicing some more. And then some more, still.

Because, obviously, that’s how you get better. How even the best get better.

It’s hard work that gets you to the top and for those who have seen track and field tainted these past 25 or so years by far too many doping-related scandals, here are Ashton and Brianne, examples of the right stuff. Never say never about anyone. But Ashton and Brianne? So wholesome, Harry says, and he has been in the business for, well, a lot of years, and seen it all, and he adds for emphasis that they don’t even take Flintstone vitamins.

Ashton follows his pole-vaulting with a series of 400 hurdle splits, trying to get the timing down – how many steps between each? 13? All the way around? Does he cut the hurdle? Float? What’s right? She does her repeat 150s so hard that, when she’s done, it’s all she can do in the noontime sun to find some shade.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you rise to the top.

And yet – the questions have to be asked:

Is track all the better because it’s a kind of extended family where one of its biggest names can hang on a sunny morning practice with a 54-year-old and a 77-year-old?

Or isn’t that, in its way, kind of ludicrous?

Does LeBron James practice with a 54-year-old doctor of holistic health?

Do Peyton Manning or Tom Brady run 7-on-7 drills with a 77-year-old clinical psychologist at wide receiver?

It’s not that James, Manning and Brady don’t understand their responsibilities as stars. But this is – practice. This is not a fan meet-and-greet.

What if things were different for track and field? What if the decathlon champ was The Man, the way it was when Bruce Jenner and, before him, the likes of Bill Toomey, Rafer Johnson and others were venerated the way Manning, Brady and James are now?

It’s not just Ashton. Brianne is herself a major, major talent.

Of course, track and field does not hold the same place in the imagination that it once did. Dan O’Brien, the 1996 Olympic decathlon winner, is not The Man the way Jenner was. Bryan Clay, the 2008 Olympic decathlon winner – not The Man the way Jenner was.

And that’s no knock on either O’Brien or Clay.

Times simply have changed. Jenner won in Montreal in 1976. That is a long time ago.

Yet in Ashton and Brianne, track has a marquee couple.  Here are breakout stars in the making: doping-free, handsome, articulate, passionate about advancing track and field the same way Michael Phelps has always been for swimming. Phelps is on bus stop advertisements in Shanghai. Why aren’t these two, for instance, featured on the bright lights looking out and over Times Square?

For sure that would be better for the sport.

Would it be better for Ashton and Brianne – and Harry?

It’s all very complex.

Right now, track and field is, for all intents and purposes, Usain Bolt.

Isn’t there room for Ashton and Brianne, too?

The scene at Westmont this weekday morning is all the more striking because it comes amid the news Phelps will be racing again. The media attention enveloping Phelps is, predictably, striking.

Yes, Phelps is the best in the world at what he does.

Then again – so are these two.

Yet here are Ashton and Brianne and Harry – and, for that matter, a Canadian delegation that includes Damian Warner, the 2013 world bronze medalist in the decathlon – going about their business at Westmont, along with the others at the host Santa Barbara Track Club, with no interference, no autograph requests, no attention.

Phelps has always sought to live a normal life. But let’s be real: could Phelps walk around Westmont – or, for that matter, any college campus in the United States – with the same quietude?

After practice, there is a quick session in the Westmont pool. No one swims like Phelps. Then it’s over to the Westmont cafeteria, where lunch is five bucks and the beet salad is, genuinely, awesome.

Brianne says they consistently make a point of reminding themselves that these are the best days of their lives – to live, truly live, in the present and know that they are experiencing special moments.

“To somebody who is in it more for fame or money,” Brianne says, “they would have a lot different outlook on this.”

“The goal is to improve yourself,” Ashton says.

“The goal is excellence,” Harry echoes.

So sweet.

IOC: $300,000 "emergency fund" for Ukraine

The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday announced it had established an “emergency fund” of $300,000 to benefit Ukrainian athletes, one of the most intriguing moves in recent memory. It underscores the will and decisiveness of the IOC president, Thomas Bach of Germany, and his bid — which he has made a point of repeated emphasis in these first months of his term — to stake out separately delineated spheres for what is sport and what is politics. Recall that the very first call Bach received upon his election last September was from Russian president Vladimir Putin.

It also comes as the days move steadily toward the IOC’s early July executive board meeting. There the list of 2022 bid cities will be finalized. Will Lviv, Ukraine, be among them?

Skeptics would say that of course 300,000 reasons to keep going would be helpful — particularly when it seems apparent Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing will go through, leaving the European possibilities of Lviv, Oslo and Krakow, Poland, and both Krakow and Oslo facing distinct financial or political challenges. Indeed, Krakow is up against a May 25 referendum.

In a bizarre turn early Wednesday, someone — no one knows who — sent out a “news release” declaring that Sergej Gontcharov, the head of the Lviv 2022 bid, had been fired. There was no letterhead; the sentences were awkwardly constructed and, moreover, filled with spelling and other errors; the release was quickly dismissed as a fake. A motive also remains unclear.

As difficult as it might be for the skeptics, Sergey Bubka, the IOC executive board member who is also president of the national Olympic committee of Ukraine, said the explanation for the $300,000 fund — one wholly unconnected to the bid — is simple enough.

Bach, he said, has a genuine humanity.

Recall, too, that Bubka, the 1980s and 1990s pole vault champion, was one of the other five candidates for the IOC presidency. Now read these words:

“I think, generally, the president he was himself an Olympic champion,” in fencing at the Montreal Games in 1976. “He was a great athlete.

“Through all this period,” meaning the turbulence affecting Ukraine, “in Sochi, after Sochi, we are in contact all the time. When we are in Turkey,” in April for the SportAccord convention and the IOC executive board meeting, “we had a meeting — you can see him as a human and as a president who cares. He has feelings with a heart.

“The bidding process, all these things, of course it’s important for him to have good bids, different representation from different parts of the world. But I can see he is human.”

Bubka also said, “He is a person with a heart. It is really touching.”

And: “This help is not connected in any way to the bid. I am confident. No way.”

The IOC statement announcing the fund -- from Bach himself -- started by saying he was following the “political, economic and social developments in Ukraine with the greatest attention and growing concern. Also the situation of the Ukrainian athletes, including those who have so successfully represented their country in the recent Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, which has dramatically deteriorated.”

Ukraine won two medals in Sochi, both in biathlon, gold in the women’s 4x6-kilometer relay and bronze for Vita Semerenko in the women’s 7.5km sprint. The gold was the nation’s first in two decades.

The day after they won, the four women were invited to USA House for a private reception, the Americans operating on the belief the Ukrainians perhaps had nowhere else to celebrate; the Ukrainians got a standing ovation. The Americans played that one right down the middle, of course; earlier in the Games, Putin visited USA House as well, where he mingled and took photos.

“For all these reasons,” Bach went on in the IOC statement, “I repeat my appeal of Sochi to all political leaders involved to enter into a summit dialogue in the Olympic spirit of mutual respect and peace.”

At the United Nations on April 28, Bach reiterated the main points he laid out in a speech there in November and, as he said in in Wednesday’s statement, underscored at both the opening and closing ceremonies at the Sochi Games.

This, in part, is what he said April 28 in New York:

“One of the basic principles of sport is non-discrimination for whatever reason, including political ones. Sport is the only area of human existence with a truly universal law. This universal law is based on global ethics, fair play, respect and friendship. This means for sport and sport organizations that we have to be politically neutral without being apolitical. This means for our partners that they have to respect this responsible autonomy of the sport organizations and the universal law of sport. Otherwise, international sport with its unifying, peace-building, dialogue-enforcing and respectful efforts cannot exist.”

Back to Wednesday’s statement:

“To help the Ukrainian athletes — wherever they come from in Ukraine and whatever their background — and to help mitigate their difficult situation, the IOC has established an emergency fund of $300,000.”

The money, it said, is to go through the Ukrainian Olympic committee for both training and competition.

What it means, Bubka said, is that now, as the summer season gets underway, athletes should once again be able to go to various training camps and meets. The NOC had naturally enough been funding those activities. Now the ministry’s funds for the NOC — not enough.

Ten days ago, in Taicang, China, the Ukrainian men’s race-walking team delivered a surprise 20km team victory at the IAAF World Race Walking Cup, highlighted by 28-year-old Ruslan Dmytrenko’s first-place finish, Ukraine’s first-ever individual medal at the Cup, in a national-record 1:18.37.

Igor Glavan finished seventh, in a personal-best 1:19.59; Navar Kovalenko, 10th, in 1:20.11.

Bubka, who is also an IAAF vice president, was there for the moment, and said, “What happened in China was really amazing.”

“I joined them and I saw the happiness of our athletes, our coaches, our team. This was really for our people — the history of our team, the individual success, this is really nice, to feel the team spirit and to feel society together in this particular place.”

He also said, “These last couple of months, we have emphasized that we represent all the nation. From east to west. From north to south. We are different athletes. We are different coaches. We are one team, we are united — to represent the dream.”

And: “I believe we will overcome. The most important thing is peace.”

There will be skeptics. This is an inevitable part of life. Bubka also said, referring to the IOC president, “He cares about the Olympic family of Ukraine. He cares about the movement. This is the real solidarity. We see it and we appreciate it very much. This is important help in the difficult moment of our history from President Bach.”

16 months for a supplement, and now?

Russian swim star and world-record holder Yulia Efimova got a 16-month ban for taking a supplement that included a banned substance. She tested positive for DHEA. That’s for sure a no-no.

Odds are, most of you have never heard of her.

Fair enough.

Moreover, doping cases tend to be repetitive, indeed mundane.

This one is actually interesting, and on a number of different levels.

Here’s why:

Efimova will sit out 2014 and the first two months of 2015, meaning she will likely be back in time for the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, before a home crowd, and to make a run for Rio 2016. Thus she had ample incentive to get this over with.

It's another example of leniency for supplement use. Which on the one hand is entirely appropriate. Supplement use is not, for instance, the same as injecting EPO. On the other, it makes you wonder — when is the message going to get through to elite athletes that supplement use can be reckless and irresponsible?

It’s also another victory for noted lawyer Howard Jacobs of Westlake Village, California. Look, if you have a doping problem, it’s like Ghostbusters — who you gonna call? Howard Jacobs, obviously.

Efimova didn’t even bother to have the B sample tested. She didn’t contest the lab finding. She knew what she had done. Again, this was an issue of negligence and then, for the authorities, seeking to measure liability with common sense.

The three-person FINA Doping Panel ruling was dated Monday.

Efimona competes for Russia but trains at the University of Southern California.

She is now 22. She has been a first-rate swimmer since her teens. She moved to USC when she was 18. At the 2012 London Games, she won bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke. Last year, at the world championships in Barcelona, she would win the finals of both the 50 and 200 breast and set the world-record in the 50, 29.78, in the heats - a mark that Ruta Meilutyte of Lithuania then lowered in the semifinals to 29.48.

She tested positive after last year’s worlds — on Oct. 31, in an out-of-competition test.

She loses four gold medals at the European short-course championships in Denmark. She also loses two short-course world records set late last year, including one pending mark. Two of those four were individual races; two, relays.

The source of the positive was a supplement, Cellucor CLK, that she bought Sept. 16 at a GNC near where she lives in California. She said she relied on the advice she got at the GNC store, alleging that she believed “salespersons at vitamin stores in the United States were well-educated and knowledgable concerning the products they sold.”

She said she was “more inclined to question the qualifications of individuals selling supplements in Russia than in the United States.”

The level of her naiveté, frankly, borders on the breathtaking.

We are now 15 or so years after the creation of the World and U.S. Anti-Doping Agencies, and both have spent much time and energy reaching out to athletes in a bid to make clear they have to know what goes into their bodies.

And here is a world-class swim racer, indeed an Olympic medalist and world champion, relying on the advice of a clerk at a GNC?

From the decision: “Ms. Efimova testified that although she is an elite swimmer who had been through numerous doping controls and although she is aware that she is responsible for what she puts in her body, Ms. Efimova has never been given specific anti-doping education and has never been taught how to be a wise consumer of supplements, a problem her lawyer contended was compounded by the fact that her English is self-taught and by her relative unfamiliarity with the supplement market in the United States.”

How can it be she had never been given specific anti-doping education? Seriously?

Just so everyone understands the responsibilities here — though she has been training for the past four years primarily at USC, the party bearing the burden for educating her is the Russian Swimming Federation.

The panel, apparently being diplomatic, said “the fact that no anti-doping education was provided to Ms. Efimova by the RSF is disappointing and put her at a disadvantage in fulfilling her responsibility to be a savvy consumer.”

Is she alone in that regard? If not, how does that get fixed? If she is not alone, that is a significant problem, particularly since, again, next year’s worlds will be in Kazan.

A quick look at the label, as the decision noted, would have clearly shown DHEA listed as an ingredient.

As for her English-language abilities:

Efimova has been in the United States for roughly four years. Nobody is asking her to write like Faulkner. But four years? For sure she should be conversant.

Again, the level of the naiveté at issue surely must give the reasonable person pause.

At any rate, all of this is in its way prelude to what may well be the most intriguing part of the matter.

Some context:

Before moving to LA, Efimova had been coached by her father, Andrey. For the five years before that, she had been coached by Irina Vyatchanina. Efimova moved to SoCal to swim with the Trojan Swim Club, headed by coach Dave Salo.

Salo is, simply put, one of the great coaches in the world.

Here is the thing, though:

Two others, Jessica Hardy and Ous Mellouli, had positives while at USC, Hardy for a supplement, Mellouli for Adderall.

Side note: Howard Jacobs represented them both.

Now Hardy and Mellouli are both Olympic medalists and, yes, absolutely, positive role models. For sure. If you were a seventh-grade teacher, you totally would want Jessica Hardy or Ous Mellouli to come to your class and tell your kids their story of achievement.

Two other notes:

Salo had nothing to do with either positive test.

And he had nothing to do with Efimova’s positive.

In swim circles, however, there have been whispers — like, what is going on there under all that California sunshine?

That’s why perhaps this is maybe the most compelling excerpt in the entire decision, the panel devoting an entire paragraph to it, because what is more essential than someone’s reputation?

“According to Ms. Efimova, her coach at the Trojan Swim Club, David Salo, is adamantly opposed to the use of supplements of any kind. She said her coach frequently tells his swimmers that they can get all the nutrition they need through a well-balanced diet and that supplements are unnecessary.”

If you move halfway around the world … to place your trust in your coach … and your coach is one of the best … and he says don’t use supplements … and you do, anyway … it’s appropriate for the right people to stand up for the coach, in black and white, for everyone to see, when that coach is showing appropriate leadership.

So let’s everyone recognize, as the FINA Doping Panel did, too, that Dave Salo did the right thing here.

And Yulia Efimova made a mistake.

And — despite the fact that USADA, WADA and other responsible agencies — are screaming from the rooftops not to take supplements, that message is somehow not getting across fully and completely.

So, where are we, and — to quote that most famous of Russian aphorisms — what is to be done?

IOC, NBC bet big together through 2032

The subject first came up last November. This was in New York. It was over dinner at DeGrezia, a small Italian restaurant on East 50th Street that features many private rooms. The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, was in town to deliver a major political statement at the United Nations. While in New York, there was time for him — and a couple senior aides — to meet with a few top executives from the IOC’s longtime broadcast partner, NBC Universal. Thus this dinner.

NBC already held the rights to broadcast the rights to the Games in the United States through 2020. The IOC president knew this well.

What would you think, he said that evening, about the idea of a long-term partnership?

This simple bet would launch a series of clandestine meetings — at The Olympic Club at the Sochi Games in February, and elsewhere — that culminated in Wednesday’s announcement of the $7.75 billion deal to extend NBC’s rights to the Games from 2021 through 2032.

That means six editions of the Olympics.

It is of course a financial play.

But it is so much more.

It is a fantastic triumph, professional and personal, for Bach.

It is a huge win for the entire Olympic movement, securing its financial future, in particular for the IOC and, too, for the U.S. Olympic Committee, which gets a share of the deal.

And it is a major coup for NBC, which secured the rights to the sports property that has for years, through ups and downs, given the network a consistent identity. The Olympics. no matter what, deliver ratings.

London 2012 was the most-watched television event in history, with 217 million viewers. Sochi 2014 was the “most-consumed” Winter Games ever. Even as technologies change, the Olympics drive numbers — whether in the broadcast or on emerging digital platforms — and, simply put, that’s why NBC was willing now to bet so much money into the future, the company’s executives said Wednesday.

Slightly more than half the viewers who watched Sochi 2014 on NBC also used a computer, a tablet device or a smartphone to get information about those Olympics while the TV was on, NBC has said.

It’s not just the IOC that is willing to make bets so far out into time. USA Track & Field three weeks ago announced a deal with Nike — believed to be worth about $500 million — through 2040.

And it’s not just NBC that is willing to pay big for live events.

ESPN has laid out $5.6 billion for Major League Baseball, $7.3 billion for a 12-year deal for the new college football playoff system, $15.2 billion for “Monday Night Football.”

CBS Sports and Turner Sports are paying $10.8 billion for 14 years — 2011 through 2024 — to show the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.

Others, of course, have broadcast the Olympics — CBS, for instance, in the 1990s.

But over the years, only NBC — relying on its parent companies, first General Electric, now Comcast — has backed up its passionate commitment to the Olympics with really big money.

In two negotiations in 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for the rights to the Games from 2000 to 2008.

In 2000, for $2 billion, it bought the rights to the 2010 and 2012 Games. A GE sponsorship meant another $200 million.

In 2011, it paid $4.38 billion for 2014 through 2020.

The new deal, technically $7.65 billion for 2020-2032, includes a $100 million signing bonus to promote the Olympic movement from 2015 to 2020. Some significant chunk of that $100 million presumably will be used to help boost an Olympic channel that is now the subject of a feasibility study.

This new deal came together in a spirit evocative of the two 1995 deals — when Dick Ebersol headed NBC and Juan Antonio Samaranch the IOC, and it was all done quietly, without bids from other networks.

Here, too.

The 2011 process involved competitive bids, and for those tempted to ask why not this time, too, or to suggest that something might be amiss, there are realities that explain it elegantly.

Another thing Bach knew well is that in 2011 NBC outbid everyone else by a country mile. As a matter of fact, Fox was the only U.S. entity that even bid for four Games, the way NBC did. When NBC went big at $4.38 billion, Fox came in at $3.4 billion. ESPN opted only to bid for 2014 and 2016, and at $1.4 billion.

Accordingly, Bach knew to a certainty that in dealing with NBC he — that is, the IOC — was going to make money.

The new deal breaks down this way: $2.5 billion for 2022 and 2024. $2.55 billion for 2026 and 2028. $2.6 billion for 2030 and 2032.

On average, it represents a 15 percent increase per Games over the previous arrangement.

Really, though, that is not the deal point.

“This kind of deal is not only about money,” Bach said in a conference call with reporters.

“You know, you can maybe  — in one deal you can make one or the other dollar more and maybe have your product destroyed. We are thinking long-term in the IOC. We are here for 120 years, and we want to be there much longer. We want to leave a good legacy there to our successors.

“All these kind of strategic issues play a role. We have a responsibility. We are the trustees. We are the owners of the Olympic Games, yes, but we are the trustees of the Olympic movement. Therefore the balance has to be there between the protection of the Games, the promotion of our values and the financial consideration. There this deal reflects this consideration from our point of view in an excellent way.”

Going forward, it’s obvious — more than obvious — that this deal could in an excellent way boost the chances of a U.S. bid for the 2024 Summer Games. Indeed, Bach said Wednesday a “strong bid” from the U.S. would not only be “very much welcomed” but would be a “very strong competitor.”

To be super-obvious: if the principal broadcast partner of the IOC has put in more than $17 billion since those first deals were announced in 1995, has bankrolled the IOC with that kind of money, it will likely be made clear to everyone — particularly now that things are good again between the IOC and USOC — that the IOC would look favorably upon going to the United States, and for a Summer Games. In 2024.

Larry Probst, the USOC board chair and new IOC member, would only say Wednesday what he and Scott Blackmun, the USOC’s chief executive, have said for months — that the USOC is going through its process, and expects to have whittled down a list of potential applicant cities “sometime in the next few months.”

Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and San Francisco are believed to be among cities under USOC scrutiny.

Other 2024 candidates from around the world are likely to include Paris but, frankly, it’s understood even in France that Paris could afford to run and lose. An American candidate would be in it to win, and win only, and there is a school of thought that announcing sooner in 2014 than later, particularly given this NBC deal, might well build up momentum that might be difficult indeed to beat.

The IOC will pick the 2024 winner in 2017.  It will pick a 2022 Winter Games site in 2015.

Bach, meanwhile, was elected president just last September, succeeding Jacques Rogge.

Since then, Bach has — at that United Nations appearance last November — outlined a clear vision for how sport and politics inhabit both separate but sometimes intertwined spheres of influence.

In February, he oversaw a Games in Sochi that — despite dire predictions from many beforehand and a $51 billion price tag — were generally an operational success.

He inherited roughly $900 million in reserves, a U.S. TV deal worth $4.38 billion and now has produced a new contract worth $7.75 billion. That means the IOC is and likely will be financially secure not only through his term, which presumably will run through 2025 but, incredibly, through 2032.

All this in but seven months since taking office.

Politically and financially, the IOC would now seem to be set for the next steps — all part of Bach’s big plan, aiming toward December and the IOC’s so-called “extraordinary session” in Monaco, when it will tackle the major issues that are part of what he has dubbed “Olympic Agenda 2020.”

In Sochi, the members floated 211 so-called “interventions” from the floor during their assembly. In Monaco, expect these major topics:

The Summer Games program; the bid process; autonomy and governance; and the structure of the IOC itself.

With this much cash now in hand, for instance, it’s plausible for the members to consider visits once again to cities bidding for the Games. If the IOC itself is paying for such visits, why not?

With this much cash in hand, for example, if the IOC is able to increase its outlay to an organizing committees for the Games to a level approaching or, better yet, over $1 million, isn’t it feasible to start considering a far more extensive use of temporary facilities? Bach has mentioned this notion many times over.

London got just over $750 million from the IOC in the 18 months ending Sept. 30, 2012, according to its March 2013 financial report. If an organizing committee got $250 or $500 million more, wouldn't that directly translate into less money spent on capital costs? Wouldn't that sensibly -- logically and easily -- be able to be explained to taxpayers, no matter where, that hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Games would be coming from the IOC, not from them?

“This is a happy day for the whole Olympic movement,” Bach said at the outset of that conference call, adding a moment later, without explanation, “We are happy for different reasons.”

You bet.

Tyson Gay, entourage and patience

We live now in such a sound-bite society. Too, we swim in a culture in which everyone wants answers, a definitive result, the end of the story — right now.

Particularly when it comes to matters involving doping and entourage.

Sorry, everyone. That’s not the way the real world works.

The first burst of news coverage has now come and gone involving Tyson Gay, the American record-holder in the 100-meter dash and, to be honest, almost all of it was enough to make you wonder why anyone would voluntarily come clean.

Gay’s case rightfully ought to be seen through a different lens.

It ought to be viewed as part of a larger, more comprehensive move by authorities, in particular the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, to learn and then use what an athlete knows to try to break the circle of doping — by going after, if applicable, coaches, trainers, managers, agents, doctors, other athletes, whoever.

In this case the athlete happened to be one of the biggest names in the biggest sport in the Olympic movement.

As Gay said when he was first busted, “I basically put my trust in someone and I was let down.”

David Epstein, in a story co-published with ProPublica and Sports Illustrated, has reported that Gay tested positive — he failed three tests — for a steroid or steroid precursor believed to have come from a cream given to him by Atlanta chiropractor and “anti-aging specialist” Clayton Gibson III.

But — assuming all that is true, and Epstein has consistently proven a first-rate reporter — Gay didn’t just pick up the phone and call Gibson. There’s way more to the story. That’s what Gay has now told USADA: everything else.

The USADA news release notes, in the specific language of the World Anti-Doping Code, that Gay provided “substantial assistance.”

The way USADA works, you can be sure there were multiple meetings. There were documents. There were products.

We will learn about all the rest of those connections. Be sure there are those who have traveled in track and field circles — and perhaps not just in the United States — who ought to be plenty anxious.

Draw your own conclusions but, typically, in these sorts of things government authorities know now what’s what. Obviously, these agencies never announce who they might be inquiring about, or what timetables might be at issue.

To get through all of this takes time. It  takes process.

What we got, instead, were headlines like these:

Bleacher Report, atop a Bleacher-written story: “Tyson Gay Suspended for 1 Year Following Failed Drug Test”

Huffington Post, atop an Associated Press account: “U.S. Sprinter Tyson Gay Returns 2012 Olympic Medal After Positive Drug Test”

Both these headlines: factually correct.

The headlines, and the accompanying stories, totally glossed over the larger, and more relevant — the more important — point.

Why was Tyson Gay only getting one year?

A standard doping ban is two years, at least through the end of 2014, until the new World Anti-Doping Agency rules take effect and a standard ban goes up to four.

Gay got half that two. He got one.

Frankly, the news coverage — and the response it provoked on social media — did Gay, USADA and, now, WADA, the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee a disservice.

Because now the entire case is politically charged, and for what?

We get swimmers like Britain’s Michael Jamieson, who won a silver medal in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke in London in 2012, tweeting,

...& is only banned for 1 year, backdated - so he's eligible to compete from next month. Testosterone isn't taken by mistake. National...

— Michael Jamieson (@mj88live) May 3, 2014

...governing bodies have too much say in the length of suspension. This story lets us know that there is no real desire to tackle doping!

— Michael Jamieson (@mj88live) May 3, 2014

Mr. Jamieson — to deconstruct, sir, picking up with the word "National":

The entire point of the USADA and WADA system, just as it is your country, is to take governing bodies such as USA Track & Field out of the process. USATF had nothing — repeat, nothing — to do with any part of this investigation or the one-year ban.

As for that next sentence, you are absolutely entitled to your opinion. And that opinion is ridiculous. To ask the obvious: what first-hand knowledge of Mr. Gay’s case did you have before rendering that judgment?

The reason to ask is that the Daily Mail, the English newspaper, cited you in the story as part of what it called a "furious backlash from athletes" in the headline. The story also went on to quote Sebastian Coe, the London 2012 chair who is a leading candidate to become the next president of the IAAF, track and field’s governing body: “There has to be confidence that the athletes on the track know they will be treated in exactly the same way, and spectators must have complete confidence in knowing what they are watching is legitimate.”

Actually, for sure spectators must have complete confidence in knowing what they are watching is legitimate. That, to be frank, is track and field’s ongoing credibility problem, as absolutely Lord Coe knows well.

But there is no justification for treating everyone the same way. None whatsoever. The rules now allow that if you provide “substantial assistance,” you get a break, plain and simple, as Lord Coe surely knows as well.

What we may now see is Gay’s case appealed. In such cases, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport gets the final word. Which means time and money. If that happens, what justice is being served?

Is Gay well-served? USADA? Who, exactly?

It’s ironic, really. In the Lance Armstrong case, USADA is accused of being the ultimate witch-hunter. Here Gay gets a year, and USADA is accused of being too lenient. What, it’s damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t?

This is precisely the crux of the problem with the sound-bite, rush-to-judgment nature of where we are.

Now we get comparisons between Gay’s 12 months and the 18 months Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell — another big name — got for a supplement with a banned stimulant. (Query: did Powell provide "substantial assistance"? The answer is obvious.)

Yes, for sure, as a corollary matter, it’s interesting and intriguing to try to figure out whether the others on that 2012 U.S silver medal-winning relay team will get to keep their medals — but this is an issue on which the IOC and CAS have gone different ways, given individual fact patterns, in recent years.

It’s a further irony that Justin Gatlin ran on that relay, and he, too, has served a doping ban.

But, again, that’s not the central point.

The key element in the USADA news release, as well as the increased big-picture focus in the anti-doping campaign, is the focus now on the entourage.

Indeed, a new feature of the Code, taking effect at the start of 2015 — just to show how determined WADA is about trying to shake things up — makes it an anti-doping violation for an athlete to associate with an “athlete support person” if the athlete has been formally warned specifically not to do so.

WADA and other anti-doping authorities have learned that athletes typically don’t just go online and order up a mess of steroids; or sketch out a calendar with cycles for usage of substance A, B or C; or intuitively know how to stack steroids X, Y or Z with EPO. These things take money and expertise.

To borrow from the saying: it takes a village. Many successful athletes have a kind of “village” around them. What 15 or so years of the WADA-focused anti-doping campaign has taught is that it is not enough to just go after the athlete, him or herself. You have to disrupt the enablers in that “village” as well, or the status is likely to remain quo.

Back to last Friday’s release: “For providing substantial assistance to USADA; Gay was eligible for up to a three-quarter reduction of the otherwise applicable two-year sanction under the Code (or a six-month suspension).”

Again, Gay’s time could have been cut down to just six months from two years. He got a full year. Does that sound like total leniency?

Just so everyone understands: had this case come up next year, given the WADA Code that goes into effect this coming Jan. 1, given the “substantial assistance” Gay provided, he might well have walked away with no time.

So — here is the deal, literally and figuratively:

Tyson Gay decided to cooperate. Because of that, all athletes, and for that matter, everyone with an interest in clean sport, got a two-for-one. He gave back his unclean medal from London. And now USADA — and, presumably, others — get to go after the entourage.

Gay's one-year period of ineligibility runs for a year from June 23, 2013, the day his sample was collected at the USA outdoor nationals. Obviously he passed whatever tests there were in London, or we would have known about it; USADA had no evidence of his misconduct from July 15, 2012, the date the release says he first used a product that contained a prohibited substance, until he came forward.

For those who prefer:

One way of looking at his ban -- now that he has voluntarily given back his London 2012 medals -- is that it is in effect like two years, from July, 2012, through June, 2014. He didn't just give back that relay medal; he also forfeited all medals, points and prizes from July 15, 2012, forward. Don't forget that at those same USA 2013 nationals Gay ran a 9.75 100.

Gay said in an interview Saturday with his hometown paper, the Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader, “There’s a lot for me to tell, my side …”

In time we will all hear it.

Everyone just be patient. Sometimes — a lot of times, actually — that’s the way the real world works.

The IOC's big bid problem

One of two Norwegian government parties voted Sunday against supporting Oslo’s bid for the 2022 Winter Games, Associated Press reported, in a three-paragraph story likely to be buried in the back pages of newspapers and de-emphasized by analytics monkeys at websites around the world. It’s 2014. It’s eight years until 2022. The International Olympic Committee isn’t even going to vote for the 2022 city until next year. Who could possibly care?

Everyone should care.

To put it another way — if you have even the most remote interest in the ongoing vitality of the Olympic movement, you should care.

To put it yet another way — the IOC has an enormous problem on its hands.

One notion here is to use the connotatively more neutral word “challenge” — as in,  the IOC has had a huge challenge for the last few bid cycles, and in particular Winter Games bid cycles, attracting enough interested and qualified cities.

Let’s be real, and the language has to reflect that reality.

The IOC has an enormous problem.

This big problem is of its doing, and is many, many years in the making.

The problem is complex.

It is various parts finance, governance, perception and (lack of, by the IOC) communication — with cities, states and nations saying the Games have become way, way, way too expensive; or they don’t like or don’t trust the IOC; or both.

Indeed, a 2008 survey by the British think tank One World Trust found that when looking at 30 corporations, inter-governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, the IOC ranked 30th in what it called “accountability indicators,” suggesting it was the least accountable and transparent.

Ahead of the IOC on this ranking were such institutions as the International Atomic Energy Agency (29), NATO (28), Halliburton (26), Goldman Sachs (20) and Royal Dutch Shell (12).

In South Korea last Monday, at a good governance forum sponsored by the International Sport Cooperation Center, a Seoul National University professor, Min-Gyo Koo, reminded the audience of that survey, which in Olympic circles strangely has gotten little attention.

One of the panelists at the conference, Anita DeFrantz of the United States, now on the IOC executive board, a member since 1986, told the audience, “I cannot accept that we were behind Halliburton and Shell. That is not acceptable.”

Another panelist, Ivan Dibos of Peru, an IOC member since 1982, said, “”That No. 30 ranking could be looked at positively or negatively,” adding a moment later, “I take it as something positive and I rather prefer it that way.”

In the IOC’s defense, Koo said, at least the IOC made the top 30. Soccer governing body FIFA, he observed, didn’t.

This, then, is what it has come to — at least the IOC is on the list.

What it should be is this, as Koo also pointed out, the new IOC president, Thomas Bach, reminding one and all last December, albeit in the context of a dispute involving India’s national Olympic committee, “It’s about the principles … good governance for the IOC is a key issue. We need to be strict and to make sure the rules of good governance are applied.”

Governance is not sexy. But it is essential. And this should be a key focus of the IOC’s “Olympic Agenda 2020” process now working its way toward Monaco and the extraordinary session in December.

So should PR. The members of the IOC know it is a pass-through that keeps some percent of the money it takes in. Can they all say immediately what percent, to refute the perception the IOC is not some avaricious money-sucking beast? (It keeps roughly 10 percent, perhaps a touch less.) How many know the quadrennial Solidarity budget, which sends dollars back to developing countries for athlete development? (It’s $438 million for 2013-16.)

The same goes for finance — and the issue of how much the Games should cost.

The Sochi Games were, in hindsight, a success — but.

The $51 billion price tag for those Games is, in significant measure, its primary legacy, at least when it comes to the next couple bid cycles.

It does not matter — again and for emphasis, it does not matter one bit — whether that figure is true or not.

That is the number that is out there, and so that is the number everyone around the world believes.

It also does not matter — again, it simply does not matter — that the Games’ organizing budget was roughly a couple billion dollars and the rest went toward infrastructure.

The general public does not understand the difference between operating and infrastructure budgets. They don’t want to hear it. It’s all just money.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had no winter sports facilities. Russia bid for the Games, and won. To get the job done, the Russians had to start from nothing. The short story of Sochi 2014 is that the Russians built two new cities, Adler and Krasnaya Polyana, from scratch.

That cost $51 billion.

The $51 billion question: who besides Russia has that kind of money?

China does. The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing purportedly cost roughly $40 billion.

This, then, is the problem.

Who in the world besides Russia or China has $40 or $51 billion just lying around? For a sports event that lasts 17 days -- even if, as the IOC consistently says, and virtually no one hears, most of that money is going toward roads, airports, metro lines, that kind of thing?

Big money. Big issues. Big problem.

It for sure does not help that Rio for 2016 is a hot mess.

Rio, too, is way, way, way over the initial infrastructure projections.

And despite the backtracking that IOC vice president John Coates engaged in after his initial comments last week — he’s now saying that, sure, Rio can “indeed deliver excellent Games” — it’s worth noting that in law school, they teach you in evidence class to pay attention to what people say when their message isn’t at risk for being shaped.

Coates, being an excellent lawyer, would surely know this.

What he said initially, of course, was that preparations for Rio — which he has visited six times as part of the IOC’s inspection team — were the “worst I have ever experienced.”

Sochi and Rio are the triggers.

The big problem facing the IOC, however, has been simmering for a long, long time. It is now finding increasing expression not just in Oslo but across western Europe, the IOC’s once and forever soul, which makes it all the more problematic.

In February, 2012, Rome withdrew from the 2020 campaign, the then-premier, Mario Monti, saying that a projected $12.5 billion was too much. Rome put on the 1960 Games.

In the afterglow of a European Summer Games in 2012, in London, arguably the best-ever Summer Olympics, voters in four -- and, now, maybe five -- separate countries have shot down Games bids:

In March, 2013, voters in Switzerland ended a 2022 bid for St. Moritz and Davos. St. Moritz staged the Winter Games in 1928 and 1948.

A few days later, voters in Austria rejected a Vienna 2028 plan. Innsbruck put on the 2012 Winter Youth Games; it staged the 1976 and 1964 Winter Games. And Salzburg bid for the 2014 and 2010 Winter Games.

Last November, balloting in Germany killed a Munich 2022 bid.

Munich would have been the presumptive 2022 favorite. The city played host to the 1972 Summer Games; it had bid for and lost (to Pyeongchang) for 2018; Garmisch-Partenkirchen, about an hour south, had staged the 1936 Winter Games.

Ludwig Hartmann, a Greens Party lawmaker and a leader of the movement, called “NOlympia,” that led the opposition to the plan, said, “The vote is not a signal against the sport but against the non-transparency and the greed for profit of the IOC.”

Meanwhile, a leading German newspaper, Süddeutschen Zeitung, had run a column comparing the IOC to the mafia and the “North Korean regime.”

This past January, Stockholm pulled the plug on a 2022 bid, the City Council saying the project was too expensive. Stockholm staged the 1912 Summer Games.

Now, Oslo.

Nearby Lillehammer staged the 1994 Winter Games, lauded by many as the best-ever. And Oslo itself put on the 1952 Winter Games.

The global economic situation has already affected the 2024 Summer Games race, too: Mexico City, Toronto and two Russian cities, Kazan and St. Petersburg, have already pulled back for a variety of finance-related reasons.

This is not just an Olympic Games problem. This is an Olympic movement problem. Last month, Hanoi dropped out of staging the 2019 Asian Games, the once-every-four-years event attracting thousands of athletes, citing financial concerns.

In theory, there are five applicants still in the 2022 Winter Games contest: Oslo; Beijing; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland.

Polish voters are due to vote later this month about the Krakow bid. Polls suggest a difficult situation.

Lviv is in western Ukraine; the eastern sector of that country is being ripped by armed conflict and the fate of the bid is highly uncertain.

That might leaves only three for 2022. Or would it be two?

AP reported the Progress Party vote Sunday against supporting Oslo’s bid is “likely” to put the city out of the race. In Norway, the Conservative and Progress parties rule in a coalition government; Progress Party members said the Games would affect the government’s ability to fund infrastructure projects, education, health care and tax cuts.

For 2018, the IOC managed only three Winter Games candidates: Pyeongchang, Munich and Annecy, France. And in the end, Annecy managed only seven votes.

For 2014, the IOC deemed only three bids worthwhile enough to pass along for a vote: Sochi, Pyeongchang and Salzburg, Austria.

The Oslo bid’s immediate future depends perhaps on whether it can still get the government to underwrite the needed financial guarantees, and whether those guarantees can be offered before the IOC’s July 8-9 executive board meeting. That’s when the 2022 list will be cut to the finalists — the cities that will actually go to a vote in July, 2015.

The IOC — and let’s also be clear about this — has a huge interest in seeing Oslo stay in the race. If the Polish referendum goes badly and if the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, Oslo would be it for Europe for 2022.

For now, though, there’s this, from Atle Simonsen, the head of the youth wing of the Progress Party, speaking to Norwegian public broadcaster NRK: “Believing that the Oslo Olympics would cost under 50 billion kroner,” about $8.4 billion, ”is like believing in Santa Claus, when the Sochi Olympics cost 500 billion.”

Phelps having fun, and it's all good

Thirty years ago, amid the delivery of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games, which proved a huge success, Peter Ueberroth reminded the world of a classic strategy. It works in business. It works in sports. Really, it’s the best strategy for pretty much everything. You under-promise and then you over-deliver.

This is what Michael Phelps and his longtime coach and mentor, Bob Bowman, are doing now in these very first days of the comeback story likely to dominate every swimming story between now and the Rio Summer 2016 Olympic Games.

Michael’s goals? Fun, man. Just here to have fun. 2016? Whatever. Not thinking that far ahead. Just taking it one step at a time. We’ll get there when we get there.

It’s completely shrewd, sophisticated and dazzling in its brilliance.

After years of chasing hard goals — eight-for-eight golds in Beijing, the gymnast Larisa Latynina’s record of 18 overall medals in London — there’s nothing left for Phelps to prove to anyone. He is The Man, and has absolutely, unequivocally earned the right to do this on his own terms.

The thing is, it’s also true.

Enough.

Because, for sure, Phelps has goals. He always has goals.

As he said Wednesday at a news conference, “I always have goals and things that I want to achieve and I have things that I want to achieve now. Bob and I can do anything that we put our minds to.”

Because, for real, Phelps and Bowman assuredly have not through every detail of what the master plan is to get to and through Rio. No way, no how.

Why?

Because it’s April 2014 and they don’t have to.

All Phelps — and Bowman— have to do, right now, is enough to keep the train moving.

Which, as Phelps proved Thursday in sun-blinded Mesa, Arizona, is plenty good enough.

In his first race back after 628 days away, since his butterfly leg in the gold medal-winning leg in the 4x100 medley relay at London 2012 Games, Phelps was put in the last of the 14 heats in the 100 fly.

Phelps watched as rival Ryan Lochte, in Heat 13, went 52.94.

Lochte swam in Lane 4. Phelps drew Lane 4, too. The two of them yukked it up about something as Phelps stepped on the blocks — maybe the absurdity of a jillion cameras recording every move Phelps was making while Lochte, still in the water below, got to watch while Phelps dove over him as Heat 14 got underway.

All Phelps did in Heat 14 was throw down a 52.84, the morning’s fastest time.

Yeah. He was back.

“I felt like a kid, you know, being able to race again and be back at a meet,” Phelps told longtime friend Rowdy Gaines, the 1984 Olympic champion in Mesa working television for Universal Sports.

“I literally felt like a 10-year-old kid, just enjoying it,” Phelps said, which is great, except that the next time a 10-year-old kid throws a 52.8 in the 100 fly please call USA Swimming because that kid needs to be in the Olympics immediately.

The only thing that didn’t go according to script: Phelps usually lags behind the field in the first 50 meters, often making the turn in seventh place. On Thursday morning, he was second. He split the first 50 in 25.15 seconds, the second in 27.69.

All you doubters? Haters? Come on. This is Phelps. He is one of the most competitive human beings ever to inhabit Planet Earth. Did you think he was somehow going to forget how to race?

Especially in the 100 fly, the event in which he is the three-time Olympic champion as well as the world and American record-holder.

This is what Phelps does, and better than anyone, and especially in the butterfly — which is what he is likely to concentrate on going forward.

Do you think — just riffing here — that he would want to try going forward to make amends for the 200 fly in London, a race he seemingly had won but then glided at the end when he shouldn’t have, and South Africa’s Chad le Clos stole by five-hundredths of a second?

Wouldn’t that — just being logical — be a “goal and thing … to achieve now”?

The 200 fly is the Phelps family race; older sister, Whitney, came into the 1996 U.S. Trials in Indianapolis with the best time in the country in the event, and younger brother Michael is a two-time Olympic champion, one of those wins, in Beijing, a then-world record 1:52.03, set with his goggles filled with water.

As amazing as the eight-for-eight is, and it is, the 100 fly three-peat —which by comparison bizarrely gets almost no love — is a profound accomplishment, because that race is so short and in it anything — as the 2008 final, won by one-hundredth of a second, proves — can happen.

Now that 200 fly three-peat is still out there.

Of course, no decisions have been made, or at least announced publicly. It’s possible the 200 individual medley might yet appear on the agenda, too. Or the 100 free. Who knows? Again, and for emphasis: it’s very early.

The prelim set Phelps and Lochte up for Thursday night’s 100 fly final.

Lochte had himself a way busier evening than Phelps. He first swam the 100 free, finishing fourth, in 49.68, behind 2012 Olympic gold medalist Nathan Adrian’s 48.23.

Adrian’s 48.23 will get lost in the swirl but it shouldn’t. It’s the start of the American season and it’s already the third-best time in the world in 2014 — two Australians, James Magnussen, 47.59, and Cameron McEvoy, 47.65, have gone faster, and the Aussies have already had their national championships.

Adrian won by more than a second; South Africa’s Roland Schoeman finished second, in 49.39.

Another race destined to get missed by all but the most hardy swim geeks — about a half-hour after that 100 free, Katie Ledecky swam the women’s 400 free in 4:03.84, which equaled the world’s best time in 2014. Afterward, she wasn’t even breathing hard.

Lochte got done with the 100 free at 5:11 p.m. local time.

The men’s 100 fly started an hour later.

Once again, at the turn, Phelps — in Lane 4 — was second, in 24.76.

This time, Lochte — in Lane 5 — was first, in 24.64.

The Phelps M.O. over the years has been to pour it on in the back half. Lochte knows this.

In Phelps' first competitive final of 2014, it wasn’t there. Lochte held Phelps off, winning in 51.93. Phelps touched second, in 52.13.

Give Lochte credit. That 51.93 was the second-best time in the world in 2014. Only Takuro Fujii, with a 51.84 at the Japanese nationals, has gone faster.

Phelps, meanwhile, with 52.13, is tied for fourth-best in 2014. Already.

“Down there at the turn, I kind of peeked over, I saw him, and I almost started smiling,” Lochte said in a poolside interview with Gaines that was broadcast live over the PA system in Mesa as well.

“Why? Because you were winning? Because you were ahead?” Phelps said, and everyone laughed.

Gaines, turning to Phelps, asked, what now?

“I’m my hardest critic,” Phelps said, “so I know what I can do there. But, like I have been saying this whole time, I am having fun. I really do mean that. There’s nothing like coming here, swimming before a packed stands — they’re cheering us on, helping us get through the race.

“Obviously, being back in the water with Ryan, it’s always fun when we race. Neither one of us wants to lose to each other. But that’s what makes us faster and faster each time.”

The interview actually began with Gaines asking Lochte if he had noticed anything different about swimming Thursday in Mesa — what with, you know, Phelps back.

Lochte laughed. He said, “I mean, especially this morning, seeing all these cameras, right before I’m about to race — I’m like, ‘Thanks, Michael.’ “

Phelps is back. Lochte, too, from that freaky knee injury.

Jeah, dudes.

For U.S. swimming, it’s all good.