LA 2024's new bid team, many rivers to cross

EUGENE, Oregon -- When the four American cities still in the would-be race for the 2024 Summer Olympics head to Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a U.S. Olympic Committee workshop later this week, the Los Angeles bid will have a new face. Casey Wasserman, 40, one of Southern California’s leading businessmen, has over the past few weeks quietly — in keeping with his style — assumed leadership of the bid.

Wasserman’s arrival onto the public Olympic stage, in tandem with 43-year-old Mayor Eric Garcetti, is a strong signal on many levels, the emergence of a new generation of Los Angeles leadership that for 2024 could bring new energy and new thinking, one that can obviously pay homage to the power of the 1984 Games but would no longer be beholden to them.

The mayor, who is fluent in Spanish, keeps a 1984 torch in his downtown office.

At the same time, this must be emphasized: strong signals guarantee no one and no city anything.

San Francisco, Boston and Washington already had strong business leaders aligned with their bids, San Francisco with Giants president and chief executive officer Larry Baer, Boston with construction magnate John Fish, Washington with financier and philanthropist Russ Ramsey.

Moreover, it’s far from clear the USOC is even going to launch an American bid.

USOC chairman Larry Probst and chief executive Scott Blackmun have said many times they are on a holding pattern through 2014, waiting until the International Olympic Committee and president Thomas Bach complete their review and potentially far-reaching reform process, dubbed "Olympic Agenda 2020."

An all-members IOC assembly has been called for Monaco in early December. The USOC is due to make a 2024 go-or-no-go decision in early 2015. The IOC will pick a 2024 city in 2017.

The list of potential international contenders is fluid, indeed. Paris, Berlin, Doha and others routinely surface on most rumor lists.

Making matters more complicated for Los Angeles, everyone tied to the USOC process is well aware that LA played host to the 1932 and 1984 Summer Games and, moreover, that Anita DeFrantz is the senior IOC member to the United States, with offices at the LA 84 Foundation, just west of the University of Southern California, and that Jim Easton, another IOC member, has a place near UCLA. Their IOC membership makes them USOC board members as well.

Thus, the USOC has gone out of its way — as board minutes make explicitly clear — to kick DeFrantz and Easton out of the room whenever 2024 discussions come up.

Los Angeles sought the 2016 Games, losing out to Chicago, which of course ended up coming up way short in October, 2009, to Rio de Janeiro.

The USOC stayed out of the 2020 contest, which went last September to Tokyo, Probst and Blackmun intent on building relationships rather than running through another expensive bid cycle.

Recent LA Olympic strategies have been overseen by Barry Sanders, now a retired lawyer who since 2002 has been chairman of what is called the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games.

In Los Angeles, the figurative passing of the torch, if you will, could hardly seem more symbolic: Wasserman is off Thursday to Colorado even as final preparations are being made for a party next Monday, at the stately LA 84 Foundation grounds, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1984 Games. Peter Ueberroth, who ran those LA Games and then served as USOC chairman from 2004 to 2008, which included the 2005 campaign that saw New York bid, losing to London for the 2012 Games, is expected at the party.

Ueberroth, since stepping down from the USOC post, has discretely stayed out of the Olympic spotlight.

Meanwhile, in the fabric of civic life in Los Angeles, there is always a connection to be found to the Olympics and to 1984.

For Wasserman, the connections are many and layered. He has been powerfully tied his entire life to the city, business, the media, sports and the Olympic scene. Everyone in Los Angeles who mattered, it seemed, knew Casey’s grandfather, Lew, of MCA fame; one of Lew’s closest friends was Paul Ziffren, one of the big-time lawyers in town who helped bring the 1984 Games to LA; Casey is married to Paul’s granddaughter.

Casey Wasserman is chairman and chief executive of Wasserman Media Group, the company he founded 12 years ago. Its now-global practice ranges across fields as diverse as athlete management, corporate consulting, sponsorships, media rights and corporate consulting.

As just one example of the company’s got-done list: in 2011, it brokered naming rights to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, site of the 2014 Super Bowl, in a 25-year arrangement for a reported $400 million, among the biggest stadium-rights deals in U.S. sports.

Wasserman is also president and CEO of an active private family charitable trust, the Wasserman Foundation; among other boards, he is also a trustee of the William J. Clinton Foundation.

In the Olympic sphere, relationships matter, and Wasserman’s Rolodex — to use a term that might have been more celebrated in 1984 — is formidable.

With disclosure of what was afoot in Los Angeles circulating this week among the in-the-know here in Eugene at the 2014 world juniors, speculation immediately ignited about the possibility of a track and field world championships -- 2021? 2023? -- at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

What, if anything, that might mean for Eugene's 2019 world championships bid -- it's up against Doha and Barcelona in a contest to be decided this fall -- is entirely uncertain.

Earlier this year, USA Track and Field announced LA would play host to the men's and women's U.S. marathon Trials for the 2016 U.S. Olympic team, on Feb. 13, 2016.

Of course, at this point all this is -- to reiterate -- sheer conjecture. To quote from the ballad the great Jimmy Cliff wrote in 1969: many rivers to cross.

"Casey Wasserman is one of our city's most creative and innovative business leaders, and he has built one of the world's leading sports companies here in LA because our city is the worldwide capital of the sports industry," Garcetti said. “And Casey is at the heart of thoughtful, focused philanthropy, determined to make our city even greater.

“It is only natural that Casey is my partner in leading LA's efforts to explore an American bid for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. I look forward to working closely with him."

For his part, Wasserman said, “The USOC is committed to putting forward the best of our U.S. cities, so it is a real privilege to join forces with Mayor Garcetti to steer Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. I hope our ideas, partnership and involvement can contribute to the committee’s greater mission.”

Eugene, beyond the 2014 world juniors?

EUGENE, Oregon — First and foremost, Eugene is not TrackTown USA. That is an excellent bit of marketing. But everything is relative. This is a college town, and as track's worldwide governing body, the IAAF, comes to the United States for the first time in more than 20 years for a championship of any sort, it must be said, like it or not, this is most appropriately CollegeFootballTown USA. Anybody who tells you anything else simply picked a bad week to stop sniffing whatever might be in the air by the 7-Eleven at the corner of Franklin and Patterson.

Just a couple blocks away from that 7-Eleven, Hayward Field, site of the IAAF world juniors, which get underway Tuesday, is — to use the preferred term — venerable, the fans said to be knowledgeable.

Even so, the local football palace, Autzen Stadium, where the IAAF held a party Monday night, is insane on a college football Saturday. Let us recap the past few seasons: 2010 Rose Bowl, 2011 BCS championship game, 2012 Rose Bowl victors, 2013 Fiesta Bowl winners.

It’s Nike money that helped bring the 2014 world juniors here. That’s fine. You want to see what Nike money can really do?

Check out the Hatfield-Dowlin complex, the 145,000-square foot, six-story black steel and glass football "performance facility" that opened here last year. Where to begin? The special wood floors in the weight room, the individually ventilated lockers to eliminate odors, the infection-free surfaces, the barber shop, specially designated workspaces for pro scouts as well as the dogs of the press, foosball tables in the players’ lounge that were made in Barcelona, the same sound engineering in the lobby that is used at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and on and on and on.

Even the Eugene Register-Guard, the local newspaper, knows what’s what. Monday’s edition displayed a feature on sprinter Kaylin Whitney while helpfully offering a sidebar on 10 Americans to watch at the world juniors.

Even so, on that Register-Guard website's sport section's drop-down menu, you can readily see that track -- and kudos to the paper for even mentioning track -- is sixth on its priority list. After "local," which figures, what dominates? "Oregon Ducks football." Under blogs, what's first? "Oregon football."

Here is the dilemma:

There is no TrackTown USA.

Not New York, not Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Seattle, Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Boston, Washington, nowhere. Not Las Vegas. Not nothing.

If there were a TrackTown, there would have been a world championships here in the United States, the big deal itself, already.

The last major IAAF event in the United States took place in 1992, the cross-country championships in Boston. The world indoors were in 1987, in Indianapolis. The IAAF World Race Walking Cup was held in the United States twice, in New York in 1987 and San Jose in 1991.

Lamine Diack, who has been president of the IAAF for nearly 15 years, has said many, many times that he wished there could be a way to get it done in the States.

But how? What venue? Hayward seats 20,000-ish, max; that is not major league. How many hotel rooms are there in Eugene? Answer: not anywhere near enough. And have you tried to get to Eugene? It’s a long way from anywhere — 20-hours plus from Europe, as those on the IAAF’s ruling Council learned while slogging Sunday through jet lag and their meetings at the Valley River Inn.

Vin Lananna, who deserves a lot of credit for getting the world indoors to Portland in 2016 and is trying diligently to bring the world championships to Eugene in 2019, now calls Hayward Field the “Carnegie Hall of track and field.” He likens it to Augusta National and Wimbledon, trying to play it up as a destination, a place where, as he said at Monday’s news conference, “special things happen,” like Ashton Eaton’s 2012 world record in the decathlon.

Again, excellent branding.

Eugene as a "destination" is an intriguing concept. There's now a Five Guys burger place here. That's a positive. Also, the Starbucks by the P.F. Chang's at the Oakway complex now features that new Clover brewing system, and you don't find that everywhere. So -- whoo! If for some reason you don't like that Starbucks, there's literally another Starbucks across the street. Which is, you know, nice. Eugene!

Make no mistake: these world juniors are surely an event unto themselves, but they are here to serve as the trial run for those 2019 worlds. Eugene is bidding against Doha and Barcelona. The IAAF will choose the winner later this year.

Diack said at Monday’s news conference that the world juniors mark “an important moment for the future of track and field” in the United States.

Asked later how important a successful world juniors would be for the Eugene 2019 bid, he answered, “Let us see the six days,” a reference to how long the meet goes.

“That’s a lot of pressure, President Diack,” Lananna said with a laugh.

Again, give Lananna credit. Consider the sequencing: Beijing 2015. London 2017. 2019 -- another great world capital for the IAAF like ... Eugene?!

Perhaps, though, Eugene does win for 2019.

Nike money can do a lot of things — even perhaps cozy up in places alongside adidas money, with which the IAAF has long been familiar. Now that Nike and USA Track & Field are in business together until 2040, who knows how the world might change? Wouldn’t Phil Knight want to see the championships in the United States before time claims its inevitable reward? Perhaps there are other factors and strategies at work, political or otherwise, that will ultimately see Eugene emerge the victor.

Then again, if it’s just the ability to use money to get projects done — hello, Doha? The Qatari capital finished runner-up to London for the 2017 worlds. It’s probable 2019 would be a far-better time for Doha than 2021, which would be the year before the soccer World Cup and thus likely too frenetic. And Doha is now seriously in the business of staging world championships for any number of federations; the world short-course swim championships will be there this December, for instance.

A group representing Doha perched over the weekend in the lobby of the Valley River Inn, as the Council was meeting.

Look, it’s bid season, and that is all well and good.

It’s a good idea, meanwhile, to consider timing and context when examining what people say. Here, then, are two 2011 quotes from the senior vice president of the IAAF, Bob Hersh, who happens to be an American, when there was no U.S. bid underway, and none was envisioned, and perhaps this speaks to the idea of TrackTown USA, or any such thing.

Citing stadiums in Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; and Seattle, Hersh said, “You look at large stadiums in cities that are big enough to host it,” meaning a world championships, "and they’ve removed the tracks.”

In that same story, he said, referring to the United States, “We just don’t have the wherewithal, starting with the fact that there is no stadium that could accommodate it.”

This, too, from Lananna, asked Monday to describe how Eugene got the world juniors: “It has long been a dream to host one of these world championships. We looked at what made the most sense on a college campus.”

Which this event does.

Beyond that?

There's a football model in the US -- now, soccer?

OK, soccer freaks. Now that the 2014 FIFA World Cup is over, it's back to reality. Like it or not, this is the fact: in the United States, football, Peyton Manning-style, is king. A release issued Wednesday from the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame underscores the truth, and shows just how far the United States has to go before it can truly compete on the international stage with the likes of Germany, winners of soccer’s big prize.

It’s not so much that the United States is bad in soccer. It’s not. It’s just that it’s not good — or, to be more precise, good enough.The difference is thoroughly evident in the way in the way the two countries approach their national sports.

Seven new college football teams will take the field this upcoming season, according to the release, increasing the number of schools across all NCAA divisions and the NAIA offering football to 767, an all-time high.

Welcome, Arizona Christian University (go Firestorm!), The College of Idaho, George Fox University, Limestone College, Missouri Baptist University, Paine College and Southeastern University.

For the geographically minded: George Fox is in Oregon, Limestone in South Carolina, Paine in Georgia, Southeastern — yes — in Florida.

Since 1978, when the NCAA changed its method for keeping attendance, the number of schools playing NCAA football has gone from 484 to 657, or an average of 4.9 schools per year. That includes FBS, FCS, Division II and Division III.

Over the years 2011-13, 25 programs have been added at NCAA or NAIA schools.

The release quoted NFF chairman Archie Manning — the former NFL star who has had a second act as celebrity dad to both Peyton and younger brother Eli, both Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks — as saying that more than one million high school students play football, and that 70,000 play college ball.

It's clear that in the United States young men see in football incredible opportunity, economic and otherwise. This is why in vast numbers they prefer football to soccer. To complete the syllogism, this is why soccer has such an uphill road in the United States.

In the United States, football — starting in high school, perhaps even earlier — is a year-round venture, everything from seven-on-seven summer camps to “Friday Night Lights” and everything that goes with it to the big-time of playing college ball in front of 100,000 or more people. And then, of course, there’s the NFL.

Football holds a special status in the United States. “It’s almost a religion here,” Paine athletics director Tim Duncan said in the NFF release, meaning in the South.

How is soccer supposed to compete?

How, too, is American soccer supposed to compete with what is going on in Germany — where a standardized nationalized program starts teaching the same skills to 6-year-olds everywhere, not just from Munich to Hamburg to Berlin but in every little village. By the time boys are 8, scouts are on the lookout for the ones good enough for club teams.

The German program got started after a humiliating performance in the European 2000 championships. It took 14 years — yes, there was that 2006 World Cup semifinal — to ultimately prove itself. And now the system is in place for years to come.

If you want to read all about the German program, the Guardian, the British newspaper, wrote an excellent feature in May, 2013, all about it.

Without a similar transformation, the United States is, most experts agree, likely stuck where it is for years to come in international soccer.

Such a transformation, however, is going to take time. That’s why Jürgen Klinsmann was brought on for more than just this 2014 World Cup and why he insisted he be named not just the U.S. coach but technical director.

Consider the German team that won in Brazil: Thomas Müller, Mesut Özil, André Schürrle, Mario Götze (who scored the decisive goal against Argentina), and more — these guys are all in their young  or mid-20s.

And it has all been building, like a train coming down the tracks. You could see it in 2009, in Sweden, when the Germans beat England, 4-0, to win their first Euro under-21 championship, Özil setting up two goals and scoring another. Six of the players on that 2009 team played key roles in Brazil 2014.

One of the players on that German team, Fabian Johnson, who has a German mother and an American father, switched to the United States in 2011; he played in all four games in Brazil for the United States.

Much as Klinsmann might try, he can’t field an entire team made up of German-Americans.

Long term, the only way the American team is going to get better is by doing it the American way — just the way the Germans got better by doing it the German way.

It’s so obvious that in Europe there’s a club system and in the United States the focus has traditionally been the university.

And yet men’s college soccer is at such a disadvantage when it comes to the big sell.

If the game wants to get bigger in the United States, it has to take advantage of what it has.

Currently, a men’s Division I soccer team is capped at 9.9 scholarships per school. Consider: Michigan had to spread those 9.9 scholarships around the 25 players on its 2013 roster. Stanford, 27. Consider further: Alabama doesn’t even field a men’s varsity soccer team.

Each school, of course, had the maximum total of 85 football scholarships.

If you are a young man with physical talent, and you want to go to a school like Michigan, Stanford or Alabama, and there are abundant reasons to consider any of the three, would you be more likely while in high school to lean toward soccer or football?

Archie Manning notes that 70,000 young men play college football. The stats say 37,240 played college soccer in 2013. That’s a ratio of nearly 2 to 1.

If you dig deeper, moreover, of the 37,240, only 5,691 played Division 1 soccer.

The majority, 11,416, played at the Division III level.

Meaning no disrespect to these young men, because they are out their training, sweating and giving of their time and commitment — but the issue here is not their dedication. That’s a given.

The issue here is if and how the United States is ever going to be a world-class player like Germany. And it is not likely to get there with Division III talent.

You want Americans to compete for real in soccer? Start with the 6-year-olds. Meanwhile, figure out how to fully fund soccer scholarships at the very best schools, and don’t get all hung up on Title IX issues, because if you really want to get good at soccer, this is going to take serious resource and the very best schools are where the very best talent goes. Then keep that talent here in MLS and pay them like honest professionals. Give the whole thing 10 to 15 years, like the Germans.

Then you won’t have to depend on Tim Howard to make 16 saves, and his mother to say he should have made 17.

Until then, soccer freaks, consider this:

Duncan, the Paine athletic director, said the school added 150 student-athletes in the year after it announced it was adding football, increasing enrollment by 11 percent at the historically black college.

Already they have 28 football scholarships — above the conference average of 25.

Easy math: that’s already roughly three times the number of soccer scholarships at a Division I school. That equals opportunity.

Then there’s the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, in Odessa, home of “Friday Night Lights.” In the planning stages of adding football, the university must raise $9.5 million by the end of 2014, and appears to be on track. “We’re fully planning on being a successful football team,” university president W. David Watts said, the team intending to start playing in the 2016 season.

This is it exactly. If there's $9.5 million for football in Odessa, and you want soccer to succeed in the United States for real -- this is how you make it happen. You have to step it up. In Odessa and everywhere. You make soccer the priority that football is. It's that simple.

Along those lines:

On Tuesday, Jimmy Graham of the New Orleans Saints signed a four-year, $40-million contract that makes him the highest-paid tight end in the NFL.

Every teen boy with athletic talent can do that kind of math, and then logic says he is bound to ask this easy question that is very, very hard for every reasonable-thinking person looking at the opportunity upside to answer:

Soccer — why me?

A four-nation re-think of the IOC bid process

A city campaigning for the 2010 Winter Games spent, on average, $9.5 million. That would have been in 2003. A city bidding for the 2018 Games averaged $34 million. That was in 2011, just eight years later. Yet approaching four times more. That’s just one of the many illuminating facts about the Olympic bid process in a far-reaching report released Tuesday as a project linking four prominent western European national Olympic committees. In recent months each — Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden — saw Winter Games bids die before they ever really got started.

The simple reason why, of course, is Sochi, and the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Winter Olympics. That number has freaked out voters and governments alike. Layered on to that is public mistrust of the International Olympic Committee itself.

But as the report says, to assign blame to that number and to that element of mistrust alone would be an “oversimplification.”

Things, especially Olympic bids, can sometimes be complex. And so the impetus for the report, it says, is to try to do something constructive after would-be bids from Vienna (for 2028) and then Munich, the St. Moritz/Davos region and Stockholm (all 2022) died.

Then, of course, as it notes, in May the bid from Krakow, Poland, got shot down (also 2022). Beyond which, too, the bid from Oslo, which just last week got passed through to the 2022 finalist stage, may be barely hanging on — the IOC noting in a working group report that its own polling numbers found only 36 percent support in Norway for the project.

The IOC also put Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, through as 2022 finalists. It will select the 2022 city in July, 2015.

The four-nation review got underway in February amid those Sochi Olympics, with two meetings there; another meeting took place May 13 in Frankfurt, Germany.

The “crucial” intent, the report released Tuesday says, is “to strengthen the confidence of the public in the Olympic movement.” The “overall aim” is to “rethink the bidding procedure in order to reduce complexity and increase transparency and flexibility for potential bid cities.”

The document, entitled "The Bid Experience," is punctuated not only with intriguing facts about the bid process but with a series of recommendations aimed at informing IOC president Thomas Bach’s “Olympic Agenda 2020” review and potential reform process, now underway and working toward an all-members session in Monaco in December.

It is an open question, of course, whether the IOC will adopt any or all of the recommendations.

One does not, however, have to search far and wide to understand the significance of this report. It was  produced in part by the current IOC president’s former national Olympic committee. It comes loaded with interesting and intriguing proposals and recommendations. It is written in English for easy downloading around the world. And it is timed, even if coincidentally, so it can be read for the Agenda 2020 “summit” meeting of key stakeholders in just a few days at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In sum, the report asks for four things: “more support in bidding”; “more certainty in process”; “more partnership in risk”; “more flexibility in scale.”

What that means:

First and foremost, as Bach himself made plain amid last week’s meeting of the IOC’s policy-making executive board in Lausanne, the IOC faces an extraordinary communications challenge in explaining the “budget structure of the Olympic Games.”

The report says such explaining that structure has seemingly proven “utterly impossible.”

Frankly, it’s not.

It can be done in two easy paragraphs.

First, there is the operational budget of the Games. This budget is what it costs to put on the Games. For the Winter edition, this usually runs to roughly $1.5 to $2 billion.

Second, there is everything else. This is variously called the capital or infrastructure costs. This includes needed sports venues, support infrastructure and, moreover, what a city, state, region or nation decides it wants to build — for public policy reasons — using the Olympics as catalyst.

This second element is at the root of the wide-ranging perception of the Games as a bottomless money pit.

Addressing the communications aspect of the operational budget first because, honestly, it’s easier:

What is so perplexing, indeed confounding, is that the IOC itself now puts up a sum approaching half that $2 billion. It doled out $750 million to the organizing committee in Sochi; that sum will be $850 million in Pyeongchang, South Korea, host of the 2018 Winter Games. How is it that message isn’t getting out?

Seriously: who wouldn’t want — by the time 2022 comes around — nearly $1 billion? Another interesting, can’t-be-denied fact is that the IOC traditionally likes repeat bidders. Pyeongchang, for instance, won for 2018 after coming up short in 2010 and 2014. But, as the report observes, for 2022, for the first time since the campaign for the 2006 Games, won by Torino, Italy, there is not even one repeat bidder from the prior cycle. Not one.

Clearly, the IOC has not done a sufficient job in recent years of explaining the benefits of a Games to taxpayers and governments, and particularly throughout its traditional base, western Europe.

Indeed, given a nearly $1-billion head start and the economics of a modern Winter Games, it would seem almost impossible for an organizing committee not to make — this is the preferred term of art in the Olympic sphere — a “surplus” (not a “profit,” though they are exactly the same).

And yet that message is — obviously — not getting across.

As the report says, the IOC “should better explain and clearly show the financial contributions it makes to the organizing committees of the Olympic Games,” because that would “ease the national public discussion about the cost of the Games and at the same time help to promote a better image of the IOC.”

As for infrastructure:

The communications challenge is that for years the IOC has done virtually nothing in addressing, much less helping, its purported partners — from bid stage to franchisees actually putting on the successive editions of the Games — explain why or how various infrastructure or capital projects might or might not be worthwhile in the near- or long-term.

To that end, the report suggests the IOC might think about co-funding a communication campaign — perhaps with funds from the Olympic Solidarity program, which come from on-the-rise IOC broadcast rights  — as soon as a city plunges in. That, though, the report stresses, would mean a huge paradigm shift — all involved, perhaps including the IOC itself, would have to see the IOC “not as a counterpart but as a partner for interested cities.”

Fascinatingly, the report shows that just 54 percent of all necessary venues actually exist when a city decides to bid. What that means is that bid cities planned to spend an average of about $400 million for Winter Games sports venues. The venues mostly missing? Ice halls. The problem? Who needs big ice arenas after a Games?

The dilemma? It’s a “lesser of two evils” game, the report says. Temporary venues are simply not cost-efficient, at $1,000 per seat; then again, building and dismantling runs even higher. The answer? More flexibility from the IOC, the report suggests. Soccer games at the Summer Olympics are scattered about a host nation. Why not the same for ice hockey at the Winter Olympics?

As for the delicate subject of the IOC voting itself, the report notes, as everyone involved with the process has long understood, the IOC’s so-called “technical evaluations” — that is, its reviews of a city’s facilities and operational capabilities — can sometimes mean little if nothing when it comes to balloting itself.

Cities with low technical grades have not infrequently emerged as winners — see Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016. Dryly, the report says, “This may, however, be related to the strict prohibition for IOC members to visit bid cities during the bid process,” a subject that may be revisited during the Monaco meeting.

The report says it may be “necessary” to “reconsider” how bid cities are selected. It asks:

What if the IOC split the candidate city vote into two equally weighted parts?

One — representing the technical evaluation, with a ranking of all bid cities?

Two — the vote of the IOC members?

That, while surely provocative, is not the most striking set of observations and recommendations in the report.

This is:

“Sustainability,” the report says, is now a buzzword. The IOC talks a lot about it. It even has its own get-together, the IOC World Conference on Sport and the Environment, and gives awards for sustainable initiatives. But, the report says, those awards focus mainly on environmental impact.

That’s not enough, the report says.

Most businesses now have a corporate social responsibility department. The IOC?

Point: the IOC has reached out to the United Nations in multiple ways over the past year. Counterpoint: as the UN’s Environmental Program wrote, according to the report, the Sochi 2014 project marked a “general economic development in which environmental aspects [played] only a minor role.”

It is “very important,” the report says, that “sustainability is understood in the broadest sense possible, including not only environmental but also social, ethical and economical sustainability and thereby also human rights.

“The IOC has to clearly define not only its understanding of sustainability but also its values and goals in this context.”

Further, the report says, the IOC should implement a “comprehensive and transparent” monitoring process — to make sure its defined sustainability, those values and goals, are being maintained during “all phases of bidding, planning and staging” of an Olympics.

It is “crucial” — that word again — that there be “sanction possibilities” for the monitoring body to wield. Again, the report makes plain, this is a credibility issue: “The criterion sustainability, already a critical fact in the public perception, needs to become a ‘hard fact’ within the bidding procedure,” not only part of the bid documents but of the host city contract as well.

Finally, a big-picture point:

Of course, national Olympic committees agree to the Olympic charter. Within the Olympic world, that’s a given. It’s also the case that the IOC can not force country X or Y to “obtain the charter and to value ethical standards and human rights,” for it has no such authority.

But, the report adds in a thought-provoking notion, it is “responsible that the Olympic Games do so.”

More and more, indisputably Bach's IOC

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — In 1980, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain was elected president of the International Committee. The next year, the IOC held a far-reaching Congress in Baden-Baden, Germany, that set the stage for Samaranch’s visionary — yes, visionary — years in office. Germany’s Thomas Bach was elected IOC president last September. This December, the IOC will hold an all-members assembly in Monaco to reflect on his far-reaching review and potential reform process, which he has dubbed “Olympic Agenda 2020.” Backstage, the comparisons to Samaranch have already begun, and within the Olympic community those comparisons are assuredly meant to be complimentary.

Absolutely Samaranch endured criticism, some of it brutal, outside the walls of the IOC’s lakefront Chateau de Vidy headquarters. At the same time, he was widely adored within the IOC as a president who commanded authority but who also understood personalities and relationships.

Bach has already demonstrated the same touch.

On Tuesday night, the upstairs bar area of the Palace Hotel in Lausanne was turned into a viewing party area for IOC members — and reporters, too — for the soccer World Cup semifinal match between Germany and Brazil. The front row featured a couch where Bach, who promised to be “studiously neutral,” and Carlos Nuzman, who leads the Rio 2016 effort, sat side by side.

Behind were rows of couches or chairs for everyone else. Without anything having to be said, it was understood both that the president was to be left alone until the game was over, and that afterward he would be gracious enough to say a few words.

This scene would never have transpired during the Jacques Rogge years. Not that Rogge is not friendly enough. It’s just that this was not his style.

Almost a year in, it’s now evident this is more and more becoming Bach’s IOC. This is as it should be.

The IOC functions best when the president takes charge. When he is a strong figure.

Bach recognized this from the outset.

Politically, financially and diplomatically, he has -- in large measure -- moved adeptly.

Last November, he delivered a speech at the United Nations that delineated the IOC’s place in the complex worlds of politics and sport. He then navigated through the controversies of the Sochi Games. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon met Bach here in Lausanne in June; that meeting came just two months after the two signed an agreement to strengthen ties; Rogge, meanwhile, has been appointed Ban’s special envoy for youth refugees and sport.

Bach moved fast to strike a $7.75 billion deal with NBC, announced in May, that extends the network’s rights through 2032. A key facet of that deal is $100 million to explore the potential of an Olympic television channel — and it surely is no accident that of the 14 working groups in Bach’s Olympic Agenda 2020 process, the only one the president himself is chairing is the one exploring the potential TV channel.

A “summit” reviewing the working groups’ activity meets in Lausanne next week; the executive board takes a look at it all in October.

The TV deal extends the IOC’s enviable financial position. Keep in mind the global financial crisis of the past several years while processing these numbers: the IOC’s forecast 2013-16 revenues are up 86 percent compared to 2001-04. Why? Primarily television rights, which have increased by 85 percent to $4.1 billion from $2.2 billion. Throw in another $1 billion for top-tier sponsor revenues, up a comparable 53 percent, and simple math says the IOC is at $5.1 billion.

Bach’s pace has kept staffers half his age racing to keep up. After the three-day executive board get-together, he was due to fly out Wednesday night to Rio for high-level meetings amid the World Cup final with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and others. After the game, he flies to Haiti for the dedication of an IOC “Sport for Hope” project; the UN’s Ban is due to attend as well.

In his news conference Wednesday, asked a question about potential Tokyo 2020 venue changes by a Japanese reporter, Bach talked about how he’d recently had some discussions with senior authorities in Tokyo while on the ground there for all of 12 hours.

Bach, too, knows that all is not rosy with the IOC. Hardly. Absolutely he knows that criticism comes with the territory.

For one, he is not a dictator. He is a president. The IOC has to be careful not to overreach — so, for instance, when the Spanish Olympic Committee announces, as it did last week, that it is going to be working on an anti-doping program funded by the IOC, that is bound to raise questions about the role of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Much IOC business seemingly can take on the air of never-ending, impending crisis. The Rio project, for instance, is well behind schedule. “We have to stay vigilant. There is no time to lose,” Bach said Wednesday, adding a moment later, “We are very confident. The World Cup is encouraging. We are very confident we will have great Games in Rio de Janeiro.”

The cities that were passed through Monday to the finalist stage for the 2022 Winter Games race — Oslo, Beijing and Almaty — underscore perhaps the IOC’s most fundamental challenge:

There were only three left.

The IOC had essentially no choice but to go with those three, and Oslo is by no means certain to stay in. The government there must yet offer certain financial guarantees; it won’t be known until November whether that can happen.

Over the past several months, scared off by the $51 billion figure associated with the Sochi Olympics, other cities said no thanks to 2022: Stockholm; Lviv, Ukraine; Krakow, Poland; Munich.

In an IOC-commissioned survey released Tuesday, asked if staging the Olympic Games leaves the host city or country with “many benefits,” 73 percent responded favorably, 13 percent not. The online survey consists of 36,000 interviews in 16 countries; age groups ranged from eight to 65. A margin of error was not immediately available.

So there’s obviously a disconnect -- all those people all over the world believe the Games are beneficial, according to that poll, and yet all those cities and governments, when it comes to 2022, bowing out.

It’s reality, it's perception, it’s a significant communications challenge, it's all intertwined.

Asked about the disconnect Wednesday, Bach spoke, uninterrupted, for nearly six minutes. This is obviously unusual at a news conference — but underscores the importance of what’s much on the mind within the so-called "Olympic family."

This is what he said:

“Explain. We have to explain and to explain and to explain. This is sometimes, you know, we could say easily sometimes you have a difference between the published opinion and the public opinion. But this would be too easy. It is obvious we have to explain our system of bidding and organization of the Games better.

“That means we have to show that this is a very transparent procedure from the very beginning. You know, you can start with a working group — the results of this working group are public, are open to everybody, the report and the visit of the evaluation commission will be open to everybody, the bidding files are to everybody. The evaluation report is open to everybody. The comments from the bidding cities are open to everybody. Obviously, we need to explain this better and more.

“We have to explain better and more the system and the logic of the two different budgets," meaning, on the one hand, the Games operational budget and, on the other, however much a city, region or nation opts to invest in infrastructure. "It is, you know, this is easy when you speak to a financial or business community. They understand very well that you can not depreciate the investment for housing for thousands of people within 16 days to zero. But obviously the broader public does not understand this.

“This is an investment budget, what you could put in the Olympic Games budget and what is Olympic-related — there what you could argue is the rent for the four weeks, where this housing serves as the Olympic Village. The other day, a colleague of mine said, it is like with a housewarming party. It’s as if you would calculate the cost for a housewarming party [in] the construction cost of a house. It’s a little bit the same, therefore for the two budgets and for the investments to be made. There again we also have to explain.

“And the Olympic Agenda to make sure — it is first of all up to the candidate cities to tell us how the Games fit into their environment. That means which investments have they planned, anyway, to develop their city, their region, and how the Games fit into this, not blaming in the end the IOC and the Olympic movement for infrastructure projects they wanted to do, anyway, but using the Games just as a catalyst because they know that without the Games they would not never have gotten the approval to put them in place.

“I was once, allow me this to be a little bit because as I say I have to explain and I may take the opportunity to explain — we had once had a bid in Germany, this was for the Summer Games, this was the bid from Leipzig,” for the 2012 Summer Games. “One day the prime minister there of this region invited me to visit there Leipzig and to show me the project. Then he got me to a helicopter and we were flying over the airport of Leipzig.

"Then he showed me some land and said, ‘Here we are going to build the next landing strip for the airport.’

“I said, ‘What do you need it for?’

“‘It’s the other way around. I need it, the candidature for the Games, to get this approval for this landing strip.’

“In the end, if they would have gotten the Games, then people would have said the Games have to pay for this landing strip. It’s just not logic but sometimes in this business it’s more about perception than it is about reality. So we have to keep explaining and thank you for giving me the opportunity to start.”

Whole lotta love for Oslo in IOC report

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — International Olympic Committee evaluation and working group documents are, it is said, strenuously neutral. The IOC purportedly doesn’t rate or rank cities in campaigns for the Summer or Winter Games. Yet the 2022 working group report that was issued Monday as the IOC passed the three remaining cities — Oslo, Beijing, Almaty — on to the finalist phase is so transparently obvious. It unequivocally favors Oslo, perhaps merely in a bid to keep it in the race, or maybe more. It is relatively positive about Beijing though it makes plain that distances are profound and a sense of why the Games ought to go there ought to be refined. And it is curiously skeptical about Almaty.

Perhaps this more direct tone is in keeping with other facets of this first year of the Thomas Bach presidency. In a striking change from the Jacques Rogge years, for instance, there were no Olympic bid consultants on hand at IOC headquarters here at the Chateau de Vidy, by the shores of Lake Geneva; Bach has made it plain that he finds such consultants unnecessary if not distasteful.

Gilbert Felli, the outgoing Games executive director, delivered a remarkable soliloquy Monday evening at a news conference that referred obliquely to such consultants, and also to the fact that three other cities -- Stockholm, Munich and Lviv, Ukraine -- dropped out along the way to Monday's decision by the executive board to pass Oslo, Beijing and Almaty through. If it is rare to hear the IOC refer to blame, much less to itself, consider:

"In every situation you should never blame the others. And probably the IOC is the first one to be blamed.

"It may not be able to explain what you are telling now about different models. Not be able to explain the different budgets. Not be able to explain to some people that if you want to have for your own city, your own region a new train, a new road, new investments — it’s going to cost you more money …

"So what we tried to do here — first of all, the IOC needs to communicate beforehand. Second, the IOC should be open. As you know, until now, the IOC never discussed with bidding cities before we got the report of the first phase," meaning what it calls the "applicant" phase, which for 2022 ended Monday, the race turning now to the "candidate" phase.

"And even between the two phases, we don’t discuss much. The idea was developed in the 2020 Working Group -- to say the IOC probably should have an office or a place where people can come or propose a concept or try and see. Because who is advising the cities? Outside advisers. People who are saying to the cities, you know if you don’t do that, the IOC member will not support you. If you don’t do that, then you’ve got the perception of the IOC given by outsiders and not by the IOC itself.

"So in the communication — and that’s the lesson from this [2022] campaign here — we lost good cities because of the bad perception of the IOC, the bad perception of how the concept could be done. We have to learn our lesson. The one to be blamed is the IOC. But we have to work in a different way of the bidding process."

The report issued Monday, as Felli noted, might highlight that Almaty holds "excellent raw materials" though "you could see that maybe they are a bit behind on understanding the concept."

Then again, big-picture, perhaps there is the legitimate belief Almaty might win, and it may well be that there are those in certain IOC circles who are honestly not sure about that. Almaty staged the 2011 Asian Winter Games. It’s going to stage the 2017 Winter University Games. It has resource and ambition and a ski jump in the middle of town. If Sochi was too warm, not to worry. Almaty will be plenty cold.

Beijing, of course, put on the 2008 Summer Games and is seeking to become the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games. There is, though, the matter of geography. The Winter Games will be in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018, the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020. Will the IOC pull a three-peat and go back to eastern Asia, to China, in 2022?

From its first words, it’s clear how much the report loves Oslo: “With winter sport as part of the country’s national identity, Oslo’s vision is to share its passion, expertise and experience by delivering an outstanding celebration of sport and solidarity in a fast growing, young and ethnically diverse city whilst promoting Oslo as a winter sports capital.”

Wow.

That’s like advertising copy.

The report runs through 14 separate categories, ranging from weather to Games concept to finance. Oslo ranks first in eight of the 14 and ties with Beijing in three more. Almaty is not first even once; it does, however, sit last in 11 of 14.

The report even treats Oslo gently in the category in which Oslo is unequivocally not good, public support. An IOC poll in Oslo and the surrounding area shows only 36 percent support for the Games with 50 percent against. On a one-to-10 scale, the report ranks that as a minimum 5/maximum 7.

It does make one wonder what one has to do to get a 2 or 3 when a 36 gets you a 5.

To compare:

At this stage, the Tokyo 2020 bid got a minimum 6/maximum 9 from the IOC when its poll ratings were 47 percent — with 30 percent offering no opinion and 23 percent opposed to the Games.

Glossed over in one brief sentence in section eight of the Oslo profile is that it’s two hours and 20 minutes by bus or two hours and 10 minutes by train from Oslo to Lillehammer. And then you’ve got to get to the venues.

Beijing’s plan involves one city and two mountain clusters. From Beijing itself to one of the mountain clusters, the report says, travel time would be two hours and 44 minutes. Anyone who was in China for the 2008 Games — the report notes that 2:44 would be “long.”

Almaty, by contrast, offers a compact venue plan. The longest travel time, the report says, would be an hour, to the alpine ski venue.

Where Almaty does rank first, by the way, is in the size of its construction budget: $3.78 billion.

Beijing proposes $2.24 billion, Oslo $2.75 billion.

Bach, speaking earlier Monday, said, “The IOC is very happy to see three very different approaches with regard to the organization of the Games. This gives the IOC a choice among three diverse bids with different legacy plans with different approaches, with different budgets.”

Referring to his far-reaching review and potential reform plan, which the members will consider at an assembly in Monaco in December, Bach continued, “This is exactly in line with the discussions we are having with ‘Olympic Agenda [2020],’ where we want to encourage just this diversity, where we want to encourage sustainability and the feasibility of the organization of the Olympic Games.”

The report, meanwhile, lays out Almaty’s commercial estimates revenues of $1.055 billion. It immediately notes, “Sponsorship may be optimistic given the scale of the economy,” which it helpfully points out is the 46th largest in the world.

In case anyone could possibly have missed the point, the report also says, on the same page, “Given the size of the economy and its reliance on oil, there may be challenges in supporting the significant investments in competition and non-competition venues necessary for the Games, unless there is extraordinary government support and the economy is strong.”

In Kazakhstan, there is still “some way to go” to bring the security apparatus “up to international standard.”

There appears to be “limited accommodation options for spectators, mainly in alternative and university accommodation.”

Anything else? Oh, just this: “Almaty lies on a fault line and is prone to earthquakes.”

The report does say, “While there are many environmental challenges facing the city and country, the opportunity of the Games could be a catalyst for significant improvements.”

For Almaty supporters: it’s not clear if many, even any, IOC members read these reports. Also, Rio got dinged in the working group report for 2016; it would eventually win going away.

As Almaty 2022 executive board member Andrey Kryukov said here Monday, referring to the three cities, “I think now three are favorites.”

$51 billion, and now these three

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — As the Rolling Stones so memorably put it, you can’t always get what you want, and that’s worth keeping in mind as the International Olympic Committee announced Monday that it was passing the only three cities remaining through as finalists for the 2022 Winter Games — Oslo, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The Stones also said you get what you need. Is this, really, what the IOC needs? Just three cities in the entire world want the Winter Games, and only one in western Europe, the IOC’s traditional home — and that one, Oslo, is not yet a solid bet to even make it to the finish line next July?

This much is entirely clear: this situation is entirely of the IOC’s making.

It ought to offer cause for deep reflection and much soul-searching.

There are two central challenges confronting the IOC.

One: the perception of how much the Games cost. The other: the way the IOC itself is too often seen.

It's also the case that Thomas Bach, the IOC president, understands these matters, and acutely. It's clear from his language and his signals over the past weeks and months that he knows three things: one, that perception has become reality; two, that in confronting perception, he is also confronting the realities of a communication challenge; and, three, that it may well take time to turn things around.

At issue, first and foremost, is the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games. That figure has severely affected potential Winter Games hosts in established economies and markets. Whether that figure is real or not, whether it is misinformation or misinterpreted or not — it does not matter. For now, for all the amazing performances on the ice and snow, a primacy legacy of Sochi is $51 billion.

Beijing 2008 cost $40 billion, it is believed. London 2012 cost $14 billion. Rio 2016 is now on track to cost at least $17 billion, and climbing.

To put it in a context that’s easily understandable, the collection of these numbers have voters and governments freaked out.

The very first warning sign surfaced in the 2020 Summer Games campaign. In February, 2012, Rome withdrew, the then-premier, Mario Monti, saying that a projected $12.5 billion budget was too much.

Then, though, came London. Those Games rocked. You’d think that would spur massive interest across western Europe, right?

Instead, in March, 2013, voters in Switzerland ended a 2022 bid for St. Moritz and Davos. It’s not as if they don’t love the Games there, either: St. Moritz staged the Winter Games in 1928 and 1948.

A few days later, voters in Austria rejected a 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, German voters killed a Munich 2022 bid. Munich probably would have won for 2022 easily. The city played host to the 1972 Summer Games. It had bid for and lost (to Pyeongchang, South Korea) for 2018; Garmisch-Partenkirchen, about an hour south, had staged the 1936 Winter Games.

This January, Stockholm pulled out of the 2022 campaign, the City Council saying it was too expensive. Stockholm staged the 1912 Summer Games.

In May, voters in Krakow, Poland, voted no on 2022. Too expensive, they said by a whopping margin.

Oslo put on the 1952 Winter Games. Lillehammer staged the 1994 Winter Games; the IOC will go back to Lillehammer for the 2016 Winter Youth Games.

The Oslo bid is hanging on, if barely, waiting to see if the Norwegian government will — later this year — put up certain financial guarantees.

An opinion poll commission by the Oslo 2022 bid committee at the beginning of 2014 showed 36 percent support in all of Norway for the idea of hosting the Games. That is, in a word, dreadful. The IOC likes to see 70 percent or better.

An IOC poll in Oslo and the surrounding municipal areas, released Monday as part of its 2022 working group report, again came back with 36 percent support. A full 50 percent were against the Games.

Compare and contrast: 65 percent support in Almaty (not fantastic but edging toward tolerable) and 77 percent in Beijing.

The reason for the 36 percent figure in Oslo is easy: $51 billion.

In the abstract, it makes perfect sense that Russia, in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, had to create new winter sports facilities. Seriously: it had to to go other countries just to hold its own national championships.

This was one of the primary reasons why the Russians, in 2007, bid for 2014.

The disconnect is why $51 billion.

The Russians didn’t just build sports facilities. They built two new cities from scratch — Adler, for the ice venues, and Krasnaya Polyana, up in the mountains. All that took massive infrastructure.

Whether or not there was corruption that went with all that construction is of course a question open for potentially considerable discussion. The books in Russia are not open in the same way they might be in, say, the United States.

The 2014 Games — that is, the operating budget — cost nowhere near $51 billion. It was roughly $2 billion.  The Sochi 2014 committee two weeks ago put out a news release touting a $261 million profit — though government subsidies given to the committee totaled at least $420 million.

If you’re counting, that “profit” amounted to roughly 0.5 percent of $51 billion.

This leads into the next challenge.

Basic math.

Any Olympics features two separate budgets.

The IOC has, seemingly forever, not been able to explain the difference between operational and capital budgets.

This, though, is the conundrum, and the IOC kinda sorta wants to have it both ways. It is absolutely the case that one of the reasons so many mayors, governors and prime ministers want an Olympics is elemental public policy. A Games imposes a fixed deadline: you can get done in seven years what would otherwise take 20, 30 or more.

It’s most helpful to the IOC for it to focus on the “operational” side, so that if Country X wants to spend like mad on metro lines, roads, airports and more, that is a matter for the people and government of Country X.

The problem here is the tipping point of $51 billion. If $40 billion in 2008 didn’t do it, $51 billion in 2014 for sure did. That creates a perception problem worldwide for — the IOC.

Which leads directly more broadly to the next challenge.

The IOC has long dealt in crisis communication. Think, for instance: are the Games in Rio going to happen?

One of the reasons the IOC is in the fix it is in now is plain: its communication strategy, day-to-day, is almost non-existent.

The IOC, over the past 15-plus years, has launched winning campaigns such as “celebrate humanity.” It has touted the Olympic values: “friendship, excellence, respect.” But if I were to walk out of the classroom where I teach at the University of Southern California and cross Exposition Boulevard to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, center of the 1932 and 1984 Games, and ask 10 people what the IOC stands for, the bet here is I would get a blank stare.

That has to change.

The more than 100 IOC members frequently get rapped for being fat cats who care only about five-star hotels and limousines. Maybe. Or maybe they are, for the most part, exceptionally smart people who are hugely qualified, volunteering of their time and energy, giving up weekends, holidays and family time to try, little by little, to make the world a better place through sport. Why isn’t that story being told?

In their countries, the IOC members can and should be incredible resources. Yet for the most part they aren’t being used. Why not?

It’s not like they are lacking for ideas. When they got together for their meeting in February in Sochi, they flooded the president, Thomas Bach, with 211 “interventions,” as comments and questions from the floor are called in IOC lingo.

In the public perception, though, the members are seen as distant and remote. And you wonder why the IOC has an image problem?

Bjorn Daehlie, the Norwegian cross-country ski champion who is now a businessman, in Lausanne Monday as part of the Oslo 2022 team, said of the talks underway now in his country relating to the bid and, ultimately, the financial guarantees, “I’m confident these discussions which are taking place now are important discussions. We needed these discussions. They thought all this money went into a big sack in Lausanne and these guys were driving in these black cars spending this money. So this is, I think — this is, huge, positive.”

He added, “I think a lot of other countries need to learn more about the work the IOC does for sport in general.”

Bach visited Norway a few weeks back, ostensibly to review Lillehammer's 2016 preparations.

"If you listen to Mr. Bach between the lines, he wants all countries to be able to host the Olympic Games," Daehlie said Monday.

Which, as the IOC moved the three cities on to become 2022 finalists, should lead in a straight line to the next issue.

The IOC must reinstate bid visits by the members.

As a reaction to the late 1990s Salt Lake City scandal, the IOC banned such visits. That was understandable then. The time has come now to allow the members to see the cities.

For one, it’s patently absurd that reporters — who are allowed to follow the IOC evaluation commission around — can know more about the cities than the members. The stakes are too high.

For another, now that NBC and the IOC have struck a $7.75 billion deal through 2032, it’s not as if there isn’t money available for the IOC to fund such visits. Take the financial incentive away from the cities.

Most importantly, however, there is no way that Bach can travel the world and hold out the IOC as a paragon of good governance and credibility if his own members can not be trusted to visit the cities bidding for the right to stage the Games.

It’s that simple -- though whether the members themselves will, ultimately, see it that way is entirely uncertain.

The bid-city issue is part of Bach's far-reaching “Agenda 2020” program, which is working its way toward an all-members review in December in Monaco.

In his comments Monday, the president said the IOC’s policy-making executive board was “impressed by the legacy plans” of each of the cities and noted that “it is good to see” that, at the outset, each understood the key difference between operating and capital budgets.

He also said the IOC sought to "encourage sustainability and the feasibility of the organization of the Olympic Games."

He said, “So we have a very good choice.”

Perhaps.

Not just three dopers -- at least four!

Do you believe in redemption, and the power of second chances? Or was what went down Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland, just the saddest of all possible advertisements for track and field? Three dopers, all American, went 1-2-3 Thursday in the sport’s glamor event, the men’s 100 meters, at the Lausanne Diamond League event: Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay and Mike Rodgers.

Consider just some of these other first-rate performances Thursday at the Athletissima meet, as the Lausanne stop is known:

Grenada’s Kirani James and American LaShawn Merritt went under 44 seconds in the men’s 400, James winning in a world-leading 43.74 seconds, Merritt in a season-best 43.92. The women’s 100 saw a sub-11: both Michelle-Lee Ahye of Trinidad & Tobago and Murielle Ahoure of Ivory Coast timed in 10.98, Ahye getting the photo finish.

Barbora Spotakova of the Czech Republic threw the javelin 66.72 meters, or 218 feet, 10 inches.

An 18-year-old Kenyan, Ronald Kwemoi, ran a personal-best 3:31.48 to take out Silas Kiplagat and others in winning the men’s 1500.

In the men’s high jump, Bogdan Bondarenko and Andriy Protsenko, both of Ukraine, went 2.40m, or 7-10 1/2. There have now been 50 2.40m-plus jumps in history; 12 have been in 2014.

And yet — what’s the headline from Thursday in Lausanne?

You bet.

Gatlin ran 9.8 to win, his second-fastest time ever, off his personal best by just one-hundredth of a second. Gay, in his first race back after a year away because of suspension, went 9.93. Rodgers, who last week won the U.S. nationals in Sacramento, ran a season-best 9.98.

Ah, but it doesn’t end there.

Typically, of the eight guys in a 100-meter final, it’s not unreasonable — at least since 1988, and Ben Johnson — to wonder, how many might be dopers?

In this instance, we have at least an inkling, and it wasn’t just three.

It was four!

To the inside of Gay in Lane 2, Rodgers in 3 and Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic champion — all decked out for the Fourth of July in red, white and blue — in Lane 4, we present Pascal Mancini of Switzerland, in Lane 1. He finished eighth, in 10.43.

Mancini was busted for nandrolone.

Rodgers tested positive for a stimulant and drew a nine-month ban.

Gatlin served a four-year ban between 2006 and 2010 for testosterone.

Gay tested positive for an anabolic steroid last summer. He received a reduced one-year suspension for cooperating with USADA. Neither the IAAF nor WADA appealed.

What Gay told USADA — and in particular about Jon Drummond, who trained Gay from 2007 until just after the 2012 Olympics, and has for years been an influential figure in USA Track and Field circles — remains unclear.

Drummond is such a key figure that he served on the USATF panel that released its findings Thursday about the disqualification controversies at the indoor nationals in February in Albuquerque.

Drummond, meanwhile, has filed a defamation lawsuit in Texas state court against USADA; its chief executive, Travis Tygart; and Gay. That case is likely on its way out of state court and en route to federal court.

After Thursday’s 100 in Lausanne, Gay told reporters, “It’s been a little bit tough training, a lot of stress but I made it through.”

Gay had not met with reporters before the meet. Gatlin did, and was in something of a philosophical way:

“My journey rebuilding my career has been an eye-opening experience,” he said. “It let me understand what real life was about outside track and field. I was basically sheltered by track and field all the way from high school, got a full scholarship to college, two years in college, turned professional, one of the highest-paid post-collegiate athletes. Then I didn’t run for four years, so I was able to understand what being a man in the real world is about, and struggles, and once I came back to the sport, I was grateful.

“I wish him [Gay] luck because it can be a stressful time, not only on the track but what the media thinks about you, what personal [things] people think about you and how they look at you. It’s going to be with him for the rest of his career. I’ve been back in track longer now than for how long I was away for and every year I’ve got better and better. That’s only been my focus and maybe he can take a lesson from that, or if he wanted to go his own path.

“I haven’t talked to him, I’ve seen him around but I haven’t talked to him. It’s that competitive edge and competitive spirit but we give each other gentlemanly nods.”

As should be obvious, track and field has many, many issues.

It also has incredible strengths. It is universal. It is elemental. It is primal.

For these strengths to come through, the sport must be able to assert its credibility.

The only way that can happen is for fans to believe what they are seeing is real.

When a race like the Lausanne men’s 100 goes down, it can be a huge turnoff. No two ways about it.

The tension, of course, is that Gatlin, Gay, Rodgers, Mancini and who knows who else have a right to make a living.

“Why are we saying this race should not be happening?” Gatlin had said beforehand. “It is because of my past discretions, because then I shouldn’t have been at the worlds and shouldn’t have been at the Olympics if that’s the case. Or is it all on what he’s done thus far? I have no power to say what races he can be in and what he can’t be in. I’m just here on my own to win and to run. If he’s here and I line up against him I can’t complain and moan about it, I’ve just got to go out there and do my job.”

There’s another tension, too, and it was beautifully described by the former Irish steeplechase record-holder Roisin McGettigan, who found out this week that she was being upgraded to a bronze medal at the 2009 European indoor championships.

“That’s the thing about doping,” McGettigan told an Irish newspaper, “it makes clean athletes doubt what they’re doing. You train harder to try and reach their standards,” meaning athletes suspected of using illicit performance-enhancing drugs, “and that often leads to injuries or illness.”

Which leads, perhaps in a meandering fashion, perhaps not, to the men’s 200 Thursday in Lausanne.

In May, Yohan Blake, the 2011 100 world champion, had run a spectacular anchor leg, an unofficial 19-flat, to power the Jamaican team to a world-record 1:18.63 in the 4x200 relay in the Bahamas.

On Thursday, Panama’s Alonso Edward won the 200, in 19.84.

Blake, who likes to call himself the Beast, got off to an indifferent start Thursday, and that’s being gracious. He faded down the stretch. He finished sixth, in 20.48.

Nickel Ashmeade of Jamaica took second, in 20.06. France’s Christophe Lemaitre got third, in a season-best 20.11, and as he went by Blake, he gave him a stare, like, what is up, dude?

Blake trains with Usain Bolt, with coach Glen Mills. Blake suddenly looks awfully, well, un-Beast-ly. Bolt has yet to appear this summer.

At the end of last July, the world found out, thanks to World Anti-Doping Agency statistics, how minimally Jamaican sprinters had been tested and, in turn, how lax the Jamaican anti-doping program had been.

Now, in summer 2014: is it just that those Jamaican yams simply aren’t doing the job?

Or is there a different truth waiting to emerge?

Katie Ledecky version 2014

The wall-to-wall coverage of the soccer World Cup has tended to obscure what the American swimmer Katie Ledecky did at a low-key meet that concluded Sunday near Houston. It shouldn’t. It isn’t just that Ledecky set two world records in the 1500 and 800, the two women’s freestyle races that for decades featured records impervious to change. She won across the board — 1500, 800, 400, 200, 100. It has been more than 40 years since Australia’s Shane Gould held every women’s freestyle record, from the 100 up to the 1500. (The 50 didn't come until later.) That is borderline preposterous. Then again, so is what Ledecky did this weekend.

Granted, many of America’s top swimmers were racing elsewhere, at the Grand Prix event in Santa Clara, California. Even so, her times in Texas were almost unbelievable.

If she didn’t get airtime on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” because it was being hogged up by the U.S. men’s soccer team’s 2-2 tie with Portugal, or even because golfer Michelle Wie won the women’s U.S. Open, you can bet that everyone in swim circles snapped to when they saw what Katie Ledecky did near Houston.

Because — as amazing as she was in 2012, when at 15 she won Olympic gold in the 800 free, or as dominating as she was in 2013, when she won four golds in Barcelona at the world championships amid two world records — the 2014 version of Katie Ledecky appears to be just as ruthlessly competitive but far more versatile.

When she is not swimming, Ledecky is, by all accounts, a delightful young woman. She is modest. She is a team player. She has announced she intends to attend Stanford when she finishes high school. She is still — let’s remember — only 17.

“She has unbelievable work ethics and work habits,” said Jon Urbanchek, the former University of Michigan coach who has for years been affiliated with the U.S. national team and worked with Ledecky in London in 2012, adding, “She was pushing the boys in practice a lot.”

When she is racing, however, she is a killer, and that is meant to be a high compliment. Simply, Ledecky goes out and means to break you by the force of her incredibly intense competitive will.

Afterward, she smiles, and sweetly.

Just like Missy Franklin.

The idea of the two of them — and Allison Schmitt — racing the 200 free is pretty unreal.

Schmitt is the London 2012 Olympic 200 free gold medalist. Franklin is the Barcelona 2013 world champion in the 200 free. Schmitt didn’t swim in Barcelona. Franklin and Ledecky together swam on the winning U.S. 4x200 freestyle relay team.

“She is unreal,” Franklin said at a news conference Thursday in Santa Clara.

Here is how unreal Ledecky is, starting with the 1500, which in swimming lingo is called the mile:

— Janet Evans swam the 1500 in 15:52.10, on March 26, 1988, at the USA spring nationals in Orlando, Florida. No one broke that record for nearly 20 years.

Finally, on June 17, 2007, Kate Ziegler did it, going 15:42.54, at a meet in Mission Viejo, California. That is not quite eight seconds.

At that meet, Ziegler had just come down to California from attitude training. She is what Urbanchek calls a “responder” — that is, someone whose body responds immediately to the effects of altitude training, designed to increase oxygen-carrying capacity.

“You train up there at altitude, you come down and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can breathe,’ “ Evans said. “It’s awesome. It’s amazing.”

In warmups, Ziegler recalled of that race, she was off. But when the gun went off, something clicked:

“It was as easy as a mile could be. Lap after lap, I felt so consistent, so strong. I didn’t know how fast I was going. I saw people going alongside and cheering me along. I didn’t have that many teammates there so I knew something must be going on — I saw so many people cheering!”

Last summer in Barcelona, Ledecky lowered the mile mark almost six seconds, to 15:36.53.

In Texas this weekend, Ledecky, too, had just come down from altitude. She, too, is a “responder.”

In the mile, she went 15:34.23 — lowering the record by two and a half seconds.

As an indicator of how good Ledecky’s performance is, Lotte Friis of Denmark, who is maybe one of two or three women in the world right now who might be able to give Ledecky a race in the mile, swam the same event Thursday in Santa Clara. Friis won convincingly, by 10 seconds. Friis’ time: 16:00.35.

Math: Ledecky’s time is better by 26 seconds. 26 seconds!

The career progression & trend line for Katie Ledecky in the 1500m Fr. An amazing WR but the trend line is awesome: pic.twitter.com/sCABWO0pGl

— USA Swimming Stats (@USASwimStats) June 22, 2014

— It was Aug. 20, 1989, when Evans, again, set the world record in the 800 free, 8:16.22, swimming in Tokyo at the Pan Pacific championships.

It took 19 years until someone broke that record — Rebecca Adlington of Great Britain, on Aug. 16, 2008, at the Beijing Games, going 8:14.10.

In Barcelona last year, Ledecky went 8:13.86.

In Texas on Sunday, Ledecky went 8:11 flat. Again, she took more than two seconds off her own record.

In Santa Clara, Cierra Runge of the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, swimming Sunday, won the 800 free in a lifetime-best 8:26.71.

Math: Ledecky’s time is 15 seconds-plus better.

Katie Ledecky's new World Record in the 800m Fr 8:11.00. A look at her progression with a trend line showing sub 8:00 pic.twitter.com/WqPsUN8vbO

— USA Swimming Stats (@USASwimStats) June 22, 2014

At that Texas meet, beyond the two world records, Ledecky also won three other freestyle races, the 400, in the fastest time so far this year in the world; the 200, in a time a tenth away from what she did at the 2013 world championships; and the 100, just off her season- and personal-best.

“I think she is in a really sweet spot,” Evans said. “There are a lot of eyes on Michael, a lot of eyes on Missy,” referring to Phelps and Franklin. “As well as she did in London,” meaning Ledecky, “she’s still going to college. There’s not a lot of adulation on her yet. There’s not a lot of pressure. That’s how I felt. Not a lot of pressure. It’s all fun. You just go.”

One of Urbanchek’s former Michigan swimmers, Bruce Gemmel, is now Ledecky’s coach, and Urbanchek said, “She is like Janet. She has the range across the continuum — except for maybe the 50. She is extremely talented. She is extremely hard-working. She is a racer, an attacker. And she is learning to control her races.”

Ledecky’s London 800 is already the stuff of swim legend — she went out super-fast, so fast that almost no one thought she could hold on. Of course she did.

The Barcelona 1500 — she and Friis dueled throughout the race until Ledecky dropped the hammer late — proved that Ledecky had developed great closing speed. Now, Ziegler said, “The more speed she develops — and she has speed — she also has finishing endurance and she has guts. That is an incredible, unstoppable combination. I wouldn’t begin to predict what we will see from her. She keeps raising that bar. I would not set a limit on her.

“Whatever she she sets her sights on is within her realm,” Ziegler said, adding, “It’s very exciting.”

Here today, Ghana tomorrow: US not a soccer nation

Attention, soccer crazies: the United States is not, repeat not, a soccer nation. Or, as your all-knowing mother — and, for sure, mine — might have said: here today, Ghana tomorrow.

Every four years, with the arrival of soccer’s World Cup, the opportunity presents itself to write a column like this. It’s difficult to know which is more fun. The column. Or the howling in response from the soccer crazies.

Though I have lived in California for 31 years, I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. If I went back home to the central bus stop in Dayton, on Main between Third and Fourth, and asked the first 10 people I met who Landon Donovan is, odds are they would say, no idea. Maybe that guy from “Little House on the Prairie”?

At the outset, to be clear: I actually like, really like, soccer.

One of the perks of my job is that I have gotten to see games at some of the great temples of European soccer — San Siro, Allianz, Old Trafford, Emirates, Bernabéu, Camp Nou. Moreover, I was there at the David Beckham news conference in Carson, California, in 2007. And I would venture that Giovani Dos Santos’ goal, the dagger that gave Mexico its fourth goal in its 4-2 victory over the United States in the 2011 CONCACAF Gold Cup at the Rose Bowl, is still one of the great displays of soccer skill, anytime, anywhere.

Of course, that most of the 93,420 people in the stands that day were rooting for Mexico — and that the American team had been up 2-0 and a real team at that level does not, can not blow a two-goal lead — emphatically prove my point.

But I digress.

I do not, will not, dispute that over the next month thousands of Americans will crowd bars and sit in front of their living-room TVs to watch the goings-on from Brazil. That is not, however, because the United States is a soccer nation or even because the U.S. team has an odds-on chance of getting out of the Group of Death. It is because Americans love big events. The day the World Cup is over, soccer in the United States will go back to being what it is — background noise.

I might wish it were different. But it’s not.

The Los Angeles Times, where I spent 17 years as a staff writer, ran a story a few days ago that explained to readers “how to watch the World Cup.”

For purposes of discussion, it is essentially 40 years, or two generations, since Pelé joined the New York Cosmos — it was June, 1975. That’s more than enough time for Americans to have learned how to watch the World Cup, if they were so inclined.

Did the LA Times feel compelled to run a similar story before the Super Bowl — explaining, for instance, who the Denver Broncos or Seattle Seahawks were, and how a first down involves moving a football 10 yards or more on the ground or through the air? Obviously not. There’s no need to do so. Football is ingrained in American culture. Soccer is not.

Throughout this column, by the way, I am going to be resolutely American and call it soccer. Not futbol or football, all pretentious-like, like this story in the New York Times that is a candidate for most over-the-top piece of journalism in recent memory. I have covered Rose Bowls, BCS championship games and Super Bowls. That is football. Later in this column I am going to return to football, and explain why football, Peyton Manning-style, is what Americans really care about. So soccer it is.

Here, soccer nuts, is the crux of the problem: there are heavy economic, social, cultural and peer incentives working against soccer.

Before getting there, let us examine some of the arguments that the United States is, actually, a soccer nation:

Look at how many teams there are now in the MLS! Look at the new MLS TV deal! Look — the English Premier League is now on NBC!

For sure there are more teams now than before in the MLS. It’s even expanding. (Oh, joy. More minor-league soccer.)

Currently, there are 19 MLS teams. (Up to 21 soon.) According to a November, 2013, story in Forbes, 10 are making a profit. Maybe I didn’t learn a lot in journalism school but if 10 are making money it seems pretty elemental that nine are not or are at best breaking even.

If the financial play in the MLS is increased franchise valuation over time, fine. Good for the owners and their long-term investment plans.

But to have the half the teams in the league flat or in the red — as Dean Wormer might have said in Animal House, that is no way to go through life.

Since this is a World Cup year, you’d think that attendance at MLS games would be way up, right? Wrong. Eleven of the 19 teams are down. Overall, through June 2, attendance is down 1.86 percent from 2013.

As for TV:

The new package, an eight-year deal with ESPN, Fox and Univision, is worth a worth a reported $90 million a year or, all in, $720 million.

Compare that to these numbers:

ESPN is paying $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.

When you compare the soccer package with sports that matter in the United States, the conclusion is inescapable: soccer is, at best, a value proposition.

And why is that? Because ratings for the MLS stink. Again, from Forbes: ESPN’s regular-season telecasts were down 29 percent, to an average of 220,000 per game, while NBC’s MLS audience fell 8 percent, to 112,000 per game — ranking the MLS behind the WNBA.

So, the natural question: why are ESPN, Fox and Univision shelling out money? And why is NBC showing the Premier League?

Disclaimer: I have had a relationship with NBC, on air and online, since 2003. But I have had no involvement, zero, with its soccer programming.

The logical answer is that in an age of exploding channels, soccer games fill a lot of airtime. And there’s a niche that’s interested, especially in the Premier League.

But that hardly makes the United States a soccer nation. Especially if what’s at issue is televising games from some other country.

It’s so obvious that football is America’s game. The two most popular sports in the United States are the NFL and college football.

When Ohio State and Michigan play football, they jam into the Shoe in Columbus or the Big House in Ann Arbor.

The two schools played at Michigan in 2013, at Ohio State in 2012. Here are the attendance figures: 2013 in Ann Arbor, 113, 511. 2012 in Columbus, 105, 899.

When the two schools play men’s soccer? Michigan played at Ohio State last Oct. 6. Attendance: 962, at 10,000-seat Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium.

As they say, ladies and gentlemen, numbers do not lie. The numbers here say that soccer is roughly 1/100 as popular as football. That seems about right.

Oh, and there’s an MLS team in Columbus. So it’s not as if soccer is unknown in central Ohio. (Incidentally, for 2014, through June 2, Columbus Crew attendance is down 7.95 percent compared to 2013.)

The issues confronting soccer, as it relates to football, are both simple and complex.

When boys who are talented athletes are roughly middle-school age, they self-select out of the AYSO leagues they have all been in since they were 5 or 6. Why? Because it becomes apparent that there is way more opportunity — of all sorts — in football than soccer.

For one, there are more than 120 FBS football schools. Each of those schools offers 85 scholarships. This is simple math -- more than 10,000 scholarships. There's also the allure of playing on television every week.

There simply aren’t that many soccer scholarships --  a fully financed Division I team can offer 9.9 full scholarships for freshman to seniors, and those scholarships can be divvied up among the team. In total there are 1,990 scholarships.

That’s a powerful economic incentive right there in favor of football -- roughly a 10 to 1 scholarship-available ratio at the major-college level alone.

Then there are the many social and cultural imperatives.

At many if not most high schools, it is a tradition that the football players get to wear their jerseys to school on Fridays. It is a big deal on multiple levels to be school royalty — believe it.

It has been a long time since I was in high school but this much has not changed: cheerleaders and the dance team tend to notice the football players.

Do you think “Friday Night Lights” was all about … soccer? Right.

If you are good enough to play college football, that is a calling-card that stays with you for life -- in business, wherever you go. That is America.

This is not likely to change.

Talk, too, all you want about concussions, and how a great fear of football is suddenly going to sweep the country and drive parents to move their boys to soccer. As if. Talk to soccer moms about concussions — you don’t think you can get hit playing high-level soccer?

We haven’t even gotten yet to basketball. Suffice to say that there are basketball scholarships, too, and that basketball, college and the NBA, is way more popular than soccer. That’s why CBS and Turner are shelling out those billions for March Madness. It’s why — if I went to that bus stop in Dayton — you bet they’d know who LeBron is, and I wouldn’t have to volunteer a last name.

There are all kinds of things wrong with baseball. Yet each year most Major League teams consistently draw millions of fans.

The United States is not really a hockey nation, either. But on this subject it’s difficult. The Los Angeles Kings just won the Stanley Cup for the second time in three years. The Cup went back to the bar across the street from the house I lived in for 14 years. So I’m going to move along in this column.

The two factors that can spark the changes that might — I say, might — make the United States a soccer nation are, one, a deep run in the World Cup, or, two, the MLS.

A deep 2014 World Cup run would be, in a word, unexpected. It would seem apparent that US Soccer head coach Jurgen Klinsmann, who dumped Donovan and is going with a younger team, is setting things up for a more sustained run in 2018 in Russia and hoping luck might turn the Americans’ way in Brazil. No argument here with that strategy.

Of course it all starts Monday with Ghana — which has knocked the U.S. out of the past two World Cups, beating the Americans in the final group-stage game in 2006, defeating the Americans again in the round of 16 in 2010.

Meanwhile, the MLS simply is not designed for that kind of far-reaching change. Structurally, everything is all wrong. US Soccer is in charge of soccer in the United States, not the MLS. Which is kind of weird — like USA Basketball telling the NBA how to run things. Which, when you think about it, raises a fundamental question: why is it that way in American soccer?

While that gets sorted out, one of the best thing that could happen to the MLS — besides the obvious, more talented players — would be a sharp dose of the WAGs and drama that attend the Premier League. That would make soccer way more interesting.

In the meantime, everyone, enjoy the World Cup. Don’t sleep on the Belgians.

When it’s all over in Brazil, NFL training camps will commence. Thankfully. Richard Sherman, America awaits your next breath of fresh air.