The kabuki theater of the 2022 evaluation commission

The kabuki theater that marked the two-stop International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission for the 2022 Winter Games wrapped up Saturday in Beijing. In this and a prior trip to Almaty, Kazakhstan, it can be said to have accomplished practically nothing of consequence. Here is why. The technical merits of these two bids are practically irrelevant, even if one might like to argue back and forth about whether the ski jump in Almaty is so close you can touch it or the ski run is so far away from Beijing it might as well be in Mongolia.

This 2022 race is the worst the IOC has conducted in its modern history.

Worse, by far, even than the 1984 Games “race,” when Los Angeles was the only entry.

Then at least you knew what was going to happen.

IOC elections can be unpredictable. Even so, this one would seem to be showing a lot of clarity already.

First and foremost, the 2008 Summer Games were in Beijing.

That means that some significant number of the IOC members have actually been to Beijing.

Moreover, the Nanjing Youth Games were just last summer. That means some number of members have been to China who knows how many times over the past several years and seen for themselves just how incredibly good the Chinese are at organizing Olympic events.

It’s true. The Chinese do grand Olympic scale stuff exceptionally well. Of course they do. This is not difficult: money plus resource plus the ability to tell people what to do equals prime-time showtime.

That gives Beijing a huge — and unfair  — advantage over Almaty.

The dumb IOC rule that says the members are not allowed to visit candidate cities means that in this context they can’t visit either Beijing or Almaty. But most have already been to Beijing. So when the time comes this July 31 to make a 2022 choice at the IOC assembly in Kuala Lumpur, and the members know from just seven years ago, or even just last summer, that the Chinese are hugely capable, what button are they most likely instinctively to push?

This dumb rule, meanwhile, cuts both ways. It’s currently three hours from Beijing to what would be the ski venues in 2022. If the members were able to sit on a bus for three long hours and think about that — even though the Chinese say they’re going to build a high-speed rail to cut the travel time to under an hour — would they still want Beijing?

How does such an expensive high-speed rail fit into Agenda 2020, the IOC’s purported reform agenda? Let’s be real. The Chinese say the rail line to the ski resort is unrelated to the Games. Who believes that? Without the Olympics, is there all of a sudden this drive to get 300 million Chinese — about the population of the entire United States — to embrace winter sports, which has abruptly, indeed over just the past few weeks, become one of the drivers of the Beijing 2022 campaign?

The Chinese are masters of propaganda. Nothing in and of itself wrong with that. All countries engage in the stuff. But the opportunity has been dropped into their laps for Beijing to become the first city in the history of the modern Olympics to stage both the Summer and Winter Games -- and this from a country that didn't even come back to the Summer Games until 1984. Incredible.

More straight talk, meanwhile: when the Chinese government promises its full resource, that’s a huge guarantee. Especially for the IOC, and its Winter Games.

The IOC’s winter franchise is wobbly. Think about this 2022 race. Stockholm, Lviv, Krakow and Oslo all pulled out. Munich, the 2018 runner-up, was going to get in but didn’t after a 2013 no-vote referendum and just a few days ago, the head of the German Olympic confederation, Alfons Hörmann, said what everybody in Olympic circles knows all too well:

“It is bitter that Almaty and Beijing are the only ones left. It is now clear that Munich would have been served the Games on a silver platter.”

With Thomas Bach, from Germany, as the IOC president — Munich would have won not just a silver platter, but one piled high with turkey and cranberries and all the fixings. Or German sausage. Or whatever.

The resource of the Chinese government is important, indeed, because the federal Kazakh authorities have been, for some reason, slow in coming to the table with their full faith and credit.

In so doing, the Kazakh government may have squandered some very valuable backstage relationships — key one-to-one ties that within senior IOC circles are well-known, indeed.

Take, for instance, this seemingly unremarkable picture, captured by Xinhua in mid-January:

It shows Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, one of the most influential personalities within the Olympic movement, with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

The sheikh is, among other things, head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees. He is also head of the Olympic Council of Asia. He seemingly has a proven capacity to move dozens of votes.

Just to be obvious, both Kazakhstan and China are in Asia.

How should this simple picture be interpreted?

Until a picture shows up just like this that features the sheikh with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, it’s pretty easy to understand exactly what this photo says.

Especially when you add in these remarks from the Xinhua story accompanying the sheikh’s visit to Beijing, which on their face would seem completely benign but are actually anything but, you can begin to parse certain key elements of the 2022 dynamic.

“Calling China an important cooperation partner of the ANOC, Sheikh Ahmad said the country had demonstrated its capability to hold large-scale international sport events.

“The Beijing Olympics and the Nanjing Youth Olympics were the pride of China and Asia, he said.”

This is not to say that Almaty is totally foregone. The bid has a great spirit that perhaps is just what the IOC needs. It also speaks far more to Agenda 2020, if indeed that package is real instead of aspirational, than does the Beijing proposition.

There’s little to no snow up in the mountains three hours from Beijing. No worries, IOC executive director Christophe Dubi told reporters this week: the Chinese would store water in reservoirs to make artificial snow. As opposed to Almaty, where every winter there is, like, real snow, and lots of it.

“Basically,” the chairman of the evaluation commission, Russia’s Alexander Zhukov said in Beijing at the wrap-up news conference there, referring to the China plan, “it is cold enough and everywhere there is sufficient water.”

As an environmental proposition, which wins? Moreover, which fits better with Agenda 2020?

Speaking of the environment:

How the IOC can even begin to entertain more jibber-jabber about the unfathomably bad air quality in Beijing when the same noise came forth in 2001 about 2008? This week, while the IOC team was on the ground there, readings for a benchmark pollutant in the air were more than six times what the World Health Organization considers safe.

Politically, as well: imagine seven more years of local and global protests against Tibet and human rights?

Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter, which requires host cities to secure the “rights and freedoms” set out in the charter “without discrimination of any kind,” was revised in December, at the IOC session in Monaco, in line with recommendation 14 of the 40-point Agenda 2020.

Yet, as Human Rights Watch asserted last week, “discrimination — on the basis of sex, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality, among others — remains rampant throughout China.”

Sophie Richardson, the advocacy group’s China director, said, “Host selections can no longer be made on promises of flashy infrastructure or glitzy opening ceremonies but now must require respect for fundamental human rights. Will the IOC enforce its own standards?”

In that same spirit, International Tibet Network member groups last week issued a position paper that called on the IOC “to reject [the Beijing bid] and in the context of events in China after the 2001 decision to consider with extreme caution the bid of Kazakhstan.”

This, then, is the dilemma the IOC finds itself in — one entirely of its own making — in the aftermath of the 2022 evaluation visits, full of show and short on meaning.

It could have reopened the 2022 race when there was a window to do so. But no.

Now, having a few months ago enacted the Agenda 2020 package, it remains to be seen whether — aside from the implementation of the Olympic TV channel, which assuredly is real — the rest of it is so much talk or, like many other well-meaning IOC vehicles over the years, just so many words.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand.

Intolerance in Indiana

To be clear: a bill signed into law Thursday in Indiana allowing businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples in the name of religious freedom reeks of intolerance, indecency and incivility. It’s out of step with the times. It’s also just dumb. Government in our United States, whether federal or any of the 50 states, has no business interfering this way in people’s lives. That said: what is President Obama going to do now, all of you who so vigorously last year opposed the Russian anti-gay propaganda measure before the Sochi 2014 Games? Send Billie Jean King to Indianapolis?

This is why it’s a better course for us Americans to stay out of the business of moralizing about other countries, and their laws.

Because we can come up with some incredibly stupid and offensive ones ourselves.

Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, signed the Indiana bill into law on Thursday.

Immediately, it put pressure on the NCAA, and other sports entities.

The Indiana law comes at a strange time. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule in June on whether same-sex marriage is constitutionally protected and therefore legal in all 50 states.

Why this reactionary law in Indiana now — it’s like a peek backward into history instead of looking ahead into the progressive future the Supreme Court would seem to be signaling is forthcoming.

Last year, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed a similar bill, saying, “It could divide Arizona in ways that we could not even imagine and no one would ever want.”

Pence said in an interview with an Indianapolis radio station that the new law is controversial because “of the way some in the media have reported on this.”

Without referring directly to gay rights, he said the bill was “not about any contemporary issue,” adding, “This was a measure that, frankly, Indiana should have enacted many years ago. It gives our courts guidance about evaluating government action and puts the highest standard — it essentially says, if a government is going to compel you to act in a way that violates your religious beliefs, there has to be a compelling state interest.”

One breathlessly awaits the court argument: the state attorney general arguing that there is, in fact, a compelling state interest on behalf of aggrieved Christian bakers, florists and photographers who could, you know, make money by engaging in commerce in same-sex marriage ceremonies -- just as in ceremonies between a man and woman.

Or, as, one Pence ally alleged, "A Christian business should not be punished for refusing to allow a man to use the women's restroom!"

This is for real -- what passes for honest-to-goodness rationalization of legislation in Indiana. This ally, Eric Miller, is an influential lobbyist on socially conservative issues in Indiana. Again, for real.

One also can hardly wait for the state lawyer to explain, exactly, how anyone is threatened by, as Miller put it, "those who support government recognition and approval of gender identity (men who dress as women),” because this bill “will help provide the protection!”

This is 2015?

This is idiocy.

The NCAA, of course, is based in Indianapolis. Next week, the men’s basketball Final Four is due to be held in the Indianapolis Colts’ Lucas Oil Stadium.

Jason Collins, the recently retired center and the first openly gay NBA player, posted this earlier in the week to his Twitter account:

.@GovPenceIN, is it going to be legal for someone to discriminate against me & others when we come to the #FinalFour? http://t.co/uBlKbIf8YK

— Jason Collins (@jasoncollins98) March 23, 2015

Collins should have no immediate worries. The law does not formally go into effect until July 1.

To his credit, Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, issued a statement that said, “The NCAA national office and our members are deeply committed to providing an inclusive environment for all our events. We are especially concerned about how this legislation could affect our student-athletes and employees.

“We will work diligently to assure student-athletes competing in, and visitors attending, next week’s Men’s Final Four in Indianapolis are negatively affected by this bill. Moving forward, we intend to closely examine the implications of this bill and how it might affect future events as well as our workforce.”

Moving the NCAA out of town is a tall order. At the same time, this kind of discrimination simply can not stand.

Indianapolis is the site each year of the Big Ten football championship game. It can be moved.

The NFL holds its scouting combine in Indy each year. It can be moved.

In 2012, Indianapolis played host to the Super Bowl; in 2010, the Final Four.

It is due to stage the women’s Final Four next year, the men’s Final Four again in 2021. They can be moved.

In the aftermath of the Sochi Games, the International Olympic Committee last December affirmed its commitment to what is called Principle 6 —expressly including non-discrimination on sexual orientation in its fundamental principles. This came about as part of what the IOC has called Agenda 2020, a 40-point measure that its president, Thomas Bach, has pushed as a far-reaching reform plan.

The IOC’s fundamental goal is to make the world a better place, little by little, day by day.

The IOC doesn’t always get a lot of things right. This one, though — it’s right on the mark. The governor talked a good game Thursday about being a friendly Hoosier, going on in a statement accompanying the signing of the law about "hospitality, generosity, tolerance and values." The law itself says otherwise. He -- and the state legislature -- could learn a lot from the IOC, and about the realities of life in 2015.

Boston 2024: a Cool Hand Luke problem

Maybe the Boston 2024 bid could have gotten off to a less promising start. Though it’s hard to see how. The latest dose of dismal news, a WBUR poll released Thursday evening: 36 percent of Boston-area voters support bringing the Summer Games to Boston in 2024. That’s down from 44 percent in a poll last month. The poll also found that 52 percent now oppose the bid. That’s up from 46 percent in February.

The poll of 504 registered voters was conducted March 16-18, according to WBUR, and contains a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

Just for reference: the International Olympic Committee, as a rough rule, wants to see bid-city poll numbers standing at or near 70 percent. Easy math: 36 percent is about half that. So that’s where things stand in Boston.

For entertainment value, according to a story Thursday on Xinhua, the poll numbers in Zhangjiakou, the would-be co-host city for most snow events for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games bid, a town about 120 miles northwest of Beijing — over there, they’re 99.9 percent in favor of the Games.

When the IOC evaluation commission comes to Beijing and Zhangjiakou next week, you bet they’ll be treated to scenes of happy Chinese!

Boston? What if an IOC evaluation commission were to come to town now?

Well, democracies tend to be, you know, a little different. And that’s — OK.

Indeed, it’s more than OK. Which is totally the point here.

The upside for the Boston bid is this: it’s March 2015.

The IOC won’t vote until the third quarter of 2017.

And, as U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Scott Blackmun rightly pointed out in a teleconference last week with reporters, there’s lots of time for the Boston 2024 people and the USOC to get things right.

It’s little wonder people are cranky in Boston. They’ve just had the worst winter ever. The winter has been so bad a majority would probably be against puppies.

But seriously.

Blackmun also made another hugely relevant point last week.

No one, he said, remembers the London 2012 bid in 2003 -- two years before the vote.

Well, a few of us, who have been at the Olympic bid scene for years, do.  That's when the London bid was run by the American executive Barbara Cassani, who was well-meaning, indeed, and put down a solid foundation but didn’t have what it took to get the bid across the finish line. Some of us well recall the kick-start the next year at the Palais de Beaulieu convention center in Lausanne, Switzerland, when Seb Coe took over.

From there the bid took off. The rest, as they say, is history.

The problem with the Boston bid right now is hugely self-evident.

It’s not John Fish.

It’s communication.

There is, like, virtually none.

It's like Strother Martin says to Paul Newman in the 1967 film classic "Cool Hand Luke": "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

An Olympic bid is a political campaign of the highest order. This is big-boy and -girl baseball. As a reminder: the very first call the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, got when he was elected in 2013 was from Vladimir Putin. So let’s not kid ourselves about the magnitude of the likes of who can be involved in the Olympic dynamic.

One would think the Boston people would have been, from the get-go, prepared to step into this scene and run like the wind.

But no.

One reads in the Boston Globe about bid-committee salaries of $300,000, $215,000, $182,500, $175,000 and more, and you wonder why ordinary people are — outraged?

One reads, too, in the Globe that Northwind Strategies and Keyser Public Strategies are pulling down $15,000 monthly for their communications advice. Another company is making $9,000 per month; yet another is getting $5,000.

Let’s see: that’s $44,000 per month for communications advice.

That’s a lot of cash. Perhaps it is going for the community meetings now ongoing.

Now here’s the question: what do any of these communications strategists know about winning an Olympic bid?

The guess: pretty close to nothing, zip, zero, nada.

If the question was put to any of them, who is Lydia Nsekera, where is she from and why is she increasingly influential within the IOC (and FIFA) --  how many could answer (and without looking it up)?

Not that anyone owes me anything, but after 16-plus years of covering the Olympic movement, and especially having covered every single Olympic bid campaign since 1999, you might think that at $44,000 per month, someone might want to, you know, maybe give me a shout. Maybe I might know something.

It has been crickets since the USOC chose Boston.

Northwind did issue a news release Thursday night after the WBUR poll numbers came out. Here is the deadly-dull opening sentence:

“In response to recent polls relative to public support for Boston hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Boston 2024 today highlighted its increasingly successful grassroots programs and a recent independent economic impact analysis as evidence that public support is set to rise steadily in the months ahead throughout the Commonwealth.”

Makes you want to stand up and cheer, right? No. It makes you want to slump down in your seat and go, what? That's because it's 50 words long, most of them a mouthful apiece, and you want to scream.

By the way, the USOC has been relentless that this is supposed to be America’s bid. Why the ongoing focus on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Hello? Those of us out here in the rest of the country would like to remind you that there is sentient life west of your town, and you should start acting like it. Like, immediately.

Not only is that release dreadfully long and impossible to dissect, it came out hours after the poll numbers. Since it’s not a secret there was going to be a poll, why wasn’t a release worked up ahead of time -- so that it could go out when the numbers themselves went out? This isn't rocket science.

In that same vein, the bid is getting abused on social media, especially by No Boston 2024 community activists. If I am the opposition right now, I am laughing at how easy it is. For them, it must be — fun.

The bid has almost zero positive presence on Twitter, in particular. How can this be? In 2015, when a bid that is supposed to be stressing how smart it is — with purported connections to brainy universities — can’t have some whipsmart college kid at a keyboard? Seriously?

So, now a pause and a deep breath.

As Blackmun said, there’s a long way to go.

Boston caught a huge break earlier this week when, for reasons unfathomable, German Olympic officials opted to put forward Hamburg instead of Berlin for 2024.

Crazy. Berlin would have had an unbelievably great narrative. The emphatic end of Hitler. The stadium where Usain Bolt ran 9.58 and 19.19. The rise of a fantastically cool city after the Cold War. The joy of the 2006 World Cup all over again. And so much more.

But what do I know — all that against a northern European port city?

Maybe Hamburg is the Boston of Germany. So, whatever.

What Boston needs is someone who gets how to communicate, and now.

That person needs to be someone who also knows the Olympic scene, and now.

Yes, 2017 is a long time away, and in some ways it is, but if you are Boston 2024 things cannot keep going this way.

Because Paris is likely going to be out there very, very soon. And Paris is not Hamburg.

Some unsolicited suggestions:

Inevitably, there will be pressure on Patrick Sandusky, the USOC communication chief. Sandusky is not, repeat not, the guy for this job. He already has a big-enough job.

Jill Geer at USA Track & Field knows her business. She is tough and professional and knows New England. She also will kill me for suggesting her, because she just moved her family back to Indianapolis, but she would be a great choice.

At the U.S. Olympic Committee, there are two first-rate options, both Sandusky deputies:

Mark Jones has already spent weeks in Boston. Mark is solid, solid, solid. He would be great.

So, too, Christy Cahill. Christy knows her stuff as well and, intriguingly, she reminds a lot of people of Jackie Brock-Doyle when Jackie took over everything comms in London. Now Jackie is revered across the United Kingdom as the expert she has proven herself to be.

While the Boston 2024 people sort this out, they should reach out, too, to Stratos Safioleas, who is as good at social media as anyone in the Olympic world. If they want to then hire someone at MIT or Harvard or wherever to help Stratos out, fine. But first get Stratos on board if you’re interested in stemming the carnage on Twitter.

Big picture — Olympic bidding is, again, a distinct world way beyond the local give-and-take of Boston politics. You have to think differently.

This should have been so obvious. That’s why you got chosen in the first place, isn’t it?

By the way, Ms. Nsekera is an IOC member (since 2009) from Burundi. She is since 2014 chair of the IOC’s women and sport commission. Since 2013, she has been an elected member of the FIFA executive council.

If you had to look all that up, or you didn’t know that Ms. Nsekera was earlier this week in New York at the United Nations, you need to get out of this game and into another. Maybe local politics is more your thing. Because Olympic bidding is truly for professionals only, who know and understand what’s at issue. There are billions of dollars at stake and communications needs to be a huge priority.

Lindsey Vonn's first next chapter

It was long ago the case that Lindsey Vonn became the best alpine skier the United States ever produced. Now, as this season’s racing draws to a close, with Vonn on a not-really-100 percent right knee, she has written a fascinating first next chapter to the ongoing story that is her singular career.

The day after clinching this season’s World Cup downhill title, Vonn won the super-G crystal globe, too. In all, she now has 19 globes, the same as Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark.

“I am honored to even be in the same sentence as him,” she said afterward in Meribel, France.

Vonn won the super-G title after finishing Thursday’s race 49-hundredths of a second ahead of Austria’s Anna Fenninger.

Fenninger, racing with bib 15, had come down into first place with a time of 1:08.19.

Vonn raced 19th. By the second interval, it was clear she was on her game, up 41-hundredths. By the finish line, after navigating a tricky jump, the margin was up to that 49-hundredths.

The downhill win Wednesday was Vonn’s 66th career victory, the super-G her 67th. Stenmark has 86. Vonn’s plan is to race through the 2018 season, and the Winter Games in South Korea.

Vonn also said, “It’s nice to know I can still win titles,” particularly when there were so many doubters this season, and of course there were.

Vonn blew out the right knee in a super-G at the 2013 world championships in Schladming, Austria. Trying to make the Sochi Olympics, she hurt the same knee again; she did not ski in the 2014 Games.

By the time she came back to the tour, as she recounted Thursday, she had maybe five days of downhill training, perhaps 20 days of training overall.

There were doubters, but only because those who doubt don’t understand that even when Lindsey Vonn is not 100 percent physically right she is 110 percent mentally tough.

She belongs to a special category of athlete.

It is always risky to go here, to say that so-and-so is different from someone — or everyone — else.

But the evidence is irrefutable.

Vonn’s knee is still not, well, right. You saw it at the world championships last month in Beaver Creek, Colorado, when the course was ridiculously hard and icy, and — for her — she struggled, managing “only” to win one medal, a bronze in the super-G.

She alluded to that Thursday, saying that she now will have all summer to get stronger and that the spring snow conditions in Europe the past couple weeks have been easier on her body:

“The soft snow is really nice. It’s really forgiving on my knee. It feels good. It haven’t had any problems since Beaver Creek. It’s only when it’s icy that I run into problems.”

Where you really heard her open up, meanwhile, is in the way she talked about attacking the course in the way that many racers say they do but she actually then does consistently:

“I am going to risk it all every time I am in the starting gate. That is what makes me fast.”

This is why Lindsey Vonn is the greatest of all time. In response to a question Thursday about whether she was still as fearless as she was before wrecking her knee, she said, yes, and that some of her “poor results” this year were because she “risked too much” or didn’t ski with “the same strength and power.”

She is self-reflective enough to know what can be seen at the bottom of the hill, too: her super-G is probably better now but her downhill, even for her, can be better. “I’m not building pressure at the top of the turn like I can,” she said of her downhilling.

All that, obviously, can and will change with a full summer of training.

What’s also going to change is that she is going to get even better — tougher still — mentally.

The best athletes do this, and she will.

She said Thursday that chasing records has been one of her faults.

Everyone in ski circles, especially Vonn, knew that Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll held the record for most World Cup wins by a female racer, 62, until Vonn broke it earlier this season.

Now Vonn is being asked about 86. The math says that if she keeps winning eight races per season, like she did this year, it’s a done deal.

But. as she said on a call with reporters, “”That’s a lot easier said than done,” adding, “I don’t really look at that as a goal right now. My goal is to keep winning races and keep getting as many titles as I can.”

Her mom, Linda, was on that call, and said at the end of it, “It seems like old times, Lindsey.”

Yes, but there’s a lot more yet to be written.

“I’ll call you later,” Lindsey said to her mom. “I love you.”

USATF: 12-1 is one more than 11-1

The USA Track & Field board of directors voted Saturday by 12-1 not, repeat not, to rescind its December decision to nominate Stephanie Hightower for a spot on the IAAF council. Meeting in Santa Monica, California, the USATF vote ought to put to rest the controversy that has lingered since the annual meeting in December in Anaheim. Then the vote was 11-1 in favor of Hightower following a 392-70 floor vote for current IAAF vice president Bob Hersh.

Plain math: 12-1 is one more than 11-1. The dissenter Saturday was one of the athlete representatives, Curt Clausen.

It’s time to move on, people.

“Change is just tough,” USATF board counsel Larry James said afterward, adding a moment later, “As we get to that 90 percent, the last 10 percent is the most painful.”

He also said, “Leadership has to lead.”

The 75-year-old Hersh said afterward, “I don’t want to comment at this time,” adding, “Obviously I have some misgivings about the whole procedure.”

Misgivings?

Just to speak hypothetically, what would you make of someone who would suggest at a public board meeting that a woman had no chance of being elected an IAAF vice-president? Seriously? When women have for years now been International Olympic Committee vice-presidents? Should that person really be representing the United States of America? In 2015?

Again hypothetically, what would you make of someone who might suggest, also at a public board meeting, that Cubans don’t like Americans? In an era in which change between Cuba and the United States is plainly in the air?

At a time in which several of USATF’s seemingly most vocal critics are asking for enhanced transparency, what would you think if someone might hypothetically suggest that a discussion that has attracted keen interest over the past four months be held in executive session?

How about this:

Let’s dial back the wayback machine. It would be fascinating to give Hersh a dose of truth serum and ask: four years ago, did you say to Hightower, give me one final term and I will mentor you, even get you on IAAF committees, and then stand down?

Or if that truth serum was still going: last summer, in a private meeting, were you, Bob, asked in a private meeting if you would mentor Stephanie, and did you say, “I could but I won’t?”

Because Saturday, publicly, Hersh once again committed to mentor Hightower, if only he could get four more years.

As if.

To those critics who decry age-ism: the IOC in December affirmed its mandatory retirement limit at age 70. As a matter of best-practices governance, isn't it common-sense that the IAAF is going to enact a similar provision, and soon?

The winds of change are coming this summer to the IAAF. Either Seb Coe or Sergey Bubka is going to be elected federation president. Both are in their 50s. The USATF board decided in December that Hightower, 56, a contemporary of both Coe and Bubka from their time together as athletes and now as sport executives, would be a better choice as USATF nominee than would Hersh.

This U.S. debate about who ought to get the IAAF nomination has run its reasonable course.

For emphasis: there is nothing good that can come of continuing a dialogue, or debate, on this point any further.

The decent thing now would be for Hersh to concede. In politics, there are winners and losers. He has lost. Now he should do the decent thing, and the sooner the better, for the sake of the sport -- and the organizations -- he purports to love.

There is so much going now on that is good about USATF: financially, grass-roots investment and, of course, the prospect of a great summer at the world championships in Beijing followed by epic performances at the Summer Olympics next year in Rio de Janeiro.

This is the first time in maybe forever that all these things can be said about the state of affairs at USA Track & Field.

You just have to step back to see the big picture.

Those who prefer to dwell in divisiveness and name-calling are living in a past that is rapidly receding.

It’s over, people. Get on board.

Is USATF perfect? Hardly. No institution is or can be.

Does USATF deserve criticism when warranted? Absolutely.

That said, is USATF way, way better than it has ever been?

You bet.

Why? Because Hightower and the board have empowered chief executive Max Siegel to do his thing. She is not, repeat not, a dictator. She has grown into the job — as she would readily admit — and Siegel and the staff are doing what they do. That is how a $13 million business grows into $30 million, and it’s only getting started.

So, as this space has repeated several times: the time is now for civility, tolerance and decency. Of course, to reiterate, disagreements are fine. But, big picture, let’s stop the noise and the over-the-top lectures about history and democracy.

We — Americans — do not live in a democracy. We live in a representative democracy.

On the matter of the IAAF nomination, this representative democracy has now spoken, not just once but twice.

USATF should rightfully be the gracious leader among the nations in track and field. It’s time for everyone to get together so that USATF can humbly assume that role as a partner with others around the world — without unnecessary and unproductive personality politics that contribute nothing.

If you prefer it more plainly:

Complain and scheme if you want. Fine. But here’s the deal: you risk being left behind. Way behind.

At USATF, there are a lot of smart, progressive people now running the show. For real. Change is all around. If you step back and take a look, it’s right there. Is it going to happen in a day? Nope. Over time? Yep. It is happening now, and already? Absolutely.

Hightower, after the vote, had it right. She said, “This for me is about how we move the organization forward.”

USATF: a letter from Italy

A letter from Italy, from one of the most influential strategists in track and field, to Bob Hersh, currently an IAAF vice president, makes clear what many here in the United States fail to understand: Hersh is an eminently decent man but his time near the top at the IAAF has come to a close. Hersh should realize that.

“Personally,” writes Luciano Barra, whose career in track and field and Olympic circles has seen him both wielding and observing power and its nuances for decades, “I think that you are spoiling your career in the world of athletics trying to remain in the IAAF council also on this occasion,” a reference to this summer’s IAAF elections.

“Life goes for each of us and time is a severe judge. You are 75, the IAAF will have [drastic] changes in Beijing and you should have understood that this was the right time to leave in glory, being appointed IAAF honorary life vice president.”

Barra prefaces the entire letter by saying, “It was a pity that we did not find the possibility to speak in Prague,” at last weekend’s European indoor championships, and adds, “I must say that many of the things I am writing are shared by many people I spoke with in Prague.”

The letter is most notable because Barra, as Hersh would well know, is close — and has been for years and years — to IAAF insiders.

To recap just some of Barra’s resume:

He was general director of the Italian Olympic Committee from 1984 to 2003, its sport director the final 10 years. He was chief operating officer of the Torino 2006 Winter Games. He is an honorary life council member of the European Athletic Association and has been around track and field, and the organization of its events, virtually his entire life.

Barra is far from unfamiliar with the United States and Americans, incidentally. He served as an adviser to the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid.

It is amid all that context that he wrote Tuesday’s letter to Hersh, mindful that in Beijing either Seb Coe or Sergey Bubka will be elected IAAF president and that USA Track & Field will nominate a delegate to the IAAF spot.

In December, USATF opted not to re-up Hersh but to nominate Stephanie Hightower, the USATF chairwoman.

Within the U.S. track and field community, there continues to be misunderstanding about the dynamics of the 392-70 floor recommendation for Hersh and then the 11-1 board of directors vote for Hightower. A follow-up Feb. 7 board letter sought to explain why the board went the direction it did.

This letter from Barra ought to further make plain to those within the United States why Hightower is the choice.

To emphasize, Barra’s opinion not only matters; it reflects an important current of thinking in key IAAF circles that ought to be better understood in the United States, particularly with the USATF board meeting this weekend in Los Angeles.

Hightower is now 58. When he, Barra, was 58, he wrote, he retired after 18 years in the European athletics council because the Italian track and field federation had a new president and that new president wanted to represent Italy: “It was a normal ambition for him.”

“The same I did in the Italian Olympic Committee at 62 … after 15 years as sport director general (with 110 medals in five Olympics [as compared to] 55 … before) [so that I could become] deputy CEO of Torino 2006 Olympic Games.”

“For this reason,” Barra writes to Hersh, ”I cannot understand your position and your continuous quest of support also internationally. I do not know, and I do not want to know, the formal aspect of what has happened inside your federation, but if legally this has been possible, what can you say?”

Barra goes on:

“I have understood that you have been claiming the important achievement you have reached in these years inside the IAAF. Surely you have good score even if I have been critical on two of your main [activities]: the one of Technical Delegate and the one of Chairman of the Diamond League group.

“I do not want to come back on my e-mails about the time table you have ‘painted’ for Moscow and London, I am only happy to see that those who have taken the baton from you have not followed many of your ‘best practice.’ You know what I am talking about because I have written open letters on it.

“As far as the Diamond League is concerned you should know that many people in the World Athletics consider that activity as the [worst] ever run by the IAAF on many [points] of view. Financially [it] is not positive, from [a] television point of view [it] is even worse, but most of all [it] has allowed athletics to be totally in the hand of the managers. To pursue athletics based on money and records has also made the doping a major issue.

“You chaired a group in Marrakech to discuss about the need to make athletes recognize the one day meeting (the vest problem) and in spite of a report of many pages (43?) you were not able to arrive to any proposal. Should I go on?

“So why not finish in glory and take the positive aspect of what you have done? The alternative is to be challenged on the substance of what you have done, independently to the formal aspect of your queries.”

At the end the letter says, “PS it is possible that I will circulate my thought,” and indeed it is now circulating worldwide.

The race card, and more, at USATF

For years, the U.S. Olympic Committee seemed to be bent on being destroyed from within by petty politics. Now there is a dissident cohort in USA Track & Field that is playing the same game, and, it has to be said, playing the gender and race cards. A letter from USATF board chair Stephanie Hightower in the ordinary course of business prompted one of the most outrageous pieces of correspondence in recent Olympic memory, from USATF youth division chair Lionel Leach.

To be blunt: Leach pulled the race card.

He pulled the black-on-black race card on Hightower, who is also African-American.

If no one else in the United States, or elsewhere, wants to call out Leach for what he did, here it is. That’s what he did.

It’s wrong, it’s offensive, it has zero place in our world and especially in the Olympic scene, which seeks to build a better, more peaceful world through sport.

This space has called repeatedly for civility and tolerance, particularly when it comes to dialogue at USATF.

That’s what Hightower pursued.

In the aftermath of last December’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California, Hightower — as she has every right to do — sent a March 6 letter to Tim Baker, her appointee on the USATF law & legislation committee. Apparently concerned at some of his comments at the meeting, she said in the letter, “You are my appointee on my committee, but your statements and activities seem to indicate that your commitment to advancing mutual organizational goals may be waning.”

Then, she said, “If you would like to continue as my appointee, please call me so we can discuss.”

For those concerned about the use of the word “my” in “my committee,” let’s deconstruct. Hightower is the chairwoman of the board. Thus she bears ultimate responsibility. If she were truly running a "dictatorship" at USATF, as some of her critics would want to allege, Hightower would simply take over the committee itself. Which she is not doing. Logic is what it is.

Two days later, Leach issued a three-page document that started with him saying he was lying in bed — what? — thinking of the “great sacrifices” made by Martin Luther King Jr., Rep. John Lewis (D.-Ga.) and hundreds of others seeking to register African-American voters in the South, invoking the “Bloody Sunday” march 50 years ago from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

This has what to do with the USATF, please?

Answer: it has absolutely zero to do with track, field, Stephanie Hightower or Tim Baker.

Leach goes on:

“Alabama state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas threatened and attacked the marchers. Governor Wallace refused to protect the marchers and allowed the attack to take place, making this day one of the most disturbing days in our nation’s history. Wallace believed in discrimination, disenfranchisement, and plain bullying. We all recognize bullying as the use of superior strength or influence to intimidate those who are weaker and to force them to do the bully’s bidding.”

The only bullying here is from Leach.

He is attempting to bully Hightower. Let us be clear about this.

He goes on:

“In the wake of this seminal American moment, a half century later,” which to reiterate has nothing to do with USA Track and Field in 2015, “I am saddened to say I heard about and then read a disturbing letter that makes our governor, Bully Supreme Chris Christie of the great state of New Jersey, look like an angel.”

Let’s stop, again. The Republican governor Chris Christie? What in the world does Christie have to do with any of this, aside from the fact that Leach is a union activist in Democratic-leaning New Jersey?

Again, nothing. This is political rhetoric.

Strike that. It is flat-out political bullying.

“Every day,” Leach goes on, “the members in the union I represent are bullied by their bosses all day long. I don’t let them get away with it, and I most certainly will not allow it to happen in the USATF, the organization I love most in the world.”

OK, Mr. Leach.

It’s a free country. You get the right to say what you want.

Now you get to be called on it.

Your letter goes on to call Ms. Hightower’s letter to Mr. Baker “Bullying 101.” You further describe it as “offensive, disrespectful and downright abuse.”

On what grounds?

On the second page of your letter, you say, “As a constituent leader, I have an obligation to this organization and to the youth membership — better known by all as my 85,000 babies — to protect their rights, and make this sport of track and field better than the way I found it.”

Say again: “… better known by all as my 85,000 babies…”? Seriously? What sort of paternalistic fantasy world are you living in, sir?

The penultimate paragraph of your letter says, “In closing, this organization is called USATF, not Ms. Hightower Track and Field. How dare you send this man a letter in this tone.”

Let’s pause once more. Let’s consider for a moment the tone of the two pieces of correspondence. Which of the two is a business letter and which is a three-page screed?

The hyperbole continues: Mr. Leach, you then go on to say the tone of Ms. Hightower’s letter reminds you of Oct. 20, 1973, the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” during the Watergate scandal. In the last paragraph, you then say, “You may view that as a threat or a history lesson. Either way, I don’t care. What I do care about is the integrity and leadership of USATF; hopefully, you will find it in your heart to display more of both.”

To compare Ms. Hightower’s request for a phone call with the Watergate matter is inflammatory and inaccurate rhetoric in the extreme. In this context, for it to have come from someone purporting to represent the interests of young people is hugely inappropriate.

As you well know, Mr. Leach, if you have been checking your email inbox, on the matter of integrity and leadership, here are some of the replies your letter has generated:

— “I find your letter to President Hightower wholly inappropriate and full of ridiculous innuendo.  Thank you for providing the document she sent to Mr. Baker so I could judge for myself and not rely on your bizarre attempts to analogize "Bloody Sunday" and the Nixon dismissals with a simple letter.  What a stretch. Who are you to threaten people or give history lessons? Read the letters again and assess who is the bully? Next time maybe wait till morning before you hit send and if you still maintain the poor judgment to do so, don't send it to me.” —

— “Hello Mr. Leach, STOP corrupting the youth in USATF IMMEDIATELY! I am the angry mother of [a] 16 year old student-athlete … Members of [corporations] get fired and removed from office for this type of behavior on a much smaller scale every day. Teachers get fired for expressing their opinion in the classroom. You care for your 85,000 babies so much and fancy yourself as a chair of a youth program? Why did you just poison them? You should be ashamed of yourself!”

— “Mr. Leach-I am appalled you sent this email to USATF members. Your behavior is juvenile and unconscionable. It reminds me of a schoolyard bully trying to get the other kids on his side. You have taken a private matter between Mr. Baker and Mrs. Hightower and asked others to get involved that DO NOT have all the facts. You should be ashamed of yourself. This may be your tactic for your union work but has no place in a youth organization! I have read both letters and your letter is ten times more intimidating and bullying than Mrs. Hightower's. … You really should apologize to your "85,000 babies" for your irresponsible behavior. My child, who is a USATF athlete, overheard my husband I talking about this, and labeled you as a cyber bully. I agree! You are not setting a good example of how adults should react to conflict and it frightens and saddens me that you are representing the USATF organization.”

These people get it.

Mr. Leach, you should, too. You owe a lot of people an apology. Then you should resign your USATF position, immediately.

All of the rest of you who purport to be supporting Mr. Leach: you might want to think about where you stand as well.

None of you — seriously, nobody amid the controversy this week at the University of Oklahoma  — thought to step up and say that what Mr. Leach wrote has no place in our civil dialogue?

Your petty focus on Stephanie Hightower and whether she is a “dictator,” which is laughably absurd, keeps you from seeing the big picture?

It is wrong, wrong, wrong to conflate USATF and Stephanie Hightower in 2015 with George Wallace in 1965 and "discrimination, disenfranchisement and plain bullying," and Alabama state troopers "wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas [threatening] and [attacking] the marchers ..."

If track and field in the United States is to be taken seriously, then the people who take it seriously now — that is, the people who love it the most — have the most responsibility to take care of it. That means stepping back and seeing what’s really happening. Racism in any or all its forms cannot be tolerated, whether white on black, black on black, purple on green.

All of you, meanwhile, on the Let’s Run message boards, when you see a post like this:

“Yea, it screamed "well you can't not agree with us sooo..." to me. This is what happens when we give women positions of power. The feck schit up.”

No one condemns this noise? No one?

Everyone, this is it, loud and clear:

Stephanie Hightower is an intelligent, resourceful, assertive, powerful black woman.

She didn’t get to be who she is without being a combination of all of those things.

Her strength and willingness to engage, and when necessary engage in constructive conflict, is an asset. It is an asset at USA Track and Field, and it will prove of benefit on behalf of U.S. interests at the IAAF, track and field’s worldwide governing body, when she goes to that board.

It’s 2015. If you don’t like or at least appreciate all that, get over yourself. And start acting with decency and tolerance.

$50 million profit on $51 billion is 0.098 percent

With so many positive stories to tell, it can be so mystifying to read what the International Olympic Committee considers the most important bits of its news in its releases. The IOC likes to say that athletes are at the core of everything it does. On Thursday, at a meeting of its policy-making executive board, it modified provisions together known as Rules 40 and 50 so that athletes can sport “generic” or “non-Olympic advertising” during the Games. If ultimately approved by the full IOC, this will likely amount to a major step forward for athletes, especially in track and field, who had protested over prior restrictions that had stopped them from mentioning their sponsors.

Instead of trumpeting this news in its release, what did the IOC lead off with?

This:

The Sochi 2014 Games made an operating profit of $50 million.

In its release, the IOC for sure did not mention that the $50 million figure is way below the $261 million surplus reported last June by the Russian organizers.

That drop can at least in part be explained by the ruble’s drop in value against the dollar.

Just a little math: $50 million is about a fifth as much as $261 million.

Just a little bit more math, and it’s only because the IOC brings this on itself: $50 million equals what percentage of $51 billion, the reported cost of staging the 2014 Winter Games?

That would be 0.098 percent.

This is the news the IOC seeks to spotlight for the world?

When it genuinely has good news about the athletes, its purported raison d’être?

Of course, there’s more. The IOC gets 20 percent of the $50 million surplus. Math: $10 million. It said it would transfer that $10 million to the Russian Olympic Committee for sports development, the newly approved Olympic Channel and an Olympic Museum in Russia.

Yay for Russia!

Imagine if the IOC gave the U.S. Olympic Committee $10 million just like that. How would that go over around the world?

But I digress.

In all, the IOC said, it contributed $833 million to the Sochi 2014 operating budget, which ultimately roughed out at a total of about $2 billion. This contribution marked an increase of $83 million over previous estimates.

The IOC then spent two full paragraphs agreeing that there remains a “misconception” around the costs of the Games — that is, what it costs to run them and all the stuff that gets built around them or because they came to town.

All recent editions of the Games have made an operating profit, it pointed out.

It also — correctly — noted that the operating budget of an Olympic Games, Summer or Winter, is privately funded, with a significant contribution from the IOC. For the Rio 2016 Games, that contribution will be on the order of $1.5 billion.

But then:

The “other part of the budget” is the “investment the host city authorities decide to make,” the IOC said.

This is where the IOC gets it totally, fundamentally wrong.

It’s not the “other part of the budget,” and this is why the IOC is saddled with the perception that Sochi cost $51 billion.

This perception is the thing that has dragged at the 2022 Winter Games race and is more or less the first thing almost anyone anywhere thinks about when they think about Sochi. Or, pretty much, the Games in general -- whoa, the Olympics are cool but, holy smokes, they are really, really expensive!

Here is the thing:

The infrastructure cost is totally, fundamentally separate.

It’s why for decades cities and countries all over the world have sought the Olympic Games — as a catalyst to get public policy works done in the hard-deadline of seven years, the date from which the IOC awards a Games to opening ceremony, instead of 20 or 30, which is what it would otherwise take if roads, bridges, sewage pipes, metro lines, airports and whatever else could even get done in the first instance.

For years and years, however, the IOC has allowed the infrastructure budget misconception to hang around.

The IOC says it’s too difficult to explain otherwise.

It’s not.

There are two distinct budgets. One is the operating budget. The other relates to the infrastructure numbers.

Is that difficult?

No.

But even in Thursday's official IOC release, the IOC gets it wrong. Little wonder why when the IOC complains that Sochi didn’t really cost $51 billion, no one wants to hear it. Because it’s just “the other part of the budget.”

There’s so much more to chew on in this IOC release — for instance, the IOC executive board opting not to go in April to the SportAccord convention in Sochi, a clear slap at Marius Vizer, the key figure in that organization, and for what purpose?

The release ends, meanwhile, with a paragraph that aims to pay tribute to Mario Vazquez Raña, the longtime IOC member from Mexico who for more than 30 years also served as president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees. He died earlier this month. The executive board, the release said, ended its meeting with a minute of silence in his memory.

Nowhere in that paragraph does it also mention that Vazquez Raña also served on that very same IOC executive board for a dozen years.

Back to the real lead — as we would say in journalism terms — of the day, and an observation.

The Olympic movement genuinely does good work all over this world. Much of it is not front-page stuff nor perhaps should it be. Much is one-to-one change. Plenty is the stuff of inspiration and dreams.

At the same time, the IOC itself has a huge image problem. Thursday's release from the executive board meeting in Rio de Janeiro is emblematic of this problem.

The IOC says it wants to be transparent and accountable. It wants to reach out to young people so they can understand what it is and what it does.

Really?

Here is a challenge. Read these paragraphs from the release and — no fair if you have had years of experience in the Olympic scene — decipher them.

“Proposed advertising changes

“The EB agreed to two proposals regarding changes to Rule 40 and Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, both of which will be presented to the next IOC Session this July in Kuala Lumpur for final approval.

“In regard to the application of Rule 40, the IOC would, following Session approval, allow generic (non-Olympic) advertising during the period of the Games. The change to Rule 50 would increase the maximum size of a manufacturer’s identification while respecting the clean field of play to prevent conspicuous advertising.”

Seriously, there has to be a better way. It's athletes first. At least if the IOC genuinely means it: explain what Rules 40 and 50 say, in plain English, and what these changes — assuming a forthcoming OK in Kuala Lumpur — would mean for the athletes. It’s not difficult.

And put all of that first, ahead of stuff that translates to 0.098 percent. That should not be difficult to figure out, either.

See that Almaty ski jump: why no visits?

The International Olympic Committee evaluation commission visit to Almaty that just wrapped up underscores powerfully the problem with the one element that is sorrowfully missing from the new Agenda 2020 reforms. If all 100-plus IOC members could actually visit Almaty, or for that matter Beijing, this shambles of a 2022 race might be totally different.

Just outside the hotel where the evaluation commission members stayed these past few days — literally, steps — sits the ski jump that is the symbolic heart and soul of the Almaty presentation. The rest of the bid is similarly compact.

If the members could take this all in their very own eyes but more, feel what is about in Almaty, feel the emotion of the Kazakh people for the 2022 Games and for the movement, they would be impressed. Anyone would.

“Almaty has spectacular mountains, some very impressive venues and a real passion for winter sports,” the evaluation commission chairman, the IOC member Alexander Zhukov from Russia said in his closing news conference in Almaty. “I can say that our visit has confirmed that Almaty is capable of holding successful Games in 2022.

“We were impressed by what we have seen. Everything we have seen shows Almaty is a qualified candidate to host the Games. If Almaty wins the bid, the Games will help the city to reach its real potential.”

Plain talk: it is hugely unfortunate that the IOC has gone through a year-long review process and it is still stuck — without any meaningful public debate — in the same tired situation involving arguably the most important thing the members do, which is of course awarding the Games to a particular city.

Whichever city it turns out to be — the members cannot visit and see for themselves.

And why not?

Because of concerns they are going to be bribed?

That is on the cities, not the members.

Beyond which, the membership has changed considerably since the 1980s and 1990s. The IOC membership now is mostly full of technocrats who hardly need more air miles or more stays in nice hotels. These, now, are — mostly — women and men of the world.

It sends completely the wrong message to the entire world when the IOC can’t allow its members to visit bid cities. Indeed, it’s a loud statement that the members can’t be trusted.

A far better statement in an era of transparency and better governance — which the IOC in the Agenda 2020 reforms purportedly says it is striving for — is to show off its members as models of 21st-century global citizens.

Seriously.

Does that come with some risk? For sure.

Does everything in life come with some risk? For sure.

Does the system as it is now come with some risk? Absolutely. There is literally nothing in the way it is now that would prevent some ambitious city from doing something to bend the rules.

Be proactive. Show the members off. If the IOC wants to reverse its often-poor public image, in which the members are stereotypically depicted as nothing more than fat cats swilling champagne and caviar, better to get them out there and let the world see the stereotype is wrong.

What’s to hide?

It’s hardly a bother to arrange trips in groups of 15 or 20. Now that the IOC is awash in revenues, let the IOC pay.

The way the system works now simply cannot be said — in any way, shape or form — to be best practices.

Not when there are billions of dollars at issue.

See Sochi — where there was literally nothing on the ground when the IOC voted for it in 2007 — and the $51 billion hangover.

More — what is missing when the members can’t go is the real measure of a place.

The evaluation commission, now that it has visited Almaty, will visit Beijing in March. It will produce a report, which all the members will get, and odds are most will never read. Then the two cities will make a presentation for the full membership in June at IOC headquarters in Switzerland, and one more immediately before the vote July 31 in Kuala Lumpur.

It’s one thing to read in the report that it is two or three hours from Beijing to the mountains. It’s quite another to sit in the bus and feel that kind of time drag by.

It’s one thing to read in the report that there is no snow in the mountains outside Beijing. It’s another to go to those mountains and walk around them and see there is, really, no snow and wonder to yourself about the environmental implications — particularly in China — of having to make snow.

Or to tour Almaty — which had real snow in abundance the week of the evaluation commission and always has snow because it always snows there in the winter — and wonder whether the Agenda 2020 reforms, which say the movement is trying to leave a gentler footprint, are for real.

If the members, in this time of global uncertainty, ultimately opt that their friends in the Chinese government — whom they trusted in 2001 for the 2008 Summer Games — are going to get their votes just seven years later for the Winter project, that is of course the members’ choice.

There is zero question — literally, zero — that Beijing would organize the Games reliably.

At the same time, is that what the movement needs for 2022?

Because when you hear what the two sides are offering, it’s clear there is a difference, and this is what the members could have heard if only they had been in Almaty.

Beijing, at least right now, is a spreadsheet. Almaty is a poem.

Almaty has emerged as the first bid in a long time — a very, very long time — that actually needs the Games. Russia did not need the Games. London did not need the Games. Rio did not. Nor did Pyeongchang.

You hear it and feel it in this bid from a very young country, one that is just 24 years old: Almaty needs the Games. The people there are bidding for their very lives, and this is why the federal authorities there can seem at times so uncertain. It’s all new.

The people get it, though — an IOC commissioned survey finding at least 75 percent support.

You hear it, too, in the voice of the vice mayor, Zauresh Amanzholova, an executive board member of the bid, in a vision piece — with the theme “Keeping it Real” — that she wrote recently:

“In 1991, Kazakhstan woke up as an entirely new nation. Imagine the impact that reality had on our sporting infrastructure, from top to bottom, from grassroots to elite. We realized that we had to start from scratch to rebuild sport in Kazakhstan. Almaty 2022 is part of that plan,” a wide-ranging national  development strategy that stretches to 2050.

She also wrote:

“We also understand that sport improves lives at every level of society. That is why we hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2011, why we are hosting the Winter [University Games] in 2017, and it is why we are bidding again, for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

“Our bid’s vision also reinforces the true potential of an Olympic legacy – using it where it is needed most. As a new nation, Kazakhstan needs the power of the Winter Games to serve as a continuing catalyst for progress. Moreover, given our location sitting at the heart of Central Asia, the potential of an Almaty 2022 Olympic legacy becomes even more powerful and enduring for millions of people.

“The culture of Kazakhstan is a mosaic that not only reflects thousands of years of human interaction, but thousands of years of integrating different ideas and ways of life. This diversity is the source of our strength and a true example of Olympism at its core.

“This is the new face of Kazakhstan that we want to share with the world, for the first time as an Olympic host city.”

Explain, please, why the members can’t see, and experience, that up-close and in-person.

Mario Vazquez Raña dies: the passing of an era

Mario Vazquez Raña of Mexico died Sunday. He was 82. With him goes an era. Don Mario was indisputably the most important man in the Olympic movement in the entire western hemisphere. His ways may have been old-fashioned but his love for the movement and the so-called “Olympic family” were unquestioned. His counsel served International Olympic Committee presidents Juan Antonio Samaranch and Jacques Rogge. His jet, too.

Unclear now is who is positioned to take Vazquez Raña’s place in the Americas, if anyone. The 2016 Summer Games are of course in Brazil. The United States is bidding for the 2024 Summer Games, with that election in 2017. The 2015 Pan American Games are in Canada.

There are four primary languages at issue — Spanish, English, Portuguese and French.

The central issue is that there is no one — no one— quite like Don Mario.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach told Associated Press “we will always remember him as a great Olympic leader,” declaring the Olympic flag at IOC headquarters at the lakeshore Chateau de Vidy would be flown at half-mast in his honor.

"The Olympic family in Mexico and indeed the world are mourning this loss,” the president of the Mexican Olympic Committee, Carlos Padilla Becerra, said in a statement.

U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Larry Probst said he was “deeply saddened” to hear of Vazquez Raña’s passing. “Mario,” he said, “served the Olympic movement for the majority of his adult life, and advanced Olympic sport in the western hemisphere like few before him.”

“Mario was a legendary leader, a dear friend and an esteemed colleague,” added Marcel Aubut, president of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Vazquez Raña was much-misunderstood by many.

In part, that is because he preferred to operate almost exclusively in Spanish. In part, that is because he was an operator, in every sense of the word. In part, it is because — though he was a media magnate and himself interviewed hundreds if not thousands of world leaders, dignitaries and celebrities, enough to fill a nine-volume set of hardbound books and more — he permitted only a handful of English-speaking reporters, if that many, into his inner circle.

When he was in Mexico City, that circle invariably met for lunch every day in his offices. This was where the matters of the world, the state, the Olympic movement, the Olympic family and, perhaps most important, family were discussed.

To Don Mario, if you were in his circle of trust, you were in.

Criticism was OK — it was a part of life, as long as it was fair, reasoned and straightforward. He knew and accepted criticism.

Indeed, he sometimes sought criticism. Only fools, he would say, did not want criticism. Nobody got along with just yes people.

Trust — now trust was a commodity to be earned, over time.

Don Mario had the trust of Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980-2001, and then Rogge, president from 2001-13.

Samaranch used to say that the harmony of the Olympic movement used to depend on three “pillars” — the IOC itself , the international federations and the national Olympic committees. But when Vazquez Raña took over the Assn. of National Olympic Committees in 1979, that third pillar was comparatively weak.

Under his leadership, it became a force. Him, too.

For years he oversaw the IOC’s Olympic Solidarity commission, which oversaw the disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to developing nations in a bid to get promising athletes to the Games.

He served as ANOC head for 33 years.

“An anecdote may illustrate his love for sports,” said Eduardo Palomo, president of the El Salvador Olympic Committee.

Just two years ago, on a tour of four South American countries in six days to evaluate sites for the 2019 Pan Am Games, Palomo said, Vazquez Raña “shared his middle school years.” He told how when “during recess he went to his family’s store to work, his classmates made fun of him.

“Later, he hired them to work for him.”

The intensity of the four-countries-in-six-days trip, Palomo said, “left no room for mistakes or leisure.” Vazquez Raña was “always punctual, always focused on demanding excellence for the Games in the same proportion he was giving of himself.”

Two and a half years ago, the winds of change finally caught up with Don Mario. He gave up control of ANOC; it is now headed by Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, who is arguably now the consummate IOC insider.

Vazquez Raña, meanwhile, stayed on in the Olympic world as head of the Pan American Sports Organization.

Recently, he missed a PASO meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — a sign he truly was ailing.

Jimena Saldaña worked with Don Mario for — to be precise — 30 years and two months. She is now first vice-president of the Mexican Olympic Committee, secretary-general of PASO, a member of the executive committee of PASO and a member, too, of the IOC Solidarity Commission.

When Vazquez Raña could not go to Puerto Vallarta, she said, he “called me and said, how is everybody, are they happy with their accommodations, that kind of thing — the Olympic family, is the transportation doing fine, the little details.

“I don’t think that in his mind anything gave him such satisfaction as the Olympic movement.”

She had last seen him, along with her husband, on Friday.

“He woke up and greeted me. We shook hands, he smiled. We said it was such a beautiful day, said we were happy he could look out on such a beautiful garden. We asked how he was doing. He said, ’So-so.’

“I kissed him and said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ”

“I was happy I could see him again.”

Don Mario died at 1 p.m. Sunday.