$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.

The legacy of China's He Zhenliang

The Olympic movement is all about changing the world. Very few people actually effect such change. Everything you see now that reflects China the important player on the world sports stage — all of that is, in some piece big or small, the work of He Zhenliang, a former International Olympic Committee vice president who died Sunday at age 85. Mr. He, as it seemed everyone in Olympic circles called him, was a remarkable man. He was not only the bridgehead, as David Miller pointed out Monday in the Olympic newsletter Sport Intern, but then the bridge between China and the world outside. There have been tributes, and appropriately, from around the world. Yet those tributes have missed, or glossed over, the tribulations and complexities that helped shape Mr. He.

And without those it is impossible to fully appreciate not only his story but China’s ongoing story in the Olympic movement and our world, which is entirely appropriate as the Beijing bid committee prepares Tuesday to lodge its 2022 Winter Games file with the IOC.

There are only two 2022 candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. If Beijing wins, it would be the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.

Mr. He would doubtlessly find that amazing.

To be honest, everyone ought to find that amazing.

The modern Olympic movement has been around since 1894. The People’s Republic of China, since 1949. The team that we call China — as a point of contrast to the team from “Chinese Taipei,” and by reference this is not intended to be a political discourse — has been back in the Summer Games only since 1984, the Winter Games since 1980.

The IOC president, Thomas Bach, said in a statement issued Monday, “Mr. He was a man of culture and art. He was a true advocate of the social values of sport and of our movement and I would like to pay tribute to the passion and energy he deployed over the years to fulfill his mission as an IOC member in China. He also helped our movement better understand his country, its people and outstanding culture. The Olympic movement has lost one of its most fervent ambassadors.

“For me personally, he showed me true friendship and gave me invaluable advice from very early days as an IOC member. I will always remember this with great gratitude.”

Wei Jizhong, a former secretary general of the Chinese Olympic Committee, told China Daily, “China’s current major-member status in the IOC is inseparable from He’s hard work for decades. His strong enthusiasm and responsibility to China’s sports development as well as improvement of its international image truly impressed me.”

Added Yang Yang, the short-track speed skating star who is now an IOC member, “His fruitful work in the IOC earned a positive impression from the world about Chinese sports, which inspired me and guided me to continue my work as a sports official.”

There will doubtlessly be smiles for the camera Tuesday at the Chateau de Vidy, the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.

That’s appropriate.

Mr. He knew great happiness on the Olympic stage. He played a key role in Beijing's win — at the IOC session in Moscow — for the 2008 Summer Games.

He knew disappointment as well. In 1993 — at the IOC session in Monaco — Sydney defeated Beijing for the 2000 Games, literally by a couple votes. Wei said Mr. He wept privately.

Just imagine, though, and it is difficult now, all these years later, having seen the bang of the 2,008 drums in the 2008 opening ceremony, to have seen Michael Phelps go 8-for-8 in the pool at the Water Cube, to have seen Usain Bolt set world records on the track at the Bird’s Nest — imagine what must have been going through Mr. He’s mind.

Mr. He had been exiled to the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He literally did hard labor.

During those years, which saw ping-pong diplomacy, the authorities would sometimes call him in from the countryside. Why? Because he spoke French and English, and knew not just how to translate but, even more important, how to conduct himself with the people from overseas. When the foreigners would leave, Mr. He was sent back to the countryside, there to await a next round of ping-pong and artful finesse.

Mr. He had come from Shanghai, and the French Concession there. He earned a degree from Aurora University in Shanghai in electric mechanics in 1950, the year after the revolution. In 1952, he was part of the formal mainland Chinese delegation to the Helsinki Summer Games; to reiterate, there would not be another team from “China” at the Summer Olympics until Los Angeles in 1984.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. He was an international communications official in what was then the National Sports Commission. In the 1960s, he was a senior official for organizations such as the Chinese gymnastics and table tennis federations.

Then, though, came the Cultural Revolution.

“Along with his colleagues [at the sports commission], he was doing hard labor,” said Susan Brownell, a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis who is not only an authority on China and the Olympics but translated into English the story of Mr. He’s life, “He Zheliang and China’s Olympic Dream.”

The book is written by Mr. He’s wife, Liang Lijuan, and Brownell said of the years when Mr. He was in exile, “He would see his wife and children for a short time and then disappear again,” adding, “His partnership with his wife is inspiring, just a really great story of loyalty.”

In 1979, Mr. He was made deputy secretary general of the Chinese Olympic committee; in 1982, its secretary general.

That, though, was not his real break.

That came in 1981, when then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch worked it so that Mr. He became an IOC member.

This had two results.

One, it helped to significantly advance China’s cause within the IOC. Three years later, in Los Angeles, there was China back at the Summer Games. The next few bid cycles would see it emerging as a serious contender, and then a winner, for the Summer Games — with the bang of those 2,008 drums, it has been said, perhaps signaling the onset of the Chinese century.

Two, Mr. He’s IOC membership gave him a standing within China that would help him navigate any number of shifting domestic political currents. In 1981, Mr. He was still in his early 50s; he would be an IOC member until 2010, which Samaranch and others in the IOC hierarchy knew full well.

Mr. He would serve 16 years on the IOC’s policy-making executive board, four as a vice president.

Even as China increasingly engages with the world, there remains — and sometimes at the highest levels of government — a lingering xenophobia, or as Brownell put it, “a distrust of people seen to be too internationalized, or not Chinese enough.”

She said, “It was really interesting to watch him move among IOC members. The first time I had dinner with him, in 2000, I was watching him converse in French with his IOC colleagues, managing conversation and pouring out wine, and I was thinking I had never seen a mainland Chinese do that.

"He could also manage western facial expressions. I had never met anybody like that — never met anybody who could move in both worlds.”

The last time she had dinner with Mr. He and Ms. Liang was in 2012. “After that time,” Brownell said, “I knew I would never see him again. Sure enough, that was the last time.”

She said, giving voice to an emotion felt by many within the Olympic movement, “I really admired him. He was a really inspiring and admirable person,” a man whose work and legacy will live on, in China and well beyond — perhaps to 2022, perhaps far, far longer.

Agenda 2020 change: for real, or not so much?

MONACO — From the department of the obvious: no one spends $601 million over seven years unless they’re serious. The International Olympic Committee is dead-bang serious about the digital television channel its members approved Monday as part of president Thomas Bach’s 40-part “Agenda 2020” plan. As for the other 39 components, which call for shifts in the bid process and the Olympic program? History and common sense teach that expectations ought to be tempered.

The IOC is now 120 years old. For all the talk — big talk among some here in Monaco — about how Agenda 2020 is revolutionary or radical, the blunt reality is that the IOC has talked this sort of talk many, many times before.

The issue now is whether it’s going to walk the walk.

To be clear:

Bach deserves significant credit for putting the IOC to and through a year of asking — with the help of considerable number of world-class advisers — what it is and what it wants to be in these early years of the 21st century.

The IOC absolutely, positively needs to innovate.

Just as an example of the kind of comparison that’s readily out there, one that gets almost no attention in the mainstream media but that draws intense focus within the Olympic sphere because the numbers show so plainly what’s what:

The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi: 88 nations (and one independent Olympic participant), about 2,850 athletes. Cost: widely believed to be $51 billion.

The 2014 Asian Beach Games, just a few weeks ago in Phuket, Thailand: 43 of the 45 national Olympic committees showed up (only North Korea and Saudi Arabia did not), about 2,300 athletes. The entire thing — test event, training, competition, demolition — proved a temporary put-up and take-down that required all of one month. Cost: not anywhere in a galaxy near $51 billion.

A consequence, perhaps intended, because sports politics is not a game for the naive, is that this year bought Bach buy-in from virtually every corner of the Olympic firmament — the dozens of international federations, all 205 national Olympic committees, the IOC athletes’ commission and more.

This stakeholder consensus enabled Bach to run the table Monday — to see Agenda 2020 go a perfect 40-for-40, with the IOC members voting “unanimously” for each and then at the end for the entirety of the resolutions, there being zero no votes even though perhaps not all hands were raised at all times.

The only time the members were not in unanimity was mid-afternoon Monday, when maybe five or six said they might like to take a coffee break but Bach opted to push through.

The last time the IOC went through such a far-reaching institutional exercise was under duress, amid the late 1990s Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which saw 10 members resign or be expelled. That prompted the IOC to enact a 50-point reform plan.

It was all this that Bach assuredly had in mind when, at the opening of the 127th IOC session here in Monaco, he made a play on Shakespeare and Hamlet, saying the IOC had to change or be changed.

The TV channel marks such a change. That’s $601 million talking, and that is big money.

Everything else is incremental change, at best, until proven otherwise.

Because the IOC has been there, done that, many times before.

Consider:

“It would be very unfortunate, if the often exaggerated expenses incurred for the most recent Olympiads, a sizable part of which represented the construction of permanent buildings, which were moreover unnecessary — temporary structures would fully suffice, and the only consequence is to then encourage use of these permanent buildings by increasing the number of occasions to draw in the crowds — it would be very unfortunate if these expenses were to deter (small) countries from putting themselves forward to host the Olympic Games in the future.”

That is from Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron widely credited as the founder of the modern Olympic movement, and those are words he penned that were published in the Olympic Review magazine in April 1911.

Fast-forward to 2002 and 2003.

Under the direction of Jacques Rogge of Belgium, who had just taken over as president from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, the IOC dialed up an in-depth report, what came to be called the “Olympic Games Study Commission.”

Under the direction of longtime Canadian member Dick Pound, a former vice president who himself had run for the presidency, losing out to Rogge, the panel — just like Agenda 2020 — solicited public input, taking in thousands of suggestions. More than half related to the Olympic program; others were directed to the format of the Games, the bid process, TV coverage, the extravagance of the opening and closing ceremonies and more.

The IOC, according to the report, produced for the IOC’s session in Prague in July 2003, sought “to ensure that the host cities and their residents are left with the most positive legacy of venues, infrastructure, expertise and experience.”

In all, the document contains 117 specific recommendations, each aimed at managing the “inherent size, complexity and cost” of the Games. The IOC adopted all 117.

The upshot:

Beijing 2008 ($40 billion, at least). Sochi (that $51 billion).

And the 2022 Winter Games bid race (numerous cities drop out, only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, still in and not clear Almaty will stay in).

Monday’s action includes a provision in which the IOC created an “invitation” stage at which applicants will now be urged to discuss how their bids might be a more holistic fit with the Olympic universe.

OK, but look — this is going to take time, probably seven to 14 years, minimum, to figure out thoroughly.

Also, it’s one thing to say, all dreamy-like, you propose, you candidate city you, whether your butterflies and rainbows fit into your vision of the Games. What happens when that lovely little dream gets put to the acid test of a secret IOC vote?

This is the realpolitik of Agenda 2020.

Bach has, on numerous occasions, referred to Agenda 2020 as a “jigsaw puzzle” or “white paper.”

In a news conference here Saturday, before Monday’s discussion and votes, he called it a “strategy paper,” or “wishes for the future of the Olympic movement,” explaining, “We will not be discussing semicolons and bullet points.”

Now, though, the time has come to punctuate the conversation.

For all the headlines that rocketed Tuesday around the world about countries mounting dual-nation bids, those would be allowed only in “special circumstances.” Such circumstances would be few and far between and, again, the odds of any such bid winning a campaign for the Games — even more remote.

A real-life Agenda 2020 circumstance has already emerged, and it’s not pretty: the pushback in moving the bobsled run out of South Korea for the 2018 Winter Games?  Already intense. And so predictable, the governor of Gangwon province, Moon Soon Choi saying in a televised address Tuesday, “Sharing the competition with another city is not an option we can consider. The South Korean people would never accept it.”

When they were bidding, and they bid three times for the Winter Games, x million for a bobsled run and y million in annual maintenance expenses were legacy costs the Koreans knew they were confronting. The political and cultural costs of asking them to do something else — how much is that worth? Is that somewhere in Agenda 2020?

Just as challenging, albeit in a different context: the real-world hard work that lies ahead in re-shaping the Olympic program now that the IOC has shifted the focus from “sports” to “events.”

IOC policy, renewed Monday, calls for a cap of 10,500 athletes except in “special cases.” This begs the obvious question: which of the established sports now figures to give up spots to sports such as surfing, skateboarding, climbing or others seeking to gain entry into the Olympic program?

Consider track and field.

Seb Coe and Sergey Bubka — Coe has already declared — are going to be the two candidates for the IAAF presidency. Under what theory does it serve either to suggest, before the presidential election next Aug. 19 in Beijing, that track and field should give up even one slot from its Olympic quota?

Now, aquatics:

FINA launched high-diving at the 2013 world championships in Barcelona to great acclaim. It is experimenting with mixed-gender relays. It is promoting men in synchronized swimming, and has changed the name of that discipline — said to be at the urging of Bach himself — to “artistic swimming.” There’s urgency, in the name of gender equality, to put the women’s 1500 freestyle on the program.

So where does it seem likely that FINA wants to bend?

This can go on and on. Shooting. Rowing. And more.

Actually, there is an elegant solution — if, that is, the IOC wants to confront it.

The Olympic accreditation system gives athletes a placard with a capital letter “A” on it. Some of these “A” placards can feature a lower-case letter as well for others in the athlete camp; there are a variety of different letters. Altogether, the different “A” placards total roughly 10,500.

One of the secrets within the Olympic world is that perhaps 900 of those 10,500 “A” accreditations have not over the years belonged to, well, athletes. They have been assigned over the years to sponsors or, very quietly, to security personnel.

If the IOC wanted to take all of those 900 and move them to a new category, voilà! Problem solved.

Even a third, 300, would go far in addressing the practicalities.

Moving on, because the 2022 campaign remains a real challenge, and Agenda 2020 may well accentuate the matter.

One of the 40 resolutions affirms the IOC’s support for non-discrimination.

“It is not only with regard to sexual orientation,” Bach said at a Monday news conference, referring to the firestorm of controversy triggered by Russian legislation in advance of the Sochi Games. “We will be looking for the guarantee of the host country that the principles of the Olympic charter apply to all the participants during the Olympic Games.”

This ought to go over just swimmingly in either Beijing and Almaty.

Who remembers the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Games? The protests over human rights that marred the 2008 torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco?

Pound, as the session was drawing to a close Tuesday, dropped the bomb of suggesting the IOC re-open the 2022 race with the newly enacted Agenda 2020 procedures, declaring it would be “leveling the playing field” and “doing our best to promote the Olympic movement.”

No, Bach responded immediately, the IOC’s policy-making executive board had decided a couple months ago that the only cities that could be in the race were those that had applied earlier. “There will be no change in this procedure,” he said.

Thus: the first post-Agenda 2020 Games are now destined to go a non-democratic nation; western protests over human rights would seem an inevitability; and more.

Bring it on, all of you who believe the IOC signed on Monday for big change.

That change, again, is going to take time, and lots of it — if, indeed, it ever manifests itself at all.

The TV channel — that absolutely is for real. Anything else?

Time is the measure of all things.

At that Monday news conference, Bach was asked what he hoped 20 years from now how he would feel about the passage of Agenda 2020.

“When I look from above — this is difficult to say. I hope very much that this then will prove to be an important and positive day for the Olympic movement. I hope very much, I’m confident, I’m sure that today we took the right decisions with a vision for the future of the Olympic movement that we are getting the Games and the Olympic movement closer to the youth and to the people.

“We with this day today and with the Olympic Agenda 2020, we are also fostering our relationship with society at large. I hope in 20 years that I can still live it, first of all. I can look back to this day with satisfaction and happiness and maybe a little bit of relief.”

Agenda 2020 goes 40-for-40

MONACO — To much self-promotion and -congratulation, the International Olympic Committee on Monday “unanimously” enacted all 40 points of president Thomas Bach’s review and potential reform plan, dubbed “Agenda 2020.” The potential game-changer: approval of a digital TV channel. Other significant elements: shifts in the bid process as well as to the Olympic program.

The action Monday gave Bach what he craved, approval of what he has variously described as a "jigsaw puzzle" and a “white paper.” Now comes the hard work: implementation.

How to balance considerations such as finance and the essence of Olympic tradition? Should the bobsled track for the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea be moved to save money? Isn’t it ridiculous — or worse — to pressure the Koreans to give up building a track to move the event to, say, Japan, when, for instance, the matter of the 1936 Berlin marathon, won by Korean Kee Chong Sohn, who had to compete under the Japanese flag, is still very much alive in Seoul and precincts beyond?

To move it to, say, the United States? Canada? Europe? Wouldn’t that make the Olympics something of a united world championships, the very thing Sport Accord and international judo federation president Marius Vizer had proposed just last year?

The Koreans bid twice for the Games, for 2010 and 2014, before winning for 2018. It’s not as if they didn’t know the Winter Olympics included a bobsled run, right?

More of the struggles to come:

Yay for a move from “sports” to “events” if that means the possibility of fresh additions to the program, and particularly in the Summer Games — say, for instance, surfing.

But with a cap of 10,500 athletes except in “special cases,” the policy affirmed anew Monday, which of the established sports can be counted on to give up spots to newcomers? Track and field? Swimming? Shooting? Rowing?

In a word: ha.

To be sure, Monday ushered in evolution, not revolution.

In a style that can only be described as only in the IOC, the 40 measures were voted on one by one and by a show of hands, the 96 members in attendance passing each resolution in what was described from the head table as “unanimously,” even though it was sometimes plain not all hands went up.

To be abundantly clear: no hands went up to register a vote against.

Why did the IOC not register the votes on each measure through electronic ballots, which — in December 2014 — would be simple enough? Which the IOC actually does (though it does not attribute votes cast to individual members) for its bid-city ballots?

For those who might be befuddled, it must be understood that what transpired Monday is, in its way, progress.

In IOC terms, it amounted to something that might be termed transparency. The votes were shown on closed-circuit television that was beamed out to the internet. Thus some — if not all — the members could actually be seen raising their hands.

Moreover, the IOC is not, repeat not, a democracy.

Here is another fundamental principle:

The IOC works best when the president is firmly in control.

Bach, who is German, was elected in Buenos Aires in September 2013, replacing Jacques Rogge of Belgium.

Rogge served from 2001. He took over from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, who served for 21 years.

Rogge sat Monday at the head table. Bach referred to him, among others, in the ceremonial introductions of the address that opened Sunday night’s 127th IOC session. That was, well, it. Not a word from the former president.

Since being elected in Buenos Aires, Bach has clearly sought to model himself after Samaranch, who operated with a direct yet deft touch.

For more than a year, Bach has worked energetically to secure buy-in across, within and without the Olympic movement for Agenda 2020. Though Rogge was not invited Monday to speak, Didier Burkhalter, president of the Swiss confederation, was — the IOC, of course, based in Lausanne. Agenda 2020, Burkhalter said, would enable the movement to “be proactive and change rather than be changed.”

The key item on the docket was always the creation of the digital TV channel.

To get there, though, the IOC had to work through hours of agenda items.

First up Monday morning: changes to the bid process, including a provision that in exceptional circumstances would allow events to be held outside host cities or countries.

Insiders noted that many of the bid changes, aimed at streamlining and reducing the cost of campaigning, evoked the Madrid 2020 bid that lost out to Tokyo, also in Buenos Aires.

It takes nothing away from the winning Tokyo bid to note that with as with many things in the Olympic universe, it can be a matter of timing: Madrid’s bids, particularly the 2020 campaign, its third in a row, may well have articulated an apt strategy but caught the IOC at a wrong time.

Around lunch time Monday in Monaco, the IOC moved to change the Olympic program from its traditional focus on “sports” to “events,” a potential boon for sports such as surfing, skateboarding, cricket, climbing and, as soon as the Tokyo 2020 Games, baseball and softball — again, if that is, spots can be found around that 10,500 cap.

“This is really a major step forward in the modernization of the Olympic Games,” Bach said as it passed, of course unanimously.

By mid-afternoon, the members affirmed their support for what’s called “Principle 6,” including non-discrimination on sexual orientation, a response to the firestorm over legislation in Russia before the 2014 Games.

“This is a very important step,” Bach said. “Congratulations.”

Approval of the TV channel came right after that.

Bach, speaking from the head table, called such a channel “crucial” for Olympic athletes and values between editions of the Games.

Yiannis Exarchos, head of Olympic Broadcasting Services, said it would be “the always-on, multimedia platform,” aimed at being the “ultimate” Olympic content source, initially digital only.

“This will be a truly collaborative effort [among] the Olympic family,” he said, also calling it “a challenge of Olympic proportions.”

“This will be a historic step in our existence and one we should embrace,” he urged the members.

Start-up costs were fixed at roughly $446 million euros, plus a 10 percent cushion, meaning $490 million euros all-in, or $601 million at current exchange rates.

Ser Miang Ng of Singapore, a former vice president who now chairs the IOC finance commission, said the channel represented a “substantial but necessary” investment. Break-even, he said: seven to 10 years.

“These figures are more than achievable,” said Bach, who chaired the TV channel working group.

“I think this is an excellent concept and the sooner we can launch this the better,” Larry Probst, the U.S. Olympic Committee chairman and new IOC member, said from the floor.

After the channel was approved, once more unanimously, Bach said, “This is a great, great step forward. I wish all the ones who will be involved in making this happen really good luck. This is really a historical step for the IOC an the Olympic movement. Thank you very much for your approval.”

Richard Peterkin, the witty IOC member from the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia, tweeted early in Monday’s session:

Looks like we will have an abundance of unanimous acceptance votes on the recommendations. Either a good sign or we are a bunch of sheep.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

A few minutes later, he posted another tweet:

Just to clarify. There's nothing wrong with sheep. They taste great, make lovely wool sweaters, and know a good thing when they see it.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

After lunch, yet again:

My arm hurts from voting yes so often. would it be different if the votes were by blind ballot? I doubt it. Other options in the future.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

From the floor in the afternoon, Peterkin said, speaking directly to Bach, “Like President Obama, you are a strong proponent of change. I hope you have more success than he has.”

Bach had predicted at a news conference Saturday that all would go smoothly here.

Of course he did. He had lined everything up in advance, Samaranch-style.

It was “very encouraging,” he said at that news conference, “to see that all the stakeholders of the Olympic movement are actually supporting this Olympic Agenda 2020,” including representatives of the international sports federations, summer and winter, the national Olympic committees and athletes committees.

Beyond which, as longtime IOC member and former vice president Dick Pound pointed out in an interview Monday, the topics themselves lent themselves to an easy show of hands in favor of yes votes.

“It’s pretty much motherhood and apple pie,” Pound said, adding, “These things are obvious. Friction will be in the events. What does athletics,” meaning track and field, “have to give to create some space for new sports? What does shooting have to give? What does swimming have to give? And there will be a lot of wailing about that,” down the line.

“You look at the team sports. Do you cut a 14-team draw down to 12? There are lots of ways to slice the pie.”

Pound served as IOC vice president under Samaranch. The comparisons between Bach and Samaranch seemed manifest.

Referring to Bach, Pound said, “He’s well prepared. You look at those committees, especially the outsiders. He has got good traction there. So you’re getting a lot of good thought having gone into it. Things have been circulated. You read them — there’s very little there that has a big hook out there that you want to grab onto and want to fight. I think it has been well-managed, well-directed, well-meaning."

Pound continued: “… I’m trying to think, somebody raised the visit issue, very tentatively,” meaning whether the members could visit cities bidding for the Games, a notion Bach had emphatically shot down before all arrived in Monaco.

“There may be people with hair my color who may object to having to retire before the age of 70 or something. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone will throw themselves in front of the train for that purpose.”

The image of whether to tinker in any significant respect with the age limit didn’t even begin to come up until 5:45 p.m. — too late in the day, really, for anybody to do anything about it, given that Bach had determined mid-afternoon that he was going to hustle the members through all 40 bullet points in one day.

As the clock ticked toward 6 p.m., Bach did call on Vitaly Smirnov, the Russian member who holds a special place in the IOC, what is called the doyen, the longest-serving member. Smirnov, carefully reading from a script, backed the measure on the table that would allow for a one-time extension of a member’s term beyond age 70, to 74, for a maximum of five cases at a given time.

So deft.

So Samaranch-like, really.

“Even in, as you say, my wildest dreams, I would not have expected this,” Bach said in a wrap-up news conference Monday night, referring to the 40-for-40 unanimous yes votes, going on to deflect credit away from himself and onto the members, just the way Samaranch used to:

“It showed the great determination of the members for these reforms to make this progress and to make this happen.”

Francesco Ricci Bitti, president of the international tennis federation and the association of summer Olympic international sports federations, said, “We did open today a big window but most of the work still needs to be done. That’s the most difficult part of our job. It’s a historical day.

“Now we have to proceed step by step. If someone has signed a contract like Tokyo, they cannot change everything. There must be a balance.”

Bach's Agenda 2020 revival meeting

MONACO — Proclaiming, “We are successful,” International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said on the eve of a potentially historic session convened to consider a review and potential reform plan he has dubbed “Agenda 2020” that “success is the best reason for change.” “If we do not address [upcoming] challenges here and now,” Bach told the more than 100 IOC members at the seaside Forum Grimaldi, “we will be hit by them very soon. If we do not drive these changes ourselves, others will drive us to them. We want to be the leaders of change and not the object of change."

Mindful that he was speaking Sunday evening not just to the IOC membership but via the internet to a worldwide audience, Bach sought to turn the opening of the 127th IOC session into something of a revival meeting before the committee gets down to the hard work Monday morning of considering the 40 bullet points that make up Agenda 2020.

In all, the plan amounts to the most wide-ranging action since the IOC enacted a series of moves in late 1999 after the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. The IOC will debate and vote, one by one, on each of the 40 recommendations; debate and voting are expected to carry through Monday and Tuesday.

This assembly comes as several countries, all European, have been scared off by the costs of hosting the Games, in particular by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. A number withdrew from the 2022 Winter Games contest, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, and it is far from clear that Almaty will stay in the race through the finish line next summer.

The key Agenda 2020 item: creation of a digital Olympic television channel.

Also on the docket: shifts in the bid process, a transition in the Olympic program from its current focus on “sports” to “events,” a renewed commitment to non-discrimination and a number of elements dealing with financial transparency and governance.

Bach said in a news conference Saturday that he heads into the two-day workshop confident he has the support of key stakeholders for all 40 points.

Anything, though, is possible at an Olympic session. At the Sochi get-together last February, there were 211 “interventions,” as comments and questions from the floor are called in IOC-speak.

Behind the scenes, however, it was thought that the only one of the 40 that might draw real pushback is Recommendation 37, which calls for the full IOC session — upon the recommendation of the policy-making executive board — to allow for a one-time extension of an IOC member’s term beyond the current age limit of 70, to 74. The extension would be allowed for a maximum of five cases at any given time.

The issue? There might be some significant number of members, well beyond four, who are turning 70 who want to stay on beyond 74.

The other complication bubbling backstage Sunday night?

The second piece to air on German television alleging doping and other serious irregularities rooted in Russian sport, particularly track and field.

The airing of the production can hardly be seen as accidental. After all, it's on German television, in the days before and, now, during what should be the big moment for Bach, the German IOC president.

At issue, potentially: after a year pressing Agenda 2020, would potential misconduct somewhere in the reaches of the so-called "Olympic family" steal or dim the spotlight?

The first show aired last Wednesday; the next day, track's governing body, the IAAF, put out a news release saying it noted "grave allegations" and the federation's ethics commission had already launched an investigation. Late Sunday, the IAAF put out another release, this one saying an English-language transcript from Sunday's show would be forwarded to the ethics panel.

Bach made no mention from the lectern of such matters. Instead, he sought Sunday evening one final time to press his case for Agenda 2020.

“If I would deliver this speech in a theater,” he said, making like Hamlet, “I would say with an ironic smile, of course: to change or be changed, that is the question.”

Of course, in that scene, a despondent Hamlet is contemplating suicide.

On Sunday evening in Monaco, Bach — since he chose Hamlet, and now if we move just a few lines down in the scene, the president cheerfully bearing “the insolence of Office’’ — proved relentlessly upbeat.

“Whenever you initiate change,” he asked rhetorically, “you have to answer three questions: Why? What? How?”

To begin, he answered, “We need to change because sport today is too important in society to ignore the rest of society. We are not living on an island, we are living in the middle of a modern, diverse, digital society.”

And more, here speaking in French, with this fascinating, never-before-spelled out explication: “If we want our values of Olympism — the values of excellence, respect, friendship, dialogue, diversity, non-discrimination, tolerance, fair play, solidarity, development and peace — if we want these values to remain relevant in society, the time for change is now.”

This, too, back in English: “For us, change has to be more than a cosmetic effort or a procedure. Change has to have a goal. This goal is progress. Progress for us means strengthening sport in society by virtue of our values.”

That was the why.

He turned to the what.

“We are living in a world more fragile than ever,” Bach said, one beset by “political crisis, financial crisis, health crisis, terrorism, war and civil war,” one in which the “Olympic message is perhaps more relevant than ever.”

But: people not only have to “hear our message, they have to believe in our message, they have to ‘get the message.’ “

Thus the dozens of action points in Agenda 2020, he said, adding what has become over the past year one of his favorite taglines: “We have an interest and a responsibility to get the couch potatoes off the couch. Only children playing sport can be future athletes. Only children playing sport can enjoy the educational and health values of sport.”

The digital channel, he said, is intended — in part — to give Olympic athletes and sports the “worldwide media exposure they deserve” between editions of the Games.

“This modern world,” he said, “demands more transparency, more participation, higher standards of integrity. This modern world takes less for granted, has no place for complacency, questions even those with the highest reputation. This world takes much less on faith.”

Agenda 2020, he declared, takes on these matters under the broad themes of sustainability, credibility and youth.

In another of his favorite lines, Bach said, Agenda 2020 is “like a jigsaw puzzle,” adding, “Every piece, every recommendation has the same importance. Only when you put all these 40 pieces together [do] you see the whole picture. You see progress in ensuring the success of the Olympic Games, progress in safeguarding the Olympic values and progress in strengthening sport in society.”

Which led him to this third, and final, question — how to achieve such progress?

It needs, he said, cooperation.

Since being elected IOC president in September 2013, he said, he had met with 95 heads of state or government, declaring, “In most of these meetings the Olympic Agenda 2020 and our relations with the world of politics played a major role.”

Unsaid: he has not met with President Obama, and seems unlikely to take such a meeting before Obama’s term expires in January 2017, the White House still frosty over Chicago’s first-round 2009 exit in the 2016 Summer Games vote won by Rio de Janeiro — though the U.S. Olympic Committee has, to its credit, made great strides in repairing many “Olympic family” relationships since.

Bach, as expected, touted what he called a “new sense of cooperation and partnership” with the United Nations.

As he neared the end of his remarks, Bach said:

“Dear friends and colleagues, now this Olympic Agenda 2020 is in your hands. Now it is up to you to show that this is our vision for the future of the Olympic movement.

Referring to the French baron widely credited with founding the modern movement some 120 years ago, Bach said, “Our founder Pierre de Coubertin, I am sure, is following us closely these days and with great sympathy, because he was always a man of reforms.

“He said, ‘Courage … and hope! … charge boldly through the clouds and do not be afraid. The future belongs to you.’ “

Bach added a moment later, turning to his catchphrase from last year’s presidential election, “Let us demonstrate the true meaning of unity in diversity. Let us together shape an even brighter future for this magnificent, truly global Olympic movement.”

Olympic channel and 39 more bullet points

MONACO — Of the 40 recommendations the International Olympic Committee made public Tuesday after a year-long study, there’s one, and perhaps one only, that is a game-changer. The rest would appear to be absolutely well-meaning but let’s-wait-and-see how they play out in practice. The difference maker? The creation of an Olympic channel.

The channel, particularly if you know the IOC, which typically moves with great tradition and caution, holds enormous potential to make the Olympic enterprise — at least in the public imagination — more than just a once-every-two-years event.

If the Olympic movement can, truly, become an everyday presence on-air and online in the lives of young people, then the IOC will have effected not just significant but perhaps revolutionary change through president Thomas Bach’s “Agenda 2020” year-long study process, which went public with the release Tuesday of the 40 recommendations.

The full IOC membership will meet here in Monaco Dec. 8-9 to vote on the full package.

In a statement released by the IOC at its Lausanne, Switzerland headquarters, Bach said Tuesday, “These 40 recommendations are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When you put them together, a picture emerges that shows the IOC safeguarding the uniqueness of the Olympic Games and strengthening sport in society.”

This must be stressed:

What was released Tuesday is a framework, a structure, a road map. Call it what you will.

What will make any of it meaningful — beyond merely the channel — is, assuming the members vote it in, the implementation. The devil is in the details and there are literally hundreds if not thousands of details to be thought about if not worked out.

That’s why, on the one hand, the 20+20 recommendations, as the IOC likes to promote them, must be viewed with sensible caution.

On the other hand, they surely should be seen with some due optimism as well.

In a piece published Monday in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, Sebastian Coe, who headed the London 2012 Summer Games, reminded one and all that he closed that event by saying,

“If the 20th century was about the globalization of sports, largely through the Olympic movement, then the first decade of the 21st century must be about reconnecting young people with sport.”

Coe, at a meeting here where the IAAF voted Tuesday to award its 2019 world championships to Doha, Qatar, also said in the Telegraph piece, “The challenge the IOC laid down for itself covered three fundamental areas of its proposition. How can we be sustainable so more cities in more countries around the world are able to host the Olympic Games? How can we remain credible – the athletes, the organization, the events? And third, how do we give greater access to Olympic sport to people 365 days a year?”

And: “Some will think the IOC has gone too far, created too many recommendations and addressed too many things, taken a scattergun approach. Others will think it has not gone far enough, that the recommendations will take too long to implement. I do not think it matters. What matters most is that the IOC has chosen to take its destiny in its own hands rather than wait for others to impose a route map.”

This, truly, is the key.

Along with communication.

Sometimes, especially these past few weeks as the 2022 Winter Games bid process has teetered, you do wonder if the IOC gets both communication strategy and the corollary optics.

Why, for instance, was it so important for the IOC to release the 40 recommendations at the very same time the IAAF, the federation that is the most important of the summer sports, was meeting to decide the site of its 2019 championships? Isn’t this a movement? What about the concept of an Olympic family where everyone is in this together?

The IOC went to lengths Tuesday to invite a number of athletes from around the world to a “roundtable” chaired by Bach at which the 40 recommendations were purportedly discussed.

The IOC in its release Tuesday described an “inclusive and transparent Olympic Agenda 2020 process.” True, the IOC solicited submissions from all over — which led, in turn, to a year of closed-door debate that produced 40 recommendations just made public for the first time Tuesday. That’s “transparent”? As for “inclusive”? Of the 11 athletes invited to IOC headquarters, seven were European. Not one was from the Americas. Two were German, like Bach. One came from Iran, where the government is currently holding as prisoner a British-Iranian woman, Ghoncheh Ghavami, 25, who had the gall to attend a men’s volleyball match.

Under what circumstances did the IOC deem it so vital at this particular moment to invite Kaveh Mehrabi, who represented Iran in men’s singles in badminton at the 2008 Beijing Games, finishing in a tie for 33rd? That he was a representative of the WADA athletes’ committee? There was no one else in the entire world available?

Bach has made it a point of his presidency to note that sport and politics do indeed mix. In this instance, the odds are very good that the Iranian government has told the IOC in a short note that the Ghavami matter is all politics, not sport.

Sometimes, you just wonder.

Like, when recommendation 21 suggests the IOC should strengthen the IOC’s advocacy capacity, particularly with “intergovernmental organizations and agencies,” and notes the IOC should “encourage and assist [national Olympic committees] in their advocacy efforts.”

How?

The outside world has paid little attention to the Youth Olympic Games. So it would seem a very good idea to evaluate the YOG proposition and, at the least, move them to a non-Olympic year beginning in 2023. (Recommendation 25)

Maybe, as all involved would quietly understand, this is the first step toward eliminating them altogether.

Moves to blend sport and culture (Recommendation 26) were part of the discussion during last year’s IOC presidential election.

It’s practical in the extreme to comply with good governance (Recommendation 27) and, please, further increase financial transparency (Recommendation 29).

The world is, as is understood, full of white papers. Is this destined to be one of those? Or will it lead to real change?

See Recommendation 8: “forge relationships with the professional leagues.” What does that mean? How does one describe the IOC’s relationship with Major League Baseball, given that baseball is on the Olympic outs? Or with the NHL, where every four years it’s a hold-your-breath to see if the best players in the world are going to take part in the Games?

As for the first few recommendations: these seek to limit the cost of bidding for the Games, to make it more of an “invitation,” to promote the use of existing facilities, to allow organization of sports or disciplines outside the host city or “in exceptional cases” outside the host country notably for reasons of geography and sustainability.”

Bach, speaking to a small group of reporters at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, said, “We want to create more diversity in the candidatures. There is no one-size-fits-all solution,” according to Associated Press.

Hypothetically, say, Los Angeles gets picked for an Olympics. But San Francisco offers better sailing. OK. That’s easy. But what if it makes sense to play, say, basketball in the Bay Area as well? Or rugby? The U.S. Olympic Committee gets to promote a Los Angeles-based California bid.

But what does it mean, really, to promote a two-country bid and how would that play with the members? No one knows.

Are these changes really going to make bidding for the Games cheaper? Here’s a bet: no. When countries want the big prize, there is very little the IOC can do to stop them from doing what it takes.

Recommendation 3 calls for the IOC to create and monitor a list of bid-city consultants. To repeat a joke that quickly made the rounds Tuesday: what, like, are they sex workers?

The 2020 plan calls for the Summer Games program to be capped at 10,500 athletes, 5,000 accredited coaches and support personnel and 310 events. That’s more or less the same number of athletes and up eight events from current levels. (Recommendation 9)

The idea (Recommendation 10) is to move from a “sport-based to an event-based program.” Again, all well and good. So where are the cuts from the existing sports going to come from so that, for instance, surfing, skateboard, rock climbing and others are going to get their athletes in?

Is the IAAF, just to take one, happily going to start chopping its events to make way for the new kids on the block? Swimming, which just got promoted to A-level status, joining track and field? Gymnastics? Volleyball? Something’s got to give. Where?

Recommendation 10 also says that the IOC session itself gets to decide on the inclusion of any sport, which for an American is akin to getting a Constitutional amendment passed (for non-Americans: extraordinarily difficult). But it then allows for flexibility: it also says organizing committees can make a proposal for the inclusion of one or more additional events for their Games. (hypothetical: baseball and softball for Tokyo 2020.)

One more thing.

Recommendation 15 says the IOC’s “ultimate goal is to protect clean athletes” and that, when it comes to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, there needs to be a philosophy change. Instead of a focus on cheats, it says, “change the philosophy to protecting clean athletes.”

That would be most welcome.

The IOC talked a big game Tuesday. In December it will be time to vote on this plan. Then, if it really means what it says, it will be time to put all these words into action.

That will be the real test of Agenda 2020.

Sheikh Ahmad at ANOC gala: "Our job is to make dreams come true"

BANGKOK — Far too often, Olympic meetings are tedious affairs in which reports that have already been passed out well ahead of time are then read out from the lectern, word for word, to those seated at banks of tables below. Little wonder time sometimes seems as if it is passing like molasses. And then there is an affair like the more than 200-nation Assn. of National Olympic Committee meeting here in Bangkok, headed by the charismatic Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, punctuated by Friday night’s first ANOC gala awards dinner, which may yet assume the role — which it clearly aims to be — of the Oscars of the Olympic sports world. Here was an assembly that, mostly, got it right. Starting with a focus on the athletes.

There were presentations Friday afternoon, yes, from Beijing and Almaty, the two remaining candidates in the 2022 Winter Games race, Beijing promising a safe and secure “joyful rendezvous upon pure ice and snow,” and note the emphasis on “pure” amid significant pollution concerns, Almaty claiming it would be not only affordable but the most compact bid in 30 years.

The emotional touchstone, however, came just a little bit earlier in the day, when an ANOC youth working group, chaired by Sebastian Coe, the London 2012 Summer Games chairman who himself won four Olympic medals in the 1980s, two gold, and is now an IAAF vice president, put forward Isabel Goodall, 19, from the remote Pacific island nation of Palau.

Isabel was, for sure, nervous to be standing in front of so many people. She would say afterward that she practiced her speech “quite a lot, quite a lot.” Asked how many times she went over her remarks so she would not make not even a single mistake, she said, “I lost count.”

She nailed it, and this came toward the end of what she had to say:

“We all believe that sport can change lives. We learned that we can improve our reality when we open our minds and try to understand the reality of others from different countries.”

This is the essence of the Olympic mission.

The IOC is trying to figure out what it is that the cherished teen and young 20s demographic wants.

There it is, and in just a few words.

It is what Beijing and Almaty are trying to win for. And even now, all those thinking about bidding for the Summer 2024 Games.

It is why Rio is in it for 2016, Pyeongchang for 2018, Tokyo for 2020.

At least in theory.

It’s also what should — emphasis, should — be at the core of each and every one of the 40 recommendations underpinning IOC president Thomas Bach’s “Agenda 2020” potential reforms, to be distributed soon to the IOC membership for review and a vote at an assembly in early December in Monaco.

Bach, addressing the ANOC session Friday, said, “The time to change is now. We have been discussing for one year. Now is the time for agreeing on something.

“If we want to preserve our values, we have to move. If we stand still, we are falling behind.”

There were a fair number of IOC members in the house Friday night for the gala.

Here were the values not only to be preserved but to be advanced.

Canadian women’s hockey player Caroline Ouellette now has four Olympic golds, including that memorable gold from Sochi, as well as five world championship golds and four world championship silvers. She accepted the ANOC award for “best female team [from] Sochi 2012.”

When boys and girls are given the chance to play sports, she said, they are “empowered” to dream big and change the world.

Scott Blackmun, the chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee, similarly accepted an award for “best team [from] London 2012.”

Doing so on behalf of America’s athletes, he said, he and everyone at the USOC is “proud to be part of something much more important,” the big-picture ideals of the Olympic movement, one-to-one change through the inspiration that heroes and dreams can bring, of “making the world a better place.”

The sheikh had said before the event, highlighting as well cultural performances by each of the five continental associations paying tribute to the diversity among the world’s national Olympic committees, “Sport has the power to bring us all together and unite us, and that is what we will be celebrating at the [gala].”

Frankly — these are technical issues for a show clearly aiming big — with dance performances Friday that included the likes of an Olympic-caliber flamenco show from Spain, samba from Brazil and haka from New Zealand, and more, the cultural elements ran on too long.

Yes — the show started late and ended on time. Even so — the dance performances were too much.

OK. What to expect? It was the first ANOC gala.

But since the gala was broadcast live in Thailand, as well as distributed to more than 25 broadcasters around the world with a potential reach of 350 million households, it was way more than just a dinner. Think about all good awards shows — they’re more than a banquet. You have to imagine way more than what’s happening in the room itself. If something is going to play on global TV, it needs way more rigor than the show presented Friday night.

Also: IOC member and former equestrian champion Mikaela Cojuangco-Jaworski of the Philippines and Brazilian actor Juliano Cazarré served as co-hosts.

Let’s just say this about Cazarré: for sure Cojuangco-Jaworski ought to be asked back.

Back to the sheikh: after he got off the stage, he was mobbed like a rock star. His security guy stood patiently by as he posed for pictures with Bach, with former IOC president Jacques Rogge, with everyone and anyone.

The sheikh has, in two-plus years, turned ANOC into a formidable institution in Olympic politics; here he was re-elected ANOC president. He is himself one of the singularly most interesting figures in the movement — a creative and innovative thinker and wielder of significant influence who may yet play an outsize role in deciding, among other things, whether China or Kazakhstan wins for 2022.

Among his other positions: the sheikh is head of the Olympic Council of Asia. Remember, one and all, China and Kazakhstan are both in Asia.

If the conventional wisdom is already that Beijing is the heavy-money favorite — well, the vote is a long way away. (It’s next summer.)

Friday night was all about the athletes.

Really.

It was a good reminder.

For everyone involved in the Olympic movement.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah said from the stage, closing the first ANOC gala, “This is only the start,” adding, “We have to create,” to “dream, dream, dream.”

Because he said, for emphasis, “Our job is to make dreams come true.”

No bid visits: will 'Agenda 2020' yield real change?

The International Olympic Committee tends, generally speaking, to move with tradition and with careful adherence to process in mind. Thus perhaps, maybe, possibly the final outcome of the all-members session in December in Monaco, at which the IOC will review President Thomas Bach’s “Agenda 2020” review and potential reform plan, will produce far-reaching change. But the signal sent at the close of Thursday’s policy-making executive board meeting seems decidedly otherwise.

In announcing that the ban on IOC member visits to bid cities will remain locked into place, Bach shot down what could have been one of the most welcome changes to IOC practice, a move that could have ushered in an era of fresh transparency and governance.

Instead, even as he sketched out for reporters on a teleconference some of the highlights of the “Agenda 2020” recommendations — saying he wants the bidding procedure to be more of an “invitation” to cities than an “application for tender” and wants proposals for a more flexible sports program — the concern reasonably has to be that change will end up, in practice, being incremental or at the margins, not the sort of shake-up that quite clearly is in order.

The challenge, as is evident to everyone familiar with the Olympic movement, is that it needs to figure out the 21st century.

When, as a for instance, you only have two cities in the entire world — Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan — that want in on one of your flagship opportunities, the 2022 Winter Games, and when, moreover, you, the IOC, have $880 million to give away to a winning city’s organizing committee and still there are only two entries in the derby, something systemic is not right.

On a different level, the IOC needs a crash course in how today’s teens and 20-somethings talk and think so it can then speak to these young people, wherever in the world they are, in the language of their hopes and dreams.

Full details of the set of 40 Agenda 2020 recommendations — or as the IOC press release slyly put it, “20 + 20” (get it?) — were not released Thursday; they need to circulate yet to the IOC members; all 40 are due to be made public in November.

One significant change was disclosed: the introduction of an Olympic TV channel. This is, for the Olympic movement, big stuff.

The rest: unclear.

What is absolutely clear is this:

The IOC works best when the president is large and in charge.

Unquestionably, this is Bach’s IOC. That executive board meeting was supposed to run three days. They got through everything in two — less, actually, because the closing teleconference was at 2:30 in the afternoon central European time.

This is indicative of a president who had his priorities for the meeting detailed and his board, well, on board.

Ladies and gentlemen — nothing wrong with any of that. Thanks now for the good work, and go home. See you in Monaco in December for the discussion and the voting, everyone.

Presumably, by the way, the votes will be more or less worked out ahead of time. There will be a lot of phone calls between now and then.

This is the way the IOC functions most smoothly. There's nothing undue or nefarious or even just weird about it.

It took Bach’s predecessor, Jacques Rogge, years to figure this out. Rogge experimented with enhanced democracy within the IOC and — it was a mess. Elected in 2001, it perhaps wasn’t until after the 2004 Athens Olympics, maybe even a couple years later, that Rogge made it clear that, OK, I’m the boss.

Bach — this analysis is absolutely intended to be complimentary — came to office last September and, in a myriad of ways, in particular the robust manner he has sought to delineate sport’s role in a political world, wasted zero time making it plain he is running the show.

There have always been two ways to view Agenda 2020, the blueprint of which was right there in Bach’s campaign manifesto.

You could say it has left the IOC in the stasis that marked Rogge’s final year-plus in office for yet another year. (While, of course, to be thoroughly fair, the IOC got through the Winter Games in Sochi and the Youth Games in Nanjing.)

Or you could argue that Agenda 2020 gave Bach a year to get buy-in from most (no one ever gets all) of the stakeholders throughout the Olympic movement, and beyond.

If you see it this latter way — pretty darn clever, right?

It’s pretty darn clever because Bach is himself a most shrewd guy and, as well, learned a great deal from many people, including Rogge and, before that, Juan Antonio Samaranch.

The overarching question throughout Agenda 2020 has been how far Bach can — could? is willing to? — push the IOC.

This is where the bid visits issue is so telling.

The visits were banned as a response to the scandal that erupted in late 1998 amid Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games. Ten IOC members resigned or were expelled for taking cash, gifts or other inducements.

In recent years, some have pushed to reinstate the visits.

For instance, would the IOC really have voted for Sochi if the members had been able to go there and seen — what? Virtually nothing was there in 2007. Could the IOC have saved itself a (purported) $51 billion headache if there had been visits?

Further, the real issue is one of trust — revolving around the members themselves. If you take a step back, there are two parties in the bid game, the cities and the members. The IOC long ago purged itself of those members it couldn’t trust. Remember, the cities are the ones seeking favor — they’re the ones with the gifts and inducements most readily at hand. So, now, who needs to be curbed, the cities or the members?

To that end, Bach faces a credibility gap when he flies around the world and talks to anyone — you name it, anyone from prime ministers to civic groups — about the IOC itself. Is he supposed to be taken as seriously as he could be, as he should be, when his own members can’t be trusted to visit the cities bidding for his franchise?

This is why a debate in Monaco about bid visits could have been one signaling a renewed era of IOC transparency.

Instead, Bach said Thursday to reporters: “I hope my executive board members and other members will forgive me if I say here already, but there will be no recommendation for a change in this regard.”

Change is what the IOC needs.

How much it’s going to get is what remains to be seen.