USATF bids for kumbaya, for real

INDIANAPOLIS — For years, USA Track & Field was arguably the most dysfunctional of the major sports federations in the American Olympic scene. Personality politics ruled. Budgets stayed flat. Almost every decision seemed to be met with argument or that more basic question: what’s in it for me?

As any business or management expert would affirm, culture change is maybe the hardest thing ever.

Underway now at USATF, for anyone not stuck in the past and willing to look with more than a glancing pass, is a profound culture shift for the better.

Instead of being combative — first, last and always — USATF increasingly finds itself on the road to collaboration and cooperation.

A session Saturday at an Indianapolis hotel room underscored that reality amid a master’s class in leadership from Steve Miller, the USATF board chair, and Max Siegel, the organization’s chief executive.

Siegel came dressed for the meeting in an untucked business shirt; Miller, in a black polo and black loafers with no socks. Ties and jackets? No way. Disarming? To the, well, max.

Siegel called the session Saturday a “conversation” among “key stakeholders.”

Miller said, “Together we have a chance to change the sport. Separately, we have no chance.”

At another point, Miller said, “We are in this together. We have a chance to move the organization forward. We have a chance to do some things that have never been done before. We have a chance to end the repetitiveness of the five-year, the 10-year, the 20-year conversations,” the loop that inevitably led to accusations, drama, friction and more, almost none of it constructive.

Under the direction of Siegel, chief executive since May 2012, USATF has made significant financial strides. Its 2016 budget is a projected $35 million, about double what it has been in recent years — and that is without the benefit of the roughly $500 million 23-year Nike deal, which kicks in the year after.

USATF’s logical next step: streamlining its governance.

In the wake of a meeting three weeks ago at which USATF and its Athlete Advisory Committee agreed in principle on a revenue distribution plan that will deliver $9 million in cash to athletes over the next five years, the session at Indianapolis’ Alexander Hotel was called to bring together nearly 50 people — from all over the country — to discuss “law and legislation” changes.

That is, governance.

As Duffy Mahoney, USATF’s chief of high performance, said Saturday, there’s a big difference between governance and politics.

Politics is important, of course, and grabs headlines.

Governance gets stuff done.

No one cares about governance until, actually, they do care.

The close cousin of governance is process. Process is not sexy. No one cares about process.

Again, until they do care.

Example A: the process by which the USATF board last year chose Stephanie Hightower, now the USATF president, to be the federation’s nominee to the IAAF council, the sport’s international governing body, in place of Bob Hersh, who had served for 16 years.

Hightower would go on in August to be the highest vote-getter at IAAF elections in Beijing.

The process, which played out at last year’s USATF annual meeting in Anaheim, California, called first for a general assembly vote.

Most importantly, though arguably not well-communicated, that vote was merely a recommendation to the USATF board of directors — who could overrule it, by two-thirds vote.

Hersh won the floor vote.

The board, though, selected Hightower, believing in her and in a new direction amid major changes coming up at the IAAF, including the election of a new president to replace Lamine Diack of Senegal, who served atop the international federation for 16 years.

In August, the IAAF picked Britain’s Seb Coe as its new president. He defeated Ukraine’s Sergei Bubka.

On Saturday,  two activists spoke at length in favor of proposed rules changes -- Becca Peter, who lives near Seattle, and David Greifinger, a Santa Monica, California-based lawyer.

Greifinger returned time and again to the same theme: democracy.

"That has worked in this country for a long time," he said at one moment.

For sure.

But the United States is not a pure democracy. It is a representative democracy.

As Miller observed, "The popular vote in our country does not always elect the president."

Moreover, democracy is not the same as leadership. And what nations, companies and non-profit sports organizations such as USATF need way more of is less pure democracy -- the USOC slimmed its board down from 115 to 15, and USATF is also down to 15 from 32 and, before that, over 100 -- and more leadership.

"It's one of those things about leadership," Miller said. "You don’t get elected and [suddenly] know everything about leadership."

Nothing at Saturday’s meeting will in any way prove binding. Indeed, the entire thrust was to set the stage for this year’s annual get-together, in about five weeks in Houston.

Two proposals -- both sparked by the process that saw Hightower picked for the IAAF -- may well show up in Houston:

The first, advanced by Peter: to bar the IAAF council member from simultaneously serving as USATF president or CEO. In Saturday’s straw poll, that got two votes.

“You have to get the best person for the job,” the agent Tony Campbell said. “If the best person is wearing two hats, so be it.”

The second: to provide that the USATF general assembly elect the IAAF rep. Straw vote: one in favor.

“Why change this now?” asked Robin Brown-Beamon, the Florida-based association president. "It worked.”

To laughter in the room, Sharrieffa Barksdale, the 1984 Olympic hurdler, said, referring to Greifinger, "If you have ever seen the movie ‘Frozen,’ David — let it go!”

An even-better cultural touchstone, referred to indirectly several times by Miller: "We're all in this together," the pitch-perfect tune from the 2006 hit movie "High School Musical."

This was the theme three weeks ago, at the meeting with the athletes that led to agreement.

And that set the tone for Saturday’s get-together.

Reminding one and all that the metric that matters most is how many medals the U.S. team collects next summer at the Rio 2016 Games, Moushami Robinson, a gold medalist in the women's 4x400 relay at the Athens 2004 Olympics, said, “It’s time to move past the residue so we can get done what we need to get done.”

Added Dwight Phillips, the 2004 Olympic and four-time world long jump champion who is now chair of the Athletes’ Advisory Committee, “It has always been competitive: ‘Let’s fight, let’s fight, let’s fight.’ How about, ‘Let’s compromise, let’s come to an agreement.’ And we’ll see progress.”

To be sure, disagreement and discussion are always part of any institutional process. And that’s totally healthy.

At the same time, USATF’s long-running dysfunction, the temptation to immediately and vociferously wonder if the sky is falling, and now, often bore echoes of the same woes that for years beset the U.S. Olympic Committee — until the USOC, too, made needed governance changes (slimming down that board of directors) and putting people in place who know what they’re doing (in particular, chief executive Scott Blackmun, in early 2010).

Now it’s USATF’s turn to look forward — to acknowledge that while discussion and dissent have a place, so, too, do compromise and turning the page.

Another proposal advanced by Greifinger:

— The USATF board now numbers 15. Six are representatives of what’s called “constituent-based” groups, including youth, officials and coaches. The current reps are selected by a process that includes nominations and slates and further complications. What if those six reps were elected by their constituents?

The consensus Saturday: fine.

Even so, it was also generally agreed, whoever gets put up for any of those six slots must pass some sort of vetting. Details obviously remain to be worked out but it's common-sense they would include a background check, drug testing and, to be obvious, a passport for the international travel that track and field demands.

And this notion, put forward by Rubin Carter and Lionel Leach:

— Make the CEO “confer and agree” with volunteer leadership on a variety of decisions.

Confer? Sure, as appropriate, Siegel said.

Secure agreement? Not workable, Siegel said, to widespread assent.

How could he sign off on this deal or that if he had to secure the OK of volunteers who might -- or very well might not -- hold particular expertise?

Siegel also noted the unintended consequence of such a provision: “no accountability for my performance.” If everything had to be run by volunteers of different stripes, how in the real world to gain an accurate measure of what Siegel did, or didn't, get done?

This, of course, is exactly the move the USOC made -- away from volunteer leadership and toward empowerment of a professional CEO and staff.

Houston and the annual meeting await.

For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, the focus at USATF is not on what happened before -- the recrimination attendant to reliving and rehashing the past.

As Miller said, “We are in this together. We have a chance to move the organization forward.

“We have a chance to do some things that have never been done before," on the track and and off: "We have a chance to end the repetitiveness of the five-year, the 10-year, the 20-year conversation.”

Olympic trend-setter: beach volleyball

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The International Olympic Committee has had great success at its Winter Games in recognizing that change can be a good thing. Recent years have seen the addition to the Winter program of, among others, snowboarding and slopestyle. Coming next: Big Air. When it comes to the Summer Games — not so much.

That’s why the recently announced additions to the Tokyo 2020 Games of sports such as skateboarding, surfing and climbing -- assuming technical and political problems can be smoothed over -- make for welcome, and long overdue, additions.

In recent years, the IOC, in a bid to reach out to the teens and 20-somethings it avowedly is so interested in reaching, has added BMX cycling to the program. And, before that, beach volleyball.

Nothing — repeat, nothing — highlights the way forward like beach volleyball.

It is, to quote the president of the FIVB, volleyball’s international governing body, Brazil’s Dr. Ary S. Graça, centered on two essentials -- technology and innovation.

Beach volleyball is, altogether and all at once, sport, music, show, scene, party, cultural touchstone.

In those regards -- just like, well, skate, surf and climb.

To play beach volleyball, the women wear bikinis, visors and sunglasses; the guys tank tops, board shorts, baseball caps and shades. In the stands, here at this week’s Swatch 2015 Tour finals, the picture was much the same — bikinis, board shorts, headgear, shades.

Just outside: stands for lemonade. But also margaritas and cold beers.

And a photo booth.

And a contraption, like the one set up at the NFL Combine, where you can see how high you might jump.

As for jumping: before Sunday's men's gold-medal match, between Americans Nick Lucena and Phil Dalhausser and Brazilians Alison Cerutti and Bruno Oscar Schmidt, a gaggle of skydivers from the Red Bull Air Force dropped in, parachuting in from a plane flying out over the nearby Atlantic Ocean.

Standard fare for the NFL, maybe. But Olympic sports? When was the last time you saw a parachute drop to open a modern pentathlon event?

Beach volleyball is not just easy on the eyes. It’s easy — even if you’re new to the sport — to understand.

Scoring is straightforward and common-sense. First team to 21 wins the set; you have to win a set by two points. Two sets wins the match. If there’s a tie after two sets of 21, first one to 15 (again, by two) is the winner.

The average match lasts about 45 minutes, maybe 100 rallies.

Sunday's women's gold-medal event -- Brazil's Talita Antunes and Larissa Franca defeated Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst, 21-17, 21-18 -- took 39 minutes.

The guys got it done in 38 minutes, Brazil's Alison and Bruno -- as they are known in beach volley circles -- defeating the Americans Lucena and Dalhausser, 21-13, 21-15.

Between every single point, a (loud) rock or hip-hop snippet blasts the speakers — the audio version of a video Vine.

The announcers are amped up, over-the-top, always on, all the time. “If you’re dancing,” one shouted to the crowd amid Saturday’s semifinals, the cameras will find you,” meaning time on the big screens at either end of the court. What do you know? The camera found two young women, one in a blue bikini top, the other wearing yellow.

The announcer cooed: “Hello, ladies!”

At some point, “T-Shirt Steve” is bound to show up and fires free shirts into the crowd.

Cheerleaders come out routinely and shake their groove thing.

Sunny the mascot also did a lot of dancing. And crowd-surfing.

All of this got the crowd so pumped-up for the second of Saturday’s two men’s semifinals — won by Americans Nick Lucena and Phil Dalhausser, both with Florida roots, over a Dutch team — that, afterward, Lucena hopped the restraining wall and high-fived everyone in sight.

“It was probably the ‘funnest’ match I’ve played in, ever,” Dalhausser said.

Lucena called the atmosphere the “most-electric” of any U.S. match he has ever played.

Holland's Robert Meeuwsen, along with Alexander Brouwer the Dutch team that fell to the Americans in Saturday's semis: "The tournament was great. We hope there are more like this. The crowd was really great."

Coming soon: LED nets. If that’s not clear, LED nets mean this: the nets will light up with messages.

On Sunday, Graça made public a nine-point strategic plan that centers on positioning volleyball as “the No. 1 family entertainment sport in the world.”

Note the "family" part.

And that it's not just “sport.”

Nor just “entertainment.

Again,  “the No. 1 family entertainment sport” anywhere, with an emphasis on the sport’s reach and popularity among teen girls.

Graça: “The public is going [to matches] to have fun. Not only to see the sport. But to have fun.”

He made a fascinating point — that any number of sports feature what he most deliberately called “violence.”

In combat sports, the violence is real.

But take soccer. Outright assault-style violence? Maybe not often (except in the stands). But rough tackling? Aggressive defensive marking? For sure.

Volleyball, especially the beach version? High-fives and hugs after virtually every point.

“We are giving a new option to the public,” Graça said. “You can choose. If you like violence, OK, you go to a sport where there is a lot of contact and violence. If you don’t, you have a lot of options, and that is volleyball.”

It is the case that volleyball’s plan bears more than a passing resemblance to the nine “smart goals” that USA Track & FIeld chief executive Max Siegel, one of the few executives in the Olympic world ahead of the power curve, set forth at the 2012 annual meeting, his first in charge.

That said, volleyball is looking at unprecedented opportunity. Just ahead: the double bang of Rio 2016, where the sport is not only going to be the big ticket but multiple Brazilian medalists are a distinct possibility, and Tokyo 2020, where volleyball is also big.

It only makes sense to outline a framework like the one Graça did Sunday.

Objectives include becoming a top-tier Olympic sport, along with track and field, swimming and gymnastics; reaching 2 million users on FIVB digital platforms by next year (it made 1 million last month); signing four new global sponsors by 2020; and growing the federation’s annual income, now $31 million, to $66 million by 2020.

How to do this will take “working,” as Graça said repeatedly Sunday. It also will, as he observed several times, take this other factor:

“TV, TV, TV.”

One:

The stadium here holds maybe 3,500. Even if that’s 3,500 whipped-up believers and converts, how does that translate to national or global reach?

Two:

Beach volleyball may already be video and digital miles ahead of almost everyone else in the Olympic movement in one regard — relying on Red Bull’s world-class production expertise, it now cuts and makes available, for free, match (and more) video.

For instance: it’s understood it might well be too expensive now for a German TV crew to travel to Florida for a tourney that runs to multiple days. But when a German team does something noteworthy, like Ludwig and Walkenhorst in making it all the way to Sunday's finals before losing, the mechanism is now in place to call TV outlets in Munich, Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, wherever, and say, would you like 30 seconds or two minutes on the silver medalists?

Who wouldn’t?

Same idea for certain digital platforms

Click on Red Bull’s Snapchat story Sunday — there, among other stuff, is the Fort Lauderdale event.

It’s not clear who else in the Olympic scene is using Snapchat.

Or, for that matter, if many Olympic federation or national Olympic committee executives even know what it is.

Be assured, however, that young people by the millions know -- and use -- Snapchat.

Graça, again: “We need TV. Without TV, we are going nowhere. But also we have now this social media that is very important.

“I want to talk to 100 million people. And we can do it.”

Dude, like, IOC walks the surf, skate, climb walk

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has said in implementing his would-be 40-point reform plan, dubbed Agenda 2020, that talking the talk simply won’t do. To make the plan real, he has stressed, the entire Olympic movement must walk the walk.

The IOC, indeed the Olympic movement worldwide, tends to be conservative, traditional, cautious. This is the obvious problem with urging sports officials, even the most well-meaning, to make bold change in line with much-needed reforms.

Thus the news Monday from Tokyo arrived like a lightning strike.

The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee announced it is proposing five sports, with a combined 18 events, for those Games: baseball/softball, karate, skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing.

Credit now where it is due: in picking those five, Tokyo organizers seriously walked the walk.

Most of the instant-reaction headlines worldwide centered on baseball/softball and on karate. At first blush, you can understand: baseball and karate are both important in Japan.

That’s not the story, though.

In skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing, the IOC gets a three-way edgy bang — urban sports, beach scene, hard-core gym rat with heavy outdoor vibe — in its reach-out to the demographic, teens and 20-somethings, with whom it is assiduously trying to connect.

The IOC is now very much in the business of asserting that it is not just relevant but the Games are, in a word, cool. In recent years, with the Summer Games program stagnant, that has been a much-harder sell for the Olympic brand.

In sum: this three-way makes for Agenda 2020 in action.

Compare the rock-n-roll driven, bodacious bikini and hard-body board-shorts scene at surfing with — oh, archery. Or even -- golf.

You're 22. Or 19. Where's the party? The DJ? On the 16th fairway, where you can't even talk loudly?

Beach volleyball is going to be the big ticket at the Rio Games. Why? Because it's a party -- combining sport, music and scene.

Same for surf, skate, climb.

Sport climbing, for those who have never seen it, is huge in Europe. As for skateboarding and surfing — assuming approval, they will soon be to the Olympics what beach volleyball is now, and w-a-y more.

“Comparing it to what skateboarding is, and if done correctly,” said Gary Ream, the Pennsylvania-based president of the International Skateboarding Federation, “seriously, I do believe that we can make a huge positive impact on youth globally.

“It’s crazy. I do believe it. Truthfully, it’s something the IOC has never seen before that could happen.”

The announcement Monday marked both an end and a beginning.

The Agenda 2020 rules, approved by the full IOC last December, allow host cities to propose one or more additional sports for their Games; the additions would be on top of the 28 sports already on the program; changes could not add more than 500 athletes, total.

In June, the list of potential add-ons was cut from 26 to eight.

On Monday, in selecting five, organizers cut squash, bowling and wushu, a Chinese martial art.

The full IOC, meeting next summer at the Rio Olympics, will make a final decision — yea or nay — on each of the five that got picked Monday. The five sports, with those 18 events, would add 474 athletes — 26 under that 500 limit.

“It was quite a difficult task,” the vice governor of Tokyo and a member of the review panel, Toshiyuki Akiyama, said. “Baseball/softball and karate were proposed and supported by the Tokyo metropolitan assembly. As for skateboarding, sports climbing, surfing, the key word is ‘youth.’ ”

Let’s be honest: baseball might be the driver, because it’s Japan, but the real winner here would be softball, which never should have been booted off the program in the first instance, and only was because it was perceived by far too many IOC members as a) too American and b) "baseball for girls."

Both baseball and softball were kicked out after the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Let’s be honest about this, too: baseball/softball can hardly be considered a lock to win full IOC approval. The participation of MLB players is still in doubt, and baseball — not softball — can be perceived within the IOC to have a considerable doping problem.

The president of the World Baseball Softball Confederation, Italy’s Riccardo Fraccari, had proposed an eight-team baseball tournament, with two groups of four teams each playing over five days.

Tokyo 2020 came back with six teams and 144 players; the women’s softball competition would feature six teams and 90 players.

Karate would have eight men's and women's events and a total of 80 athletes; skateboarding, two street and two park events, 80 athletes; sport climbing, two events in bouldering, lead and speed combined for 40 athletes; surfing, two events, shortboard only, 40 athletes.

“We’ve reached second base,” Fraccari said, according to Associated Press. “Now we’ve got to wait until Rio to get home.”

Ream also cautioned, “It’s not all done yet,” in part because the ISF is still working on being the federation the IOC would recognize as the sport’s official Olympic body.

At the same time, he said, “Skateboarding is so different,” adding a moment later, “It’s just — it’s going to be so refreshing to see first-hand how neat the kids are, and this spirit.”

At the 2014 Nanjing Youth Games, skateboarding was shown off as part of what the IOC called a “Sports Lab.” It drew big, enthusiastic crowds.

The American Tony Hawk, one of the sport’s icons, said in a statement, “It is exciting that skateboarding could possibly be included in the Olympics. This is not only a great opportunity for our sport and the skaters, but also for the Games.”

Added Amelia Brodka, a pro skateboarder from Poland, “If managed by the right people,” a clear reference to ISF, “this could be a lifetime opportunity to expose women’s skateboarding to a global audience and to get many more girls involved into our sport.”

The reaction was much the same in surf circles.

Mick Fanning, a three-time world champion, said in a story published by the Australian Olympic Committee, “It would be amazing for surfers to have the opportunity to go and surf at the Olympics.”

Fanning made world news this summer by beating off a shark attack at a contest in South Africa. Who wouldn't want a dude around its event -- thinking now of the IOC -- who has proven himself tougher than a shark? (Digression: insert IOC politics joke here.)

Fanning also said of the Games, “It is probably the most-watched sporting event in the world. It would be a huge honor to go and represent your country at such a prestigious competition.”

Even the premier of New South Wales, one of Australia’s states, said he was stoked about the possibility of surfing making the 2020 Games.

“My love of the ocean and surfing is well known,” premier Mike Baird said, “and I’m absolutely thrilled to hear the sport is now getting close to being included in the Olympic line-up.”

Surfing doesn’t have to worry about which acronym is in charge for Olympic purposes. That’s the ISA, the International Surfing Assn., led by Fernando Aguerre, based in La Jolla, California.

Surfing’s issue is where to surf. Like, maybe in the ocean. Obviously, dude. But maybe -- what about a structure to be built in Tokyo itself featuring the new wave-pool technology?

Cities worldwide now have skateparks, right? If the IOC opts for wave technology, expect an explosion in such water parks; it would offer the vehicle to grow surfing everywhere, to take it to places hundreds if not thousands of miles from the ocean. On every continent.

That’s a decision for down the road.

On Monday, Aguerre — on a telephone call after his own daily surf session in the Pacific, the day after the conclusion of a hugely successful adaptive surf contest — said, “My first words are words of gratitude: gratitude to the IOC, gratitude to Agenda 2020. This is Agenda 2020 in action: renewing, modifying, updating the program.

“There’s a lot of excitement, I imagine in the skateboarding and sport climbing worlds. There is a lot of excitement in surfing. I am myself excited about it, and I am very, very happy about it.”

U.S. track and field: a 'monumental' step forward

When Max Siegel took over some three-plus years ago as chief executive of USA Track & Field, things were hardly all roses. For one, he didn’t come up within the sport. That meant, as the former long-jump champion Dwight Phillips, now the chair of the USATF Athletes Advisory Council, put it, “He wasn’t one of us.” That meant suspicion and scrutiny. Big time. From the start, Siegel made it clear the federation’s financial picture had to improve. At the same time, he also pledged collaboration. On Saturday, in a six hour-plus meeting at the Indiana Ballroom at the downtown Marriott in Indianapolis, Siegel and other USATF officials, working in concert with the athletes themselves, hammered out a historic plan that ought to do nothing less than re-shape the conversation about being a U.S. athlete in track and field and, as well, perhaps re-invent the industry.

Bottom line, though there are tons of fascinating details: USATF and the AAC agreed in principle on a revenue distribution plan that will deliver $9 million in cash to athletes over the next five years.

Unsaid, though totally obvious given USATF’s roughly $500 million arrangement with Nike, a landmark deal that Siegel negotiated and that kicks in come 2017: this could, maybe should, be just the tip of the iceberg.

“First and foremost,” said Phillips, “it was a monumental day. We made a pivotal move within the organization to [cement] the relationships between the athletes and the national office.”

Echoed Will Leer, the middle-distance standout, “You know, this isn’t blowing smoke: for the first time at a meeting I have been to between the AAC and the national office, and with all the interested parties — we actually got together and got something done.”

He added a moment later, “We came up with something I think the athletes are going to be very happy about. You can’t please everyone, obviously. But this is an enormous step forward in the professionalization of our sport.”

Wallace Spearmon, who for 10 years has been one of the best in the world at the 200 meters, said, “The chemical make-up of track and field is changing, and it is beginning with USATF and the AAC.”

He also said, “With Dwight — I haven’t seen track changing so much as it has in the few months since he took over,” as the AAC chair.

“Max — when he first took over … I said to him, ‘We have been scarred before. This is no fault of your own. But you have to prove yourself to me. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Right now, I don’t trust you.’ He took that for what it was; I didn’t mean any disrespect. Moving forward: year one, year two — I was actually impressed.

“And this,” meaning Saturday’s action, “feels like a step toward a brighter future.”

Last December, at the USATF annual meeting in Anaheim, California, Siegel had pledged $9 million in incremental funds to athletes.

How to divvy it up?

The meeting Saturday stemmed from a long-running conversation — which Siegel had asked the AAC to undertake — about how to define who was, or should be classified as, a professional track and field athlete.

Someone who wins a gold medal at the Olympics? For sure.

Someone who enters a race somewhere and wins, say, $500? Way more problematic.

At the meeting, with 19 athlete officers and event leaders and other high-performance personalities in attendance, along with Siegel and USATF officials such as Duffy Mahoney, the chief of sport performance, and Renee Washington, the chief operating officer, that conversation segued into something less elusive and more constructive.

Instead of trying to define who was or wasn’t a professional track or field athlete, the group turned its focus to USATF’s key mission — winning medals at the world championships or Olympics.

USATF rightfully can, and does, claim many jobs at hand — everything from winning medals to inspiring young people to take up the sport. But the primary job is high-performance development and, with that, winning medals.

Medals are not only good for the winners themselves; they produce a trickle-down effect for anyone and everyone with an interest in U.S. track and field.

For his part, Siegel said, “From the outset, we focused on outcome, accountability, collaboration."

With all of that in mind, here is what was decided:

— Beginning in 2016, roughly $1.8 million per year in cash will be distributed.

— That money is over and above current USATF tier funding, development funding and other programs. (More on the tier system in a moment.)

— Roughly 75 percent of the added cash will be evenly distributed among athletes who qualify for the “world majors,” meaning the IAAF world outdoor championships or the Summer Games.

— In practice, this will mean what? A $10,300 award for making the worlds or Olympic team.

— The remaining 25 percent will be distributed as bonus money for athletes who win a medal at the worlds or Olympics.

— In practice, this will mean what? Gold gets you $25,000; silver, $15,000; bronze, $10,000.

— Those who run in the relays, at least one round, will share equally in the amount of a bonus.

— All this is independent of any shoe contract deal or other endorsement; Diamond League or other international meet prize money; or appearance fees.

On tiers:

USATF classifies athletes into tiers — One, Two, Three and, cleverly enough, Four.

Those in One and Two are considered “elite”; in Three and Four, “emerging elite.”

Far and away, statistics show, medals get won by those in One and Two, and mostly One.

To be in One: you are a medalist, individual or relay, at at least one of the two most recent “world majors” and/or have a world top-10 ranking by Track & FIeld News and/or the website all-athletics.com.

Currently in One: 106 athletes.

Two: you made the top-eight at one of the two most recent “world majors” and/or are ranked world top-20 at all-athletics.com.

Currently in Two: 49 athletes.

In sum: the two tiers account for 155 athletes. Generally speaking, 130 athletes make a “world majors” team.

Why, once everyone got in the same room with the same vibe, did this turn out to be relatively straightforward?

Because, and this isn’t rocket science — it’s return on investment.

The U.S. team won 18 medals at the 2015 Beijing world championships. It’s obviously, just to take one important example, a better result for USATF and for track and field in the United States if, next August in Rio, the Americans take home a number in the mid- or even upper-20s.

To illustrate how all this might actually work for 2016 for an athlete, him or herself:

To start, a Tier One athlete is eligible now for $25,422 in annual support. This includes an athlete and medical stipend, and if the athlete names a coach, a coaching stipend for that coach; dollars to travel to domestic competitions; health insurance; and medical support services.

Now add in the new 10k.

As a baseline, you’re now at $35,422.

Over the last several years, USATF has doubled prize money at its national championships. First place at next year’s U.S. Olympic Trials will be worth $10,000; there’s a sliding scale that sees second worth $8,000, third $6,000, fourth $4,000, fifth $2,000 and $1,000 apiece for sixth and seventh.

First place at the U.S. indoors will be worth $5,000.

Let’s say you win at the indoors and take second at the Trials. That’s $5,000 plus another $8,000.

Now that $35,422 is $48,422.

At world majors, there’s a medals bonus that the U.S. Olympic Committee awards on behalf of USATF. It’s called “Operation Gold.” In 2016, gold will be worth 25k, silver 15k, bronze 10k.

Let’s say you take second at the Olympics.

That means 15k from Operation Gold plus another 15k from USATF. Now that $48,422 is $78,422.

The fine print:

Siegel and Phillips this week are due to sign a memorandum of agreement; additional details are scheduled to be worked out in the next 30 days. The program will be reviewed in the weeks before the 2015 annual meeting, in about two months in Houston, and finalized there.

What sorts of additional details?

Leer: “It seems like it could be construed as we could be paying athletes to stifle discourse — paying to shut them the hell up so we don’t have another Nick Symmonds episode,” a reference to the 800-meter runner who opted out of the 2015 Beijing worlds, citing a dispute with USATF over the wearing of national-team gear.

“This needs to be ironed out. But I think most athletes — they’re going to say, “Now we are getting paid to be at a championship, getting paid to represent our country.’ When you are getting paid, there is expectation.

“… You are expected to come there and perform. If you come and perform, you get rewarded.

“It’s a job like anything else and this goes toward rewarding the workers, who are the athletes. I’m pretty excited about it.”

So, too, Symmonds, who in a telephone interview Monday said, "I am really really pleased with this. It’s a huge step in the right direction."

He also quipped, referring to the roughly 10k making-the-team award, "I just wish I could retroactively get the $70,000 for the last seven teams that I made."

So, too, Darvis “Doc” Patton, the former sprinter, who like Philips called the development “monumental.”

He said, “This is something that makes me wish I could come back to the sport. It makes me want to come back and compete again.

“Given the history of [USATF] meetings, you went in like, OK, I’m going to brace myself for whatever. It wasn’t that at all. If I had to use one word, I would say ‘productive’ — it was a productive meeting.”

Mahoney chose “ground-breaking,” adding, “I think it changes the direction of the dialogue between us and the athletes. We are cooperating. And we are cooperating on trying to provide as many resources for elite and emerging elite athletes as we can.”

Five for 2024 -- how many make it to 2017?

The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday celebrated the announcement that five cities are now formally in the race for the 2024 Summer Games: Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany.

After the debacle that was the 2022 Winter Games race, which ended up with only two finalists, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, Beijing in July elected the winner, you can see why this list of 2024 possibilities would be cause for IOC festivity.

"We can really look at the very diverse and creative field," IOC president Thomas Bach said in a Wednesday teleconference with reporters, "and we are looking forward to a fascinating and fair competition among these five outstanding and highly qualified candidate cities."

At another moment in the call, Bach said, "This competition is about quality, not quantity. What we see are five really highly qualified candidate cities. This is why we welcome really each and every one of these cities to this competition, which will be a very, very strong and fascinating one."

But wait. If "fascinating" is the word of the moment:

Would anyone be surprised, really, if as soon as six months from now, this 2024 race is already down to three?

Or, when it comes to legitimate contenders, practically speaking, two?

That’s the first thing to keep in focus as Campaign 2024 gets underway.

For all the talk about Agenda 2020, the 40-point would-be reform plan the IOC approved last December, there’s a more than reasonable chance the IOC could find itself right back in a 2022-like situation.

This, even though the IOC announced last month, as an obvious result of the 2022 process, that it would no longer be trimming a bigger list of “applicant,” or first-stage, cities, to a shortlist of “candidate” cities, or finalists. That cut used to come about halfway through the roughly two-year bid cycle. Now, from the start, everyone will be a finalist, a "candidate," as Bach noted Wednesday. The reason: the IOC gets a bigger field of cities.

If, that is, they can stay viable.

Big-picture, 2024:

Search the globe for the cities that ultimately decided not to bid.

Toronto, which this summer staged the Pan Am Games? Nope. Too much money, not enough political support, the mayor announced.

Durban, Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa? Not ready for prime time.

Baku, site earlier this year of the European Games? Ditto.

Doha? Which ran for 2016 and 2020? Not this time. Politics. Bach noted without further comment that Doha "obviously decided not to take part in this invitation phase."

What's obvious is that it is far easier for Bach -- 2024 is his first Summer Games bid cycle as IOC president -- without Baku or Doha.

So that leaves, for now, five.

Hamburg, though, is facing a November referendum. No one can muster any degree of confidence that voters will give it the go-ahead to keep on until the IOC decides the 2024 race, in September 2017; the $51-billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games scared numerous western European cities out of the 2022 race.

As Bach noted without comment on Hamburg itself, the IOC is interested in a "culture of welcome," a city where "the population is clearly supporting the Olympic Games and is welcoming the athletes."

Rome bid for the 2020 Games, for a short while, until the national government said, uh, wait, this Olympic thing costs entirely too much. Now Rome is back. With a campaign budget, announced last month, of 10 million euros, about $11 million. That is laughably low. Paris is figuring about 60 million euros, $63 million, and that’s probably not enough.

Budapest? Great city. Fantastic to visit. Not a realistic chance of winning, and indeed this 2024 effort might well be seen as a trial run for 2028 or beyond. It states the obvious to note that the migrant crisis enveloping Hungary, and for that matter a great deal of Europe, with seemingly no solution in sight, has made Budapest’s already dim chance for victory that much more remote.

How the migrant crisis affects Hamburg, if it gets past the referendum, as well as Rome? No one knows.

"This humanitarian challenge is going beyond Olympic candidatures," Bach said. "While we speak, political leaders in Europe and in the world are discussing how to address this great humanitarian challenge. I hope they will come together to a solution which in the end does not only address this challenge with a solution for this very moment but that, together, they are looking to a solution which allows these refugees to live at home in peace and prosperity. I think this is the real challenge."

With all that, and this is hardly a secret in select Olympic circles, that leaves Paris and LA.

It is fact that the Summer Games have never been away from Europe for more than 12 years. The most recent Olympics in Europe? 2012, London. The 2016 Games will be in Rio de Janeiro, 2020 in Tokyo.

Does that suggest Paris will be the slam-dunk winner?

It might be logical enough, indeed, except for what is really the central point about 2024 to keep in sight:

This race is, from the get-go, all about the United States.

Though the IOC will go to Asia for three straight Games after Rio -- Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022 -- there are no 2024 Asian bids. Over the next two years, expect many, many reports -- they started already Wednesday -- about how this is actually Europe versus the United States: that is, LA against the other four.

That is not it.

This 2024 race is, plain and simple, a referendum on the state of the United States within the International Olympic Committee.

By 2024, it will have been 28 years since the Summer Games were staged in the United States — in Atlanta, in 1996 — and 22 years since the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

The IOC doesn't subscribe to a rigid rotation. At least in theory. In practice, it's apparent the United States is due. Overdue, actually.

Plus, there is the simple matter of NBC’s $7.65 billion investment in the Games, from 2021 through 2032. To be clear: the network does not get into the bid game. But it's also the case that at appropriate moments the IOC acknowledges the American contribution to the Eurocentric movement.

New York lost in 2005 for 2012. Chicago lost in 2009 for 2016. If Los Angeles loses in 2017 for 2024, the IOC will have burned through the three biggest cities in the United States.

Boston is not going to bid again, perhaps ever, and certainly not in any of our lifetimes. San Francisco can’t win; if it could, you can be sure San Francisco would be the 2024 entry. Washington is often perceived, right or wrong, as the seat of American imperial power; no way.

That would leave the likes of Dallas or Houston. Or joke bids such as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Again, not a chance.

If Paris doesn’t win for 2024, it can — and will — bid again.

Forget about Paris winning in 2024 as solely a way-back machine shout-out to the 1924 Paris Games. That actually might well be a point against Paris, which becomes super-evident if thought about for more than a second. If the IOC starts awarding Games because it’s the 100th anniversary of this or that, no other city in whatever race would stand a chance against the 100th anniversary candidate from Country X.

That 100th anniversary thing? Didn’t work for Athens for 1996. See Atlanta.

If LA does not win for 2024, there is no certainty of any sort the U.S. Olympic Committee would have the will, or be able to summon the cash, for another run.

So it’s Los Angeles, right?

Except: if LA puts forward a compelling case, you can be sure Paris will, too.

Even at the outset, however, it’s apparent both face intriguing challenges.

The Paris bid? Tony Estanguet, the triple gold medalist in canoeing who is an IOC member, is the newly anointed Paris 2024 co-president, along with Bernard Lapasset, the chairman of World Rugby. Etienne Thobois, the bid's chief executive, said Tuesday, apparently in a reference to the failed Paris 2012 and Annecy 2018 bids, “Politicians should not lead an Olympic bid and that’s a lesson to [be] learned.”

OK.

So who, now, is in charge of this Paris campaign? Estanguet? Lapasset? Thobois? The French Olympic Committee? Or, despite protestations that this is really a sports-led bid, is it the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo? The president of France, Francois Hollande?

In June, when the bid was declared, Hollande issued this statement: “The state will do everything to see this sports movement through and to support this bid, which will serve as a model in terms of the environment, economy and social protections.”

Hmm.

Further, with all due respect to the longstanding Olympic consultant Mike Lee and his London-based Verocom agency, how is it that the Paris announcement Tuesday came from Verocom instead of, from, you know, Paris?

As for LA?

The facile thing would be to go round and round about whether LA got put forward as a second choice.

LA is not a second choice. Instead, LA is the product of the Agenda 2020 reforms, which allows a national Olympic committee to figure stuff out before the formal submission date to the IOC, which in this instance was Tuesday. That's the "invitation phase" Bach was talking about.

The three real issues facing the LA bid, at least at this early juncture, are easy:

— One, the Olympic Village plan is not locked down.

Expect a lot of chatter about how it is going to cost a lot of money: $1 billion, according to the bid book.

That’s going to be, in large measure, third-party money, $925 million of it; the developer is not yet identified.

Are these problems?

Hardly. That's the sort of opportunity a shrewd business person would like to have.

The rules of the journalism business preclude us jackals of the press from getting in on the deals we report on. That’s an obvious conflict of interest. It’s also the case that journalists do not often make good business people. Nevertheless: you’d have to be an idiot not to see the extraordinary upside in a deal for new housing in housing-starved downtown LA, which even the New York Times has this year anointed the cool capital of the very people the IOC is so eager to attract, the younger-shading demographic.

Meanwhile, the IOC announced Wednesday it will contribute $1.7 billion to the winning 2024 committee for the organization of the Games. The LA bid had forecast $1.5 billion, the level of the IOC contribution to the Rio 2016 Games.

So the LA bid is already -- without doing a thing -- ahead on the organizing committee ledger by $200 million.

Bach said any of the five 2024 efforts "can be very confident" to "have a profit in their organizing budget."

 — Two, Bach has in the two years he has been IOC president visited roughly 100 heads of government or state. President Obama? A noteworthy no.

Within the IOC, Obama is remembered for a logistics-bending visit to the 2009 assembly in Copenhagen at which Chicago got booted, and his decision to politicize the U.S. delegation to the 2014 Sochi Games opening ceremony as a response to the Russian law banning gay “propaganda” to minors — selecting the tennis star Billie Jean King and two other openly gay athletes for the U.S. effort. (King ultimately made it to the closing ceremony; she was unable to attend the opening ceremony because of her mother’s death.)

Next month the Assn. of National Olympic Committees meets in Washington. This marks a major event on the Olympic calendar. It's unclear if the occasion will see Obama meet with Bach.

This, though, is clear: there will be a new U.S. president in January 2017, eight months before the 2024 IOC election.

— Three, Anita DeFrantz lives in Los Angeles. She, like her colleague Claudia Bokel from Germany, serves on the IOC’s 15-person, policy-making executive board.

It’s a clear conflict of interest for both to be involved in 2024, the kind of point the Agenda 2020 reforms should have addressed but don’t.

Bach, who is German, has made it expressly clear he will be studiously neutral in regard to Hamburg.

It’s thus straightforward logic that DeFrantz and Bokel ought to be made neutral as well.

At the same time, it’s unrealistic to expect that DeFrantz, and her wealth of experience — she has been an IOC member since the mid-1980s and is herself a bronze medalist, in rowing at the Montreal 1976 Games — ought to be sidelined completely.

Same for Bokel, a fencing silver medalist at the Athens 2004 Games and since 2012 chair of the IOC’s athletes’ commission.

For DeFrantz, who for more than two decades oversaw what is now called the LA84 Foundation, awarding millions in grants for youth sports in Southern California, the answer is simple: the creation of another legacy institution, patterned perhaps after World Sport Chicago, that she can chair or otherwise serve in a significant capacity. It can — should — be nationwide. That means she could — should — be freed to extol the virtues of the Olympic movement throughout the United States.

What to do about Bokel? That’s a Germany problem. If Hamburg sticks around that long.

In Lausanne: pics, so it really happened

Not even 48 hours in, and the Los Angeles 2024 bid already has it all over Boston after meetings Thursday in Switzerland with the International Olympic Committee. Compare and contrast: Earlier this year, the world alpine ski championships were staged in Vail, Colorado, the biggest Olympic sports event in the United States in years. The IOC president himself, Thomas Bach, showed up. Did the then-Boston 2024 bid chief, John Fish? No. When Steve Paglicua replaced Fish, he thereafter flew fairly quickly to Switzerland. Did he get a meeting with Bach? No. A photo op with the IOC president? Nope.

On Thursday,  LA mayor Eric Garcetti and U.S. Olympic Committee board chairman Larry Probst met for about a half hour with the IOC president. Where? In Bach’s private office at IOC headquarters along Lake Geneva, a campus known as the Cheateu de Vidy.

After that, the mayor, Probst, USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun and LA24 bid chairman Casey Wasserman met for another half-hour with senior IOC officials: Olympic Games executive director Christophe Dubi; director general Christophe de Kepper; and the head of bid city relations, Jacqueline Barrett.

“Any campaign is about relationships,” Garcetti said in a teleconference with reporters following the Lausanne get-togethers, and perhaps in no sphere is that emphatically more true than in the Olympic bid game.

Photo op? Here you go.

There are hardly any guarantees in an Olympic bid race, this one starting formally on September 15, ending in the summer of 2017 with an IOC vote in Lima, Peru. That said, it’s clear, too, that the Olympic side not only wants but welcomes the LA effort.

After Boston withdrew in late July, Bach made it explicitly clear that the IOC expected a United States bid.

Blackmun said on that teleconference, referring to Boston, “Admittedly this was not a direct route we took to getting here,” meaning to LA24. At the same time, he stressed, “We could not be more pleased.”

“Boston made a decision that was probably right for Boston,” Garcetti said. “Los Angeles made a right decision for Los Angeles.”

Before its formal late July withdrawal, it had been clear for months within the Olympic world that Boston was a dead horse. It also had been plain that once Boston went away there would be one week of bad publicity, as the focus turned elsewhere, meaning LA. That is exactly what happened.

Asked if there were any concerns Thursday that LA might be considered a second choice, Garcetti said, “Quite the opposite,” adding, “They universally expressed excitement and enthusiasm about Los Angeles. It was not a backward-looking conversation at all.”

Which should be exactly the IOC’s response — because it offers the chance to prove that Agenda 2020, Bach’s would-be reform plan, is more than just words.

One of the changes Agenda 2020 has brought about is what’s called an “invitation phase” in the bid process; in practice, it affords a national Olympic committee the chance to explore one option and then, if it doesn’t play out, switch to a better one.

Also expected to be in the 2024 race, the first to fully test the Agenda 2020 reforms: Paris, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany. On Wednesday, the French Olympic Committee kick-started its messaging with a campaign called #JeReveDesJeux. That means, “I dream of the Games.” The plan in France is to sell wristbands with that slogan to help finance the Paris campaign.

In a fascinating turn, a look at the IOC’s consultants list, another new facet in the spirit of transparency owing to Agenda 2020, shows that Hamburg has already hired the services of seven — seven! — consultants. Paris: six, including UK-based Mike Lee, whose winning track record includes Rio 2016. Rome: four. The USOC has retained four, all well-known and -respected in the Olympic bid world: Americans Doug Arnot, George Hirthler and Terrence Burns, and UK-based Jon Tibbs.

Budapest: none.

As for what was actually said in Thursday’s meetings? Not much tremendously substantive, really.

Not that anyone should have expected anything fabulous, Probst saying on that teleconference that discussions were intentionally broad, “kept at a really high level.”

Does that matter?

No.

Once more, this was mostly — if not primarily — an exercise in relationship-building and in validation of process, in particular for the USOC and IOC.

In a statement, Probst said, “I would also like to thank the Olympic movement for its patience, as this has been a very important decision for the future of the movement in the United States. The LA 2024 bid enjoys the full support of the USOC -- our athletes, national, state and regional leaders -- and the Los Angeles city council and residents," with a poll showing 81 percent local support for the Games. "Our bid to bring the Games back to the U.S. for the first time in more than a quarter century begins right here, right now."

“This is a new LA,” Blackmun said on the teleconference, reflecting the enormous change in the city and in Southern California since 1984, and that surely and appropriately will be a key messaging point going forward.

The mayor said the idea was to start making the point that — again, completely consistent with one of the drivers of Agenda 2020 — that “we show that exciting Games and sustainability are not mutually exclusive.”

For his part, Bach said in a statement provided to Associated Press by the IOC, "Los Angeles is a very welcome addition to a strong field of competitors.  We have been informed that LA 2024 has already embraced the Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms by making use of many existing facilities and the legacy of the Olympic Games 1984.  Their vision is for the Olympic Games to serve as a catalyst in the development plan for the city."

As was pointed out Tuesday in the news conference on Santa Monica Beach where the mayor, Wasserman and others, including the 1980s and ‘90s swim star Janet Evans, helped launch LA24, 85 percent of the venues for the 2024 Games are already on the ground or are in planning regardless of an Olympics, 80 percent of them new since the 1984 Summer Games.

The operating budget stands at $4.1 billion; because of the way Olympic revenue streams work, including the IOC contribution, sponsorship and ticketing, an LA24 Games would very likely make a considerable surplus.

Also in the budgets, separately: $1.7 billion in non-operating costs — meaning construction, renovation and infrastructure such as planned Olympic Village. A huge chunk of that is expected to be paid for with private funds, including $925 million from a to-be-named developer on the village project.

“First and foremost,” Garcetti said, “my responsibility is to my city through its infrastructure and fiscal health. I would never do anything to endanger that.”

Garcetti, in that teleconference, also said that a central touchpoint Thursday was highlighting the notion that LA 24 is “a bid Los Angeles wants to do, the United States wants to do,” adding “clearly you can do that best in a face-to-face meeting.”

The point about this being not just an LA bid but an American one is — and will become even more so going forward — key.

On Wednesday, President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Dillingham, Alaska, that “obviously the president and the First Lady are very enthusiastic and strongly supportive of the bid put forward by the city of Los Angeles.”

In an Olympic bid context, it is always entirely and thoroughly appropriate for the head of government or state to offer such support.

But the comments also underscore a key U.S. challenge in the Olympic bid arena.

Again, relationships: since he took office in 2013, Bach has met with roughly 100 national leaders. Obama? No. And there is no indication a meeting is on either party’s agenda. Within the IOC, the president and First Lady are mostly remembered for the way they handled their trip to Copenhagen in support of Chicago’s 2016 campaign; Chicago got bounced in the first round.

Of course, a new U.S. president will have been in office for about eight months by the time the IOC votes in Lima in 2017.

In the more near-term: it matters for LA24, and significantly, that the U.S. government might actually step up big-time in connection with the Assn. of National Olympic Committee meetings to be held in Washington in October, and ensure that the delegates from more than 200 national Olympic committees — dozens will be IOC members — get through customs and border with not just ease but grace.

If you want to win the Olympic bid game, you have to understand the rules.

Like going to see the IOC president.

And the symbolism of the pictures — especially when you do, or don’t, get them.

Don’t be fooled, the pics can be tremendously telling. As the young people in their teens and 20s that the IOC is so keen to reach is always saying: "Pics, or it didn’t happen.”

As the mayor, Wasserman, Probst and Blackmun, head home, pics in hand, they know full well that two years is a long time.

But this, too: it has been a great two days for LA24. The launch probably could not have gone any better.

In a statement, Garcetti said, "It was an honor to meet with President Bach to discuss our initial bid. The Olympics are part of LA’s DNA – and we appreciate the opportunity to share our Olympic passion with the IOC and strengthen a movement that seeks to unite the world in friendship and peace through sport. After visiting the IOC headquarters, we are fully aware of, and ready for, the hard work ahead of us."

Just so, and to be clear, this caution: at the end of the day, this 2024 campaign will end up being about whether the IOC members want the Games back in the United States, or not.

In this dynamic, LA is not just LA. It’s way more. It’s LA representing the United States of America.

“I think it is time for America to bring the Olympics back home,” Garcetti said, adding, “The United States loves the Olympics, and the Olympics loves the United States.”

Now we will get to see — with a world-class bid that is, in theory, everything the IOC could want to fulfill Agenda 2020 — if that is, indeed, true.

A rousing launch at the beach: good vibrations

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — They could have held the news conference on Tuesday formally announcing Los Angeles’ entry into the 2024 bid race anywhere. At the LA Memorial Coliseum. At Staples Center. In Hollywood, with the iconic sign as a backdrop, like in so many movies. No.

This event, one of the most intriguing and rousing plays in recent Olympic history, was staged at the beach.

Literally, at the beach.

With twin palms standing tall as frames for the dozens of cameras and television crews. Bicyclists riding by. And, of course, beach volleyball and, beyond, the brilliant blue of the Pacific Ocean sparkling on a spectacular summer afternoon.

The Olympic movement, the Summer Games, the International Olympic Committee — they all, to be candid, need to be cool again.

At the risk of being obvious, the Southern California beachfront is unequivocally one of the coolest places on Planet Earth.

Before it all got underway, the music that was playing from the speakers: “Good Vibrations,” by the Beach Boys.

For sure.

Take a look at this selection of photos from the event, at which U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Scott Blackmun declared, “I want to thank Los Angeles for standing up once again as America’s bid city,” and LA mayor Eric Garcetti — speaking first in English, then in Spanish, then in French — said, “This is a great day for Los Angeles and a great day for the Olympic movement.”

What makes Los Angeles different from Paris, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany, its expected competition in the 2024 campaign?

Which of the five candidates boasts an extraordinary beachfront?

And, along with it, a beach culture known now in far corners of our world, a culture in which surfing and skateboarding — two events that young people, you know, actually really like — feature prominently?

This is why, among other reasons, Los Angeles should have been the USOC’s first choice all along.

But also why that whole months-long adventure elsewhere — someplace in Massachusetts, if memory serves — will quickly become a historical footnote, and no more, as the 2024 campaign develops and hurtles toward the IOC vote in the summer of 2017, in Lima, Peru.

The mayor, who along with the sports executive Casey Wasserman will be the central figures in the LA bid, proved yet again that he is a most compelling public official.

It’s not just that he is a Rhodes Scholar or served as an officer in the United States Naval Reserve. It’s not just that he can speak to others in their language.

It’s what he says.

“Breathe this moment in,” Garcetti told the assembled crowd, which included athletes who had starred at the 1984 Games, such as the diver Greg Louganis and the gymnast Peter Vidmar; 2008 Beijing decathlon winner Bryan Clay; members of the gold-medal winning London 2012 U.S. women's water polo team; and volleyball standouts.

“There are very few moments like this in our lifetime where this place and this space and this time transcend this moment.

“Look at these historic bluffs behind you. In front of you, the endless possibility of the Pacific Ocean. And this moment of the Pacific Rim. And here we are in a city that represents, to all of us, human possibility, ingenuity, creativity and diversity.”

Janet Evans, the gold medal-winning swimmer from the 1988 and 1992 Games, also stole a star turn Tuesday. In 1984, she said, she was 12, breathing in the moments from the seats at the Coliseum. Now, she said, at the outset of this 2024 bid, it must be that this LA effort is not just limited to Southern California. Nor just a bid. More, she said.

“If we are going to win these Games, and I like to win, we need to have every American behind us in this bid,” she said. “So,” turning toward the athletes, assembled on a row of seats nearby, “I am asking my Olympic and Paralympic friends to lead the effort to make the LA24 bid not just an LA bid but a national campaign and a national celebration.”

The Olympics can sometimes get such a bad rap. The two-year bid process can be a slog of numbers, finance, politics. The seven-year build-up to a Games can sometimes seem a protracted exercise in doubt, worry, negativity.

What gets lost, way too often, is the very thing that was showcased Tuesday at the beach: the hope and promise of the Olympics, the possibility of the human experience, the notion that sport has a legitimate role to play in moving the world forward toward a better way.

Earlier Tuesday, the Los Angeles city council voted 15-0 to authorize the mayor to sign an agreement with the USOC over bidding for the Games. In LA, as Garcetti said, “The Olympics is in our DNA.” It is. It’s why eight of 10 people want the Games back in Southern California, according to a recent poll.

Vidmar, who since late 2008 has served as chairman of the U.S. Gymnastics board of directors, explained:

“The fears that many people in Boston had are the same fears that many people had in LA before 1984. Which were: How much is this going to cost us? And what about traffic?

“And we saw in Los Angeles in 1984 that neither of those problems materialized. And I’m very confident that this will happen again the next time the Games come to Los Angeles.”

Garcetti, who keeps a 1984 Olympic torch in his office, never lost faith that it could, should, would be LA: "We do this because we believe since ancient times that human potential is always just in front of us, that the best has never yet been achieved. And that a moment in time, we can taste for a moment,” a reference to the 17 days of a Summer Games, “what it feels like to have a human family come back together.”

He said, noting the 1932 and 1984 Games, that “this is a quest that Los Angeles was made for.”

At the same time, and this must be stressed, while the 2024 bid can link back to a proud history in town, this is a new LA.

Once more: it is.

The city and all of Southern California has become a very different place since long-ago 1984.

In 1984, Eric Garcetti was 13. He came home to LA from sleep-away summer camp to see one of the last days of the Olympic track meet; to see as well the closing ceremony; to see, as he described it Tuesday, “the transformative power of the Games, not just to change my life but to change my city forever.”

He said, “When people said, ‘Oh, you’re from LA,’ after ’84, they knew us. They had already seen our films, our television programs, they had a sense of us. But they got a sense of our soul after 1984.

“Today we are here in a new Los Angeles. This is the face of a new America, a city that reflects the world as it is today and where this country will be tomorrow.”

It is the case, as Wasserman pointed out, that some 85 percent of the venues that would be needed for 2024 are already built or in planning regardless of any Olympic anything.

That said, about 80 percent of the venues that would be needed for 2024? New since 1984.

An $8.5 billion makeover at Los Angeles International Airport? Already underway, Garcetti said.

Some $40 billion in transit improvements, including extensive light-rail capacity throughout Los Angeles County? Voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase via what was called Measure R in 2008, unleashing that $40 billion through 2039.

The one major we’ll-figure-it-out in the bid as it stands now is the projected Olympic Village; if LA wins, the organizing committee would put in $75 million, a developer $925 million. “We have had a lot of interest from the private sector,” the mayor said, understating matters.

The ledger sheet strongly suggests that an LA24 Games would very likely make a lot of money. Even so, city council members were assured that the approval they gave Tuesday is merely the start of discussion and negotiation with Olympic officials; taxpayers are not committed.

"This is the engagement, not the wedding," council president Herb Wesson said.

“We are not changing the face of our city to fit the Olympic Games,” Garcetti said. “Instead, we are adapting an innovative Olympic Games concept to comfortably fit in what the city is doing already.”

As Blackmun said, “When we look at LA and what the mayor and Casey and their team have built, we see a framework for an ideal matchup,” adding a moment later, “We believe in the vision of LA. We believe this city can produce a new kind of Games for a new Olympic era,” one in line with IOC president Thomas Bach’s would-be reform plan, called Agenda 2020.

“We will do this openly. We will do it openly with the press. And we feel strong enough about this bid,” the mayor said, “that there’s nothing we can’t share.”

“Thank you,” Garcetti said at the end of his remarks and a Q&A session, before he, Wasserman, Blackmun and USOC board chairman Larry Probst headed off to Switzerland for meetings at IOC headquarters in Lausanne Wednesday evening and Thursday. The music turned to Randy Newman's "I Love LA."

“Feel free,” the mayor suggested, “to stay at the beach all day.”

Olympic math: why LA 24 makes for a good deal

BEIJING — Last Friday, the Los Angeles city council found itself under some pressure regarding city guarantees for any potential Summer Olympic Games. The council, sensibly, asked not just for more time but more involvement in the process. Compare: when Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh wavered last month on the same issue, that was, essentially, the end of the Boston bid.

LA 2024’s bid will go forward, indeed on Tuesday, and to places Boston’s didn't and couldn't. Why? Walsh had eight months to make up his mind. In Los Angeles, the city council had three days. This time, more time proved a reasonable request.

In doing enough to let a bid go forward, while keeping a careful eye on its coffers, the city of Los Angeles has provided the U.S. Olympic Committee’s 2024 ambitions that rarest of things in American life: a genuine second act.

To be explicitly clear about what’s next: the city and the USOC ought to be, and will be, partners. That said, the USOC will not in the near term have an easy ride, nor does it particularly deserve one.

To be plain, too, about expectations: there are always – stress, always – going to be naysayers, worriers and criticisms about events in public life, especially civic-minded projects with budgets that run into the billions. That’s billions with a b.

No problem.

Indeed, one of the fundamental reference points for this 2024 election is the understanding, for sure at the most senior levels of the International Olympic Committee, that it must – again, must – confront the $51 billion hangover from the 2014 Sochi Olympics. That $51 billion is the figure associated with the cost of those Games, and that number is why a remarkable number of cities in western democracies bowed out of the 2022 Winter Games process, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, Beijing the winner in the election last month.

Partially in response to Sochi and that $51 billion, the IOC last December enacted a 40-point would-be reform plan, dubbed Agenda 2020.

The starting point for real understanding of the LA 2024 project is that it is not – repeat, not – Sochi.

Nor is it 1976, and cost-overruns in Montreal, the sort of tiresome allusion that surfaced in my former newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, in an article published Saturday.

That was before 1984, for goodness’ sake, and the LA model that showed the world how to run an Olympic Games.

Here is how long ago, and how irrelevant and immaterial Montreal 1976 is to Los Angeles 2024: in Montreal in 1976, Caitlyn Jenner was a winning decathlete named Bruce.

The reason cities have gotten into trouble over the years with Olympic-related budgets, and the reason Montreal is irrelevant, is that there are, in fact, two budgets – one for the operation of the Games, the other for all the stuff that get built around them, anything from airports to metro lines to stadiums.

In LA, concerns about that second budget – the construction or infrastructure budget – should be minimal. All the major sports venues are already built, including, most importantly, the stadium, site of not just the 1984 but 1932 Games.

This is why it’s also inappropriate for the Times – which should know better if the concern is, truly, taxpayer protection – to lump the infrastructure column in with the operating column, and declare that the “cost” of the LA Games would be $5.8 billion.

They’re totally different – organizing committee expenses at $4.1 billion, non-committee expenses $1.7 billion.

Big picture, and more numbers will follow below:

LA was Agenda 2020 before Agenda 2020 was a thing. If that’s really, truly, genuinely what the IOC wants, it wants LA for 2024.

In conversations here in Beijing amid the 2015 track and field world championships with members of the IOC’s policy-making executive board — they were here for a joint meeting with the IAAF, track’s international governing body — it’s clear that an LA bid is eminently winnable.

The corollary: LA, and its taxpayers, should have no fear of the IOC, or the Olympics. Just the other way around. An LA 2024 Games, should they come to pass, would be the sort of success that makes 1984 look modest.

Starting again with last Friday’s city council session:

Showing the remarkable candor of an executive whose tempered self-assuredness will likely serve him well in the company of Olympic champions, IOC members and those who are both, bid leader Casey Wasserman explained to the city council the open secret that most everyone in the Olympic movement already knew: how LA was rejected in the first place.

In summary: LA was always the choice of the USOC’s chairman, CEO and staff. But board members with links to Boston were at the heart of a group that overruled the USOC’s staff and leadership.

This was, as we all now know, a mistake.

In public life, mistakes rarely come cheap.

Already, LA mayor Eric Garcetti and his team have exacted an unprecedented concession on behalf of taxpayers. LA’s city operations, estimated at $200 million, will now be paid for by a future organizing committee. 

To see the legalese that says just that, click here, and scroll to page D-3, Article II, Section 2.02.

As a point of contrast, Boston assuredly did not get any such concession. See here, again page D-3, Article II, Section 2.02.

The USOC has also offered an immediate contribution of at least $1 million to kick-start the bid. Frankly, that’s the very least it could do after denying LA 2024 eight months of fundraising opportunities.

There is more to come.

On top of the money the USOC could reasonably expect to have made during the LA 2024 lifecycle, already covered in a joint venture payment, the USOC wants a whole chunk of change – for elite athlete support – that escaped general notice throughout the whole Boston process. The line in LA 2024’s budget says TBD, suggesting some serious haggling.

Rightly so.

The USOC says it wants $100 million from a future organizing committee while it prepares for the Games, together with a $100 million endowment based on a 50 percent cut of any future surplus. That’s on top of the 20 percent of the surplus that would already go to the USOC under the host city contract. 

To see the outline of the "Los Angeles Fund for Team USA," click here and turn to page 46. To see the standard 20 percent share a national Olympic committee is due under the host city contract, click here and turn to page 40 of 69.

Apply the USOC’s now-plus-later demands, take out the standard shares for the IOC and USOC and the projected surplus shrinks from $161 million to $6.11 million.

Here is the math that explains that calculation:

A starting net surplus of $161.1 million, less $100 million elite athlete support now = $ 61.1 million. From $61.1 million, subtract 50 percent for USOC endowment = $30.55 million, 20 percent for USOC = $ 12.22 million, 20 percent for IOC = $12.22 million, for a total of $54.99 million. That would leave $6.11 million for LA.

That’s not fair to Angelenos.

And it absolutely would raise more than a few eyebrows among those in Olympic circles around the world who continue to believe the USOC’s natural instinct is to gouge everybody else.

The LA 84 deal was no extra money for the USOC during Games prep and 40 percent of the surplus after. Total. It was fair then. It is fair now. And a fair deal is needed to help LA play catch-up.

Let’s be clear, again. Had it been picked eight months ago, LA would have started the race as favorite. The delay and uncertainty since means that’s just not the case, even if not being a favorite can also be a good thing.

Paris, making the early running, has used the same eight months to line up $37 million in government funding for its bid. They have a head start on lobbying, too. Bid leaders and French sports ministers have been pressing all the flesh they can find this week, here at the track championships in Beijing. 

That all these details — about the LA bid and the USOC — have come to light is a good thing. The transparency lacking in Boston is now where it should have been all along. As Sir Martin Sorrell, the British executive, told the IOC members a month ago at the general assembly in Kuala Lumpur, sunshine is a good thing.

Transparency and oversight have big upsides too. The LA city council’s decision to maintain an active role will ensure serious measures of certainty and clarity accompany LA 2024’s bid.

One certainty is that the success of LA 84 has provided the IOC with a commercial model for supporting the Olympics that shows exactly how much money can be brought to the table.

Here, then, is where the numbers show so clearly what a crazy good deal LA 24 would be — for LA 24, of course, but also for the USOC, the IOC and, most important, for taxpayers.

It works both ways. There is absolutely no doubt -- not an over-reach -- LA would generate substantially more than any other city possibly could in revenue from sponsorships, ticket sales and more. At the same time, since the LA venues are already on the ground, the committee there can put on the Games for significantly less expense than anywhere else.

More detail:

Based on IOC guidance, LA has forecast $1.5 billion as the contribution it can expect to receive from the IOC.

That, though, is the number the IOC is giving organizers of the Rio 2016 Games.

It’s another open secret that by 2024 this will rise to as much as $2 billion, thanks to the success of IOC president Thomas Bach and his team in selling TV rights and top-tier sponsorships.

The London 2012 IOC contribution? $1.05 billion. This figure went to $1.5 billion for Rio and is going to keep going up, up, up -- thanks to the IOC's enhanced revenues.

The LA 24 estimate calls for $1.4 billion in domestic sponsorship. That is, in the parlance, conservative.

The Games have not been held in the United States since 2002, in Salt Lake City; the Summer Games since 1996, in Atlanta. That means there is 20-plus years of pent-up sponsor demand.

Tokyo 2020 blew threw its $1.2 billion target already: five years out from its Games.

Interestingly, the LA sponsorship projection of $1.437 is less – repeat, less! – than Boston had put forward, $1.52 billion. To compare, click here and turn to page 6 or, for that matter, page 47.

Come on.

Which is more appealing – a market of maybe 4.5 million people or the entirety of Southern California, at least four times as large?

What’s going on, here, obviously, is that the LA bid — and the USOC — are trying to make it clear that they are not the stereotypical Americans, interested in the Olympic sphere only in making money. Instead, they are being smart – doing the one thing that always plays well internationally for any U.S. effort, being humble.

Nonetheless, it’s super-obvious that more money from the IOC, and more sponsorship dollars, mean more revenue. Which means that the revenue projection of $4,827.3 billion is low. Which means there will be more than the currently forecast $400 million for contingencies until 2024 and that potential future surplus.

Way more. 

Like, way, way, way more.

The real projected surplus can't even start to be fixed until LA would win and then start selling. 

Again, what’s certain is that most of the venues LA will need are already in place. Which means a clear focus on what’s missing: an athletes’ village.

The city council already has its eye on this and that’s a good thing. The reassurance the council will need over the village is exactly what the IOC will need, also.

In an evaluation of Chicago 2016’s bid that explained the USA was a risk simply not worth taking, the IOC had unkind thoughts about financing for the village. LA 2024 cannot afford to take a similarly half-baked scheme to the final vote. The council’s aversion to taxpayer risk means LA 2024 won’t.

Frankly, though, it’s really not a worry. Anyone can worry about anything, and of course a project that’s budgeted at $1 billion is the kind of thing likely to make reasonable people, ask, OK, explain.

So, here:

The organizing committee would contribute $75 million. A developer will pick up the rest, $925 million.

Who is going to be that developer? Unidentified.

Is that a worry? No.

Why?

Are you kidding?

Los Angeles, like any city, has problems. But, with the support of the mayor, finding a developer who wants to invest in housing on a site near downtown – the new hipster capital of the United States – in a market that’s housing-scarce, is a no-brainer. And it’s not as if Los Angeles is lacking for real-estate developers.

With certainty on the venues and the village, there can – finally – be clarity on what will make this a winning bid: everything else LA has to offer in service to the Olympic movement.

The movement needs, more than anything, to stay relevant. To do that, it needs to attract young people.

And what’s this in the LA 24 bid book?

Skateboarding, on Santa Monica Beach. Click here for the bid book; skate is mentioned any number of times; to see the schematic that would put it literally on the beach, scroll to page 86.

Santa Monica: home not only of the sport but also to Activision, the company that made the Tony Hawk games.

Like no place else, LA gets the convergence of sports, entertainment and electronic gaming. And how to put on a sensible, financially responsible Olympic Games.

U.S. No. 1 overall -- in fast-changing world

BEIJING — With images of Jesse Owens and Luz Long on the big screens, Owens’ grand-daughter kicked off the final night of the 2015 track and field championships by presenting Usain Bolt his gold medal from the men’s 4x100 relay the night before.

This was, in a nutshell, the past and present of the sport. The future?

This, probably more than anything, from Seb Coe, the newly elected president of the IAAF, the sport’s governing body, taking over from Lamine Diack of Senegal, who served for 16 years: “We are more than a discussion of test tubes, blood and urine.”

He also said at a Sunday news conference, “We have a sport that is adorned by some of the most super-human outrageously talented people in any sport. Our challenge is to make sure the public know there are other athletes,” not just Bolt, “in our sport.”

This is not — not for a second — to discount the import of doping in track and field. But it’s clear things are changing.

The men’s 100 is often thought to be the dirtiest race in the sport; not so; a read of the historical record shows that, without question, it’s the women’s 1500.

And now that times in that event are often back at 4 minutes and over — the final Tuesday saw a slow, tactical 1500, won by one of the sport’s breakout stars, Genzebe Dibaba of Ethiopia, in 4:08 — more women from more countries can claim a legitimate shot at a medal.

That, actually, is one of the two big take-aways from these 2015 worlds: more athletes from more countries winning medals.

And, despite a disappointing medal performance by the U.S. team, the other: the emerging political influence internationally, concurrent with Coe’s presidency, of USA Track & Field.

Despite the chronic backbiting within certain circles — sometimes, track and field comes off as the only major sport in the world in which its most passionate adherents seemingly find joy by being so self-destructive — the sport could well be poised for a new era in the United States.

That depends, of course, on a great many factors. But everything is lined up.

Next year’s Rio Games are in a favorable time zone.

USATF has, in the last three years, under the direction of chief executive Max Siegel, made significant revenue leaps.

Beyond that, Eugene, Oregon, last year played host to the World Juniors and a meeting of the IAAF’s ruling council; the 2016 world indoors will be staged in Portland, Oregon; the 2021 world championships back in Eugene.

The 2017 track championships will be in London; in 2019, in Doha, Qatar.

By comparison: the swim world championships have never been held in the United States. This summer’s FINA championships were held in Kazan, Russia; in 2017, the swim worlds will be in Budapest; in 2019, in Gwangju, South Korea.

In elections that preceded this Beijing meet, all five of USATF’s candidates for IAAF office won; USATF president Stephanie Hightower got the highest number of votes, 163, for any candidate running for the IAAF council.

“You’ve got Seb leading the way but the change in the USATF position internationally is extremely significant,” Jill Geer, the USATF spokeswoman, observed Sunday night.

She also said, “Our development has to continue, and we don’t take our status as the world’s No. 1 track and field team for granted, at all,” adding, “No medals are guaranteed.”

From 2013 going back to 2004, the U.S. has been a 25-medal average team at world majors, meaning the Olympics or worlds.

Here, 18 overall, six gold.

Kenya and Jamaica -- with a victory late Sunday in the women's 4x4 relay -- topped the gold count, with seven. Kenya, overall: 16. Jamaica, overall: 12.

The upshot: for the first time at a world championships, dating to 1983, the U.S. finished third or worse in the gold-medal standings.

The last worlds at which the Americans won so few medals: Edmonton 2001, 13 overall, five gold; Athens 1997, 17 overall, six gold.

Here, the Chinese showed they are an emerging track and field threat, with nine medals, seven of them silver.

Ethiopia, Poland, Canada and Germany won eight apiece. Canada won two golds, in men’s pole vault, Shawn Barber, and on Sunday in men’s high jump, Derek Drouin, with a jump of 2.34 meters, or 7 feet, 8 inches.

Some specific examples of how the world is changing in real time:

The women’s 100 hurdles, long the domain of the Americans (and, recently, Australia’s Sally Pearson, who was hurt and did not compete here)?

Your Beijing podium -- Jamaica, Germany, Belarus.

The women’s 200? Gold went to Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands in a time, 21.63, surpassed in history only by the Americans Florence Griffith-Joyner and Marion Jones.

Asked the inevitable question, Schippers said, I’m clean.

Allyson Felix, the U.S. 200 star, didn’t challenge Schippers in that race; instead, Felix ran the 400, cruising to gold Thursday in 49.26, the year’s fastest time. Coe said the conversation ought to begin in earnest now about the possibility of allowing Felix the chance — like Michael Johnson in Atlanta in 1996 — to double in the 200 and 400 next year in Rio.

Without question, Bolt remains the dominant figure in track and field, and has been since his breakout performance here at the Bird’s Nest seven summers ago. Indeed, Coe said no single figure in international sport had captured the public imagination like Bolt since, probably, Muhammad Ali.

Assuming Bolt can keep himself in the good health he showed here, the world gets at least one more run-through of The Bolt Show, next summer in Rio, now with a worthy rival, the American Justin Gatlin, who took silver in both the 100 and 200. After that? Bolt’s sponsors want him to keep going through the London 2017 world championships; Bolt said he will have to think about it.

That relay Saturday night capped yet another incredible performance for Bolt. But for his false start at the Daegu 2011 worlds, he has won everything at a worlds or Olympics since 2008 — 100, 200, 4x1.

That was a familiar storyline.

This, too:

Mo Farah, the British distance star, nailed the triple double — winning the 5 and 10k, just as he had done at the Moscow 2013 worlds and the London 2012 Olympics.

The American Ashton Eaton won the decathlon, setting a new world record, 9045 points. He and his wife, the Canadian Brianne Theisen-Eaton, make up the reigning First Couple of the sport; she won silver in the heptathlon.

Dibaba, after winning the 1500 on Tuesday, took bronze in the 5000 Sunday night, a 1-2-3 Ethiopian sweep. Almaz Ayana broke away with about three laps to go, building a 15-second lead at the bell lap and cutting more than 12 seconds off the world championships record, finishing in 14:26.83.

Senbere Teferi outleaned Dibaba at the line. She finished in 14:44.07, Dibaba seven-hundredths behind that.

For junkies: Ayana covered the last 3000 meters in Sunday’s final quicker than any woman has run 3000 meters in 22 years.

Dibaba’s sister, Tirunesh, had held the world championship record, 14:38.59, set in Helsinki in 2005. Tirunesh Dibaba holds the world record still, 14:11.15, set in Oslo in 2008.

Then, of course, Beijing 2015 saw this all-too-familiar tale:

The U.S. men screwed up the 4x1 relay, a botched third exchange Saturday night from Tyson Gay to Mike Rodgers leading to disqualification after crossing the finish line second, behind Bolt and the Jamaicans.

Going back to 2001, the U.S. men’s 4x1 has failed — falls, collisions, botched handoffs — at nine of 15 major meets. Not good.

Job one is to get the stick around. If the Americans do that, they are almost guaranteed a medal — and, given a strategy that now sees Gatlin running a huge second leg, the real possibility of winning gold, as the U.S. team did in May at the World Relays, with Ryan Bailey anchoring.

Bailey did not qualify for these championships.

It’s not that the U.S. men — and women — didn’t practice. Indeed, all involved, under the direction of relay coach Dennis Mitchell, thought things were lined-up just right after the prelim, in which the same four guys — Treyvon Bromell, Gatlin, Gay, Rodgers — executed just fine.

The plan, practiced and practiced: hand-offs at about 10 to 12 meters in the zone in the prelims, 12 to 14 in the final. The plan, further: 28 steps in the final, 26 in the prelim — the extras accounting for the faster runs in the final, adrenaline and other factors.

Rodgers took responsibility for the essential mistake. He broke too early.

I don't make to many mistakes and I never make excuses I'll take the blame for this one, Ima learn from it and move on!

— Mike Rodgers (@Mr_Rodgers_DAT) August 29, 2015

As Jill Geer, the USA Track & Field spokeswoman put it in an interview Sunday night with several reporters, “In the relays, there’s a lot of pressure. everybody feels it,” athletes, coaches, staff.

She added, “They don’t accept a DQ any easier than the public does.”

Geer also noted, appropriately, that medals at this level are a function of three things: preparation, execution and luck, good or bad.

In the women’s 1500 on Tuesday, American Jenny Simpson — the Daegu 2011 gold medalist, the Moscow 2013 runner-up — lost a shoe. She finished 11th, eight-plus seconds behind Genzebe Dibaba.

Men’s decathlon: Trey Hardee — the Berlin 2009 and Daegu 2011 champion — got hurt halfway through the 10-event endurance test. He had to pull out.

Women’s 100 hurdles: 2008 Beijing gold and 2012 London silver medalist Dawn Harper-Nelson crashed out; Kendra Harrison was DQ’d; and the 2013 world champion, Brianna Rollins, finished fourth.

Women’s 4x4 relay: the Americans sent out a star-studded lineup, 2012 Olympic 400 champ Sanya Richards-Ross, Natasha Hastings, Felix and Francena McCorory, who had run the year’s fastest pre-Beijing time, 49.83.

Before the race, the four Americans went all Charlie's Angels.

Felix, running that third leg, then put the Americans in front with a 47.7-second split. But McCorory, windmilling with 90 meters to go, could not hold off Novlene Williams-Mills, and Jamaica won in a 2015-best 3:13.13. The Americans: 3:19.44.

It was the first Jamaican 4x4 relay worlds gold since 2001. The Jamaicans have never won the relay at the Olympics.

In the men’s 4x4, LaShawn Merritt reliably turned in a winning anchor leg to lead the U.S. to victory in 2:57.82.

Trinidad and Tobago got second, a national-record 2:58.2. The British, just as in the women’s 4x4, took third. The British men: 2:58.51; the British women, a season-best 3:23.62.

Earlier Sunday night, Kenyan men went 1-2 in the men’s 1500, Asbel Kiprop winning in 3:34.4, Elijah Manangoi 23-hundredths back.

The U.S. got three guys into the final, including 2012 Olympic silver medalist Leo Manzano and Matthew Centrowitz, second in the 1500 at the Moscow 2013 worlds, third at Daegu 2011.

The American finish: 8-10-11, Centrowitz, Manzano, Robby Andrews.

Manzano said afterward, “The first 800 was fine, but I thought I was just going to gear up like I did two days ago,” in the prelims, riding his trademark kick. “Unfortunately it didn’t quite pan out like that. Sometimes it just clicks in place, and today didn’t quite fit in there.”

A couple hours before that men’s 1500, Geer had said, “We had an awful lot of 4-5-6-7 finishes,” adding that “those are the kind of finishes where we will be drilling in and saying, how do we turn that 4-5-6 into a 1-2-3?”

The men’s 5k on Saturday, for instance: 5-6-7, Galen Rupp, Ben True, Ryan Hill.

Beating Farah? That’s an audacious goal.

But, Geer insisted, there is “nothing systemically wrong” with the U.S. effort.

“Our performance wasn’t necessary all the medals we had planned for or hoped for,” she said.

At the same time, she asserted, “When you look at our performance here, where we did well and maybe didn’t do well, if we can fix, which we absolutely can, even half the areas we had execution mistakes or under-performed, we will be extraordinarily strong in Rio.”

A decathlon record but more U.S. relay woe

BEIJING — For this world championships year, 2015, the U.S. 4x100 men’s and women’s relay teams had one objective, and one objective only: get the stick around. Really. The trick was not to fall prey to the dropsies, oopsies and bumps in the night that have for far too long at major meets have plagued American entries. With several young runners on the track and and the idea of using the 2015 worlds as an end unto itself but also a means of preparing for the 2016 Rio Olympics, the verdict Saturday: oops, again!

At first, it appeared the Americans had pulled second-place finishes in the 4x1, both times behind the Jamaicans.

The U.S. women turned in a season-best effort.

But then the U.S. men were disqualified for a gruesome-looking third pass, Tyson Gay to Mike Rodgers -- out of the zone.

To win at this level, everything has to go right. It's very complex. But at the same time, very simple. Veronica Campbell-Brown, the Jamaican veteran, offered the summation of what they do right and the Americans consistently find a struggle: "We executed well, we finished healthy and we won."

This next-to-last night of the 2015 worlds offered great performances not just on the track but in the field events as well.

In the decathlon, the American Ashton Eaton went into the last event, the 1500, needing a 4:18.25 or better to break his own world record, the 9039 points he put up at the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon.

Beyond pride and records, don’t think he didn’t want the record, even if this is a non-Olympic year; it would mean, given bonuses and roll-overs, six-figures plus.

His wife, Brianne Theisen-Eaton, the Canadian silver medalist heptathlete here and at the Moscow 2013 worlds as well, tweeted about an hour before he would run:

Last talk with @AshtonJEaton before his 1500m. He said, "Bri, I'm nervous." 1 hour until go time. 4:18.25 or faster and it's a new WR.

— BrianneTheisen-Eaton (@btheiseneaton) August 29, 2015

To go 4:18, Eaton would have needed to keep to this pace: 1:08 at 400 meters; 2:17, 800; 3:26. 1200; 4:18, finish.

In Eugene in 2012, Eaton had run a personal-best 4:14.48.

Michael Schrader of Germany hit 400 in 1:09.34, Eaton back in the pack; Larbi Bourrada of Algeria 800 in 2:21.56, Eaton one step behind; Bourrada at 1200, stretching it out, 3:31.61; Eaton ran hard down the homestretch, chasing Bourrada, who crossed in 4:16.61.

Eaton, 4:17.52.

Clear by 73-hundredths of a second.

Eaton fell to the track, then got up and staggered toward the sidelines, hands on knees, before climbing over the rail to give his wife a hug. The picture of exhaustion, he literally needed help getting back over the railing.

The new world record: 9045 points.

His performance included a decathlon event world record 45-flat Friday in the 400; Bill Toomey had run 45.63 in 1968.

He said later about Brianne, "She’s — it can’t be summed up in words but I now I would not have done what I did today without her."

He also said about the emotion that welled up after his victory, "The older I get," and he's 27, "the more I realize we're making choices to have the experience we're having. Those choices involve giving up a lot of stuff.

"You just feel like you miss a lot, friends, family ... it is just an accumulation of those feelings, and when you do something you just realize, I am doing it for a reason, and when that reason manifests itself it's pretty emotional."

Canada’s Damian Warner took decathlon silver, 8695, a national record; Rico Freimuth of Germany third, in a personal-best 8561.

"When Ashton broke the world record, the feeling on my skin was unbelievable," Freimuth said, adding, "I told him he is the greatest athlete."

Breaking the world record by less than that one second carried with it a slight irony. At the 2014 world indoors in Sopot, Poland, Eaton missed breaking his own heptathlon world record in the final event, the 800, by — one second.

"That was a gutsy 1500, huh?!" Harry Marra, who coaches Eaton husband and wife, said later -- and the results both put up underscore what a world-class coach that Marra, after many years in the sport, continues to be.

Eaton said that before the 1500, "I was doubting myself in the restroom, thinking, I don't know if I can run that." Then he thought, "I have a lot of people who believe in me … and they were all saying, you can do it. I was like, yeah, think I can."

Earlier Saturday evening, Britain’s Mo Farah completed the distance triple double, winning the men’s 5k with a ferocious kick to cross in 13:50.38. He won the 10k earlier in the meet.

With the victory, Farah became the 5 and 10k champion at the 2012 Olympics, 2013 worlds and, now, here.

The winning time, 13:50.38, was the slowest in the history of the world championships, dating to 1983. The previous slowest: Bernard Lagat, 13:45.87, at Osaka, Japan, in 2007.

Farah ran the last 400 meters in 52.7 seconds, the last 200 in 26.5. "The important thing," he said, "is to win the race, and I did that."

Americans in the 5k: 5-6-7.

For the first time ever at a world championships, the women’s high jump saw six athletes go over 1.99 meters, or 6 feet, 6-1/4 inches.

Russia’s Maria Kuchina won at 2.01, 6-7, the 0ft-injured Croatian star, Blanka Vlašić, taking second, also at 2.01 (she had one earlier miss, at 1.92, 6-3 1/2), tearfully blowing kisses to the crowd after her last jump.

Vlašić now has two worlds golds and two silvers; she took silver at the Beijing 2008 Games. This was Kuchina’s first worlds; she registered an impressive six first-time clearances Saturday before being stymied at 2.01. Another Russian, Anna Chicherova, the London 2012 gold and Beijing 2008 bronze medalist, took third, also 2.01 but with two earlier misses.

"Today I showed that I am still there, that it is not over," Vlašić said.

Since 2003, meanwhile, there had been 13 major sprint relay competitions before Saturday night — Olympics, world championships and, the last two years, World Relays.

At those 13, U.S. men had botched it up — drops, collisions, falls, hand-offs outside the zone — seven times.

Add in a retroactive doping-related DQ from the Edmonton 2001 worlds, and the scoreboard said eight of 14. Dismal.

U.S. women: five no-go’s going back to 2003, four in the sprints, one collision in the 4x1500 in the Bahamas in 2014.

There’s a women’s retroactive Edmonton 2001 doping-related DQ, too. So that would make it six.

It’s not as if the athletes, coaches and, for that matter, administrators at USA Track & Field are not aware of the challenge.

Indeed, after the 2008 Summer Games here at the Bird’s Nest, USATF commissioned a thorough report on the matter, dubbed Project 30; in those Olympics, both men’s and women’s 4x1 relays dropped the baton on the exchange to the anchor, Torri Edwards to Lauryn Williams, and Darvis Patton to Tyson Gay.

The Project 30 report identified a host of institutional and structural challenges, and potential reforms, including more training camps.

What followed that next summer, at the Berlin 2009 world championships: the women’s 4x1 team DNF’d in the heats,  the men’s 4x1 effort got DQ’d in the rounds.

It hasn’t, of course, been all bad.

At the 2012 London Games, the U.S. women 4x1 ran to gold and a world-record, 40.82.

The U.S. relay program has this year been under the direction of Dennis Mitchell, the Florida-based former sprint champion who is now coach of, among others, Justin Gatlin.

He is so in charge that when, at a pre-meet news conference, U.S. team coaches Delethea Quarles (women) and Edrick Floréal (men) were asked about who might run in the relays, each said, it’s up to Mitchell.

It wouldn’t be a championships without some measure of, ah, observation from many quarters — fans, agents, press reports — about which Americans are doing what, or not, in which relay.

For instance, Tori Bowie, the bronze medalist here in the women’s 100, in 10.86, didn't run. Why?

Bowie is sponsored by adidas; the U.S. team by Nike. At the Diamond League meet earlier this summer in Monaco, to run in the relays you had to wear team gear. Some adidas athletes chose not to -- meaning they chose not to run. For emphasis, the U.S. team did not say, don’t run because you are sponsored by adidas; indeed, the U.S. team said please do run, in national-team gear.

The predictable upshot, this quote from Bowie’s agent, Kimberly Felton: “Of course, she would love to run the relay and support her country.”

Well, sure. But a little context, please, because, as always, things just aren’t black and white.

In Monaco, Bowie attended one practice, according to USATF. Her representatives then informed USATF she would not be competing there and would not be part of the relay pool going forward, including the camp in Japan. To not stay part of the program — that was all from Bowie’s side.

This statement, in full, earlier this week from USATF:

“Our men’s and women’s sprinters were invited to Team USA relay camp in Monaco in mid-July and to Team USA’s overall World Championships training camp in Narita, Japan, this month. In order to ensure quality relay performances and success in Beijing, athletes were required to attend both camps and to actively participate in all practices. With a relatively high number of new, talented sprinters emerging this year, these practices were especially important for practicing exchanges and determining relay position. Tori Bowie’s representatives informed us that she would not compete in Monaco and later said she would not be moving forward with the relay process or attending camp in Narita. We moved forward, practicing with and planning for the athletes in attendance. We look forward to our relays taking the track on Saturday.”

If this all seems like something new, consider:

At those Osaka 2007 worlds, the American sprinter Carmelita Jeter won bronze in the 100, in 11.02, behind Jamaica’s Campbell (not yet married) and another American, Lauryn Williams, both in 11.01. Jeter ran in the 4x1 relay heats; U.S. coaches opted not to use her in the final, believing a different line-up gave the Americans their best chance; the U.S. women’s 4x1 team, no Jeter, won in 41.98.

In Saturday’s prelims, the U.S. women went 42 flat, second only to Jamaica, which went a world-leading 41.84.

The U.S.: English Gardner, Allyson Felix, Jenna Prandini, Jasmine Todd.

Jamaica: Sherone Simpson, Natasha Morrison, Kerron Stewart, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.

In the finals, the Americans put out the same line-up; the Jamaicans, Campbell-Brown, Natasha Morrison, Elaine Thompson and Fraser-Pryce.

Felix ran a big second leg. But the Jamaicans had the lead by the time the stick got to Fraser-Pryce. Game over: the Jamaicans won in a world championship-record 41.07, second-fastest time in history, the Americans next in a season-best 41.68. Trinidad and Tobago pulled third, in a national-record 42.03.

On the men’s side:

At the World Relays in May in the Bahamas, the Americans figured out a formula for taking out the Jamaicans: get a big-enough lead so that even Usain Bolt, who ran anchor, couldn’t catch up. In the Bahamas, given a big lead by Justin Gatln and Tyson Gay, running legs two and three, Ryan Bailey held off Bolt for the victory.

Bailey is not here; he false started in his 100 heat at the U.S. nationals and so did not qualify; he then pulled out of the 200.

He would be missed.

In the Bahamas, the U.S. ran 37.38, and Bailey afterward made a throat-slash motion, emphasizing no fear of the Jamaicans.

The U.S. four here: Treyvon Bromell, Gatlin, Gay, Rodgers.

Jamaica in the prelims: Nesta Carter, Asafa Powell, Rasheed Dwyer, Nickel Ashmeade.

Prelim times: Jamaica 37.41, U.S. 37.91.

For the finals, the U.S. lineup stayed the same; for Jamaica, Carter, Powell, Ashmeade, Bolt.

Before it all got underway, Bolt did a little dance on the track, laughing and smiling, as always.

The Americans ran in Lane 6, Jamaicans in 4.

Inexplicably, Bromell almost missed the start; he was just settling into the blocks when the gun went off. He recovered and executed a slick pass to Gatlin, who, again, ran a huge leg two.

But the gap closed, and Bolt powered to victory in 37.36, best in the world this year.

The U.S. appeared to finished second in 37.77 despite that ugly-looking third pass, Gay to Rodgers. Rodgers actually stopped short for just a moment to try to be sure to grab the bright pink stick in the zone.

Rodgers said, "I knew that I had to slow it down a bit because I still did not have the baton. I wanted to stay in the zone."

Job not done.

More practice, more camps -- maybe more Ryan Bailey, it would appear, for 2016.

Scoreboard for the U.S. men since 2001 in the sprints: 15 races, nine fails. That's a failure rate of 60 percent.

Take out the 2001 doping matter and since 2003 it's eight fails-for-14. Still not good.

"It was very hard to get focused because of all the noise," Gay would say later, an odd thing for a veteran like him to say, adding a moment later, "We are all very upset because of the disqualification."

China, to a great roar, was moved up to second from third, in 38.01. Gatlin earlier in the week had noted the emergence of Chinese sprinters, including Bingtian Su, with a personal-best 9.99 in the 100. It was Su's 26th birthday Saturday, and after the race the crowd at the Bird's Nest serenaded him with a rousing version of "Happy Birthday."

Canada was jumped to third, 38.13.

For Bolt, this relay made for yet another championships triple -- with the exception of his false start at the Daegu 2011 worlds, and that relay in May in the Bahamas, he has won everything at a major meet, Olympics or world championships, since 2008: 100, 200 and the 4x1.

Bolt, later, on the Americans: "It is called pressure. They won the World Relays and the pressure was on them. I told you -- I am coming back here and doing my best."

Echoed Powell, "We came out very strong and I think the U.S. wanted it too bad. They made mistakes," he said, adding,  "We got the stick around, and we won."