Ten deep (sort of, maybe) thoughts

Not everything that happens is itself worth a stand-alone column, even on the space-aplenty internet.

To that end, some recent news nuggets:

-- U.S. Olympic athletes send letter asking for other Russian sports to be investigated. Reaction: 1. There’s obviously a huge difference between state-sponsored or -sanctioned doping, and what has gone on, and for sure absolutely is going on, here. (If you think there are zero U.S. athletes engaged in the use of performance-enhancing substances, please send me a bank draft for a bridge in Brooklyn I would be delighted to sell you.) 2. The First Amendment says you can say almost anything you want. Have at it. 3. The risk, of course, is that such a letter — in the international sphere — appears completely, thoroughly sanctimonious. Lance Armstrong? Marion Jones? BALCO? Major League Baseball and the steroid era (probably the primary reason baseball is not back in the Olympic Games)? 4. With Los Angeles bidding for 2024, with every IOC member’s vote at issue, does it ever work for Americans to assume a position of such seeming moral superiority?

-- Premise: doping in Russia is bad and something has to be done. Not just in Russia. Everywhere. Reaction: 1. Obviously. 2. Seriously. 3. Now -- who's going to pay to put together a worldwide system that can really be way more effective? Let's start with $25-30 million, enough to more or less double the World Anti-Doping Agency's annual budget to the ballpark of $50-55 million. Where's that coming from? If you are an international sports federation, you don't have that kind of scratch. 4. Not even combined, the federations don't have it. 5. Governments? In virtually every country but the United States, funding for sport is a federal government function. 6. The IOC?

-- LA 2024 drops plans for an Olympic village near downtown, says if it’s picked that UCLA dorms would serve as athlete housing and USC would play host to a media village. Reaction: 1. This saves LA 2024 lots of money and removes an element of uncertainty from the bid file. 2. The biggest knock on LA is that it has played host twice to the Summer Games, in 1932 and 1984. In 1984, athletes stayed in the dorms at UCLA and USC. 3. Sure, the dorms at UCLA are better than you would find at universities in Europe. 4. The trick is convincing the European-dominated International Olympic Committee that 2024 is not a been-there, done-that. Going back to UCLA elevates that risk and is, frankly, going to require a major sales job. 5. The housing at USC is going to be really nice. Like, really excellent. The university is in the midst of a huge construction project that promises a thorough gentrification in its near-downtown neighborhood. But no one cares about the media. Clarification: none of the IOC members do, at least enough to swing a vote one way or the other.

-- LA 2024 gets a $2 billion stadium for the NFL Rams (and maybe another team). For free. Also, pretty much all major venues, and all hotels, are in place. And there’s a multibillion dollar-transit plan in the works that’s going to happen regardless of the Olympics. Reaction: 1. Is any city anywhere better-suited for the Summer Games? 2. Is the IOC ready — finally? — to embrace the Americans again? 3. If IOC president Thomas Bach really wants Agenda 2020 to be relevant, here is a world city that, as he has put it, not only talks the talk but walks the walk. 4. This is the most-important host city election in the modern era, determining the course of future bids. If the IOC keeps rewarding stupidity and waste, you have to ask, seriously, about its direction.

Watch out! @RampageNFL is loose in LA! https://t.co/zkwhvpn0ec 👀 pic.twitter.com/0SEbLJfcel

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) January 19, 2016

-- A Danish survey, measuring and comparing national representation from 2013 to 2015 in international sport, declares the United States is far and away the most influential nation in the world. Reaction: 1. Is this a cosmic joke? 2. No U.S. Olympic bids for 2020 or 2022. Why? 3. Chicago 2016. 4. New York 2012. 5. That soccer World Cup bid for 2022? How'd that work out? 6. The United States is seriously lacking in top-level representation. Everyone in the Olympic world knows this. You've got the newly elected head of the International Tennis Federation, and one member of the IOC executive board -- and a handful of others who are, say, technical directors or even a secretary general. Because of the way IOC rules work, the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee board of directors, Larry Probst, is hugely unlikely to himself ever be on the IOC board. 7. The survey methodology: "The data behind the index consists of a total of 1673 positions across 120 international federations. Each position is weighed between 1 and 10 based on the level of sports political power. As an example, the president of the IOC scores 10, whereas a board member in a non-Olympic European federation receives the minimum score of 1." 8. There's an enormous difference between quantity of influence, which this survey purports to measure, and quality. To reiterate, see No. 3 and 4, which is why the USOC, with Probst and chief executive Scott Blackmun in particular, has spent the past six years rebuilding relationships internationally, including the resolution of a revenue-sharing deal with the IOC that had made it all but impossible for the U.S. to consider a bid.

-- Voters in Iowa due to caucus in the next few days, followed by balloting in New Hampshire, and we're off to the races. Reaction: 1. If you want the Olympic Games back in the United States in 2024, you want Hillary Clinton to win in November. 2. Say what? 3. Yep. 4. You really think that Donald Trump, who advocates walls and bans, is remotely on the same page as the Olympic spirit? 5. Hillary Clinton, when she was senator from New York, went to Singapore in 2005 to lobby for New York City’s 2012 bid. In 1996, President and Mrs. Clinton led the U.S. delegation to the Atlanta Games, and Bill Clinton formally opened those Olympics. In 1994, Hillary Clinton led the U.S. delegation to the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway. 6. Bill and Hillary Clinton have a longstanding relationship with LA 2024 bid chairman Casey Wasserman.

-- Five days in Cuba for the first Olympic sports event there since President Obama’s announcement of a new normal between the U.S. and the island nation. Reaction: 1. You can see how Havana was once lovely. 2. Now it’s just mostly crumbling. Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of concrete buildings are literally falling apart in the salt air. 3. You want potholes? You have maybe never seen roads so torn-up. It’s a wonder all those classic cars don’t fall into some of these potholes, which resemble nothing so much as sinkholes, never to plow forward again. 4. Big cars with fins are awesome. No seat belts — not so much. 5. My room at the Hotel Nacional was once the site of a mafia meeting. A plaque on the wall said so. 6. Frank Sinatra once stayed in the room next door. Another plaque. 7. If you get the chance, go to Havana now, before the flood of Americans — and all the corporate investment dollars — show up. It’s incredible in 2016 to go someplace and find no McDonald’s, no Starbucks, no Walmart. Not saying those brands are the zenith of American culture. But, you know, they're almost everywhere. Not Cuba. 8. It rained cats and dogs one night and seawater washed up nearly five blocks inland. Cuba is rich with potential but the infrastructure needs — the basics — are almost staggering: water, sewage, electricity, telephone, internet, roads, bridges and more. 9. U.S. mobile phones work pretty much everywhere in the world now. Not Cuba.

-- Alberto Juantorena, the track and field legend (gold medals, Montreal 1976, 400 and 800 meters), has for years now been a senior figure in Cuban sport. As of last August, he is also one of four vice presidents of track's international governing body, the IAAF, now headed by Sebastian Coe. (Historical footnote: it was Coe who, in 1979, broke Juantorena's world record in the 800, lowering it from 1:43.44 to 1:42.33. David Rudisha of Kenya now owns the record, 1:40.91, set at the London 2012 Games.) Two events in the next few weeks require Juantorena to pass through U.S. customs, one a meeting in Puerto Rico of what's called NACAC, an area track and field group, the other the indoor world championships in mid-March in Portland, Oregon. Juantorena has been granted one (1) visa by the U.S. authorities. That's good for one entry, not two. Reaction: 1. Someone in the U.S. government has to fix this. 2. And, like, immediately. 3. Juantorena or Antonio Castro, one of Fidel's sons, an activist in seeking the return of baseball to the Games, figure to be in the mix when the IOC gets around to naming a new member from Cuba. 4. Nothing will destroy the LA 2024 bid faster than word that it is difficult -- still, 14-plus years after 9/11 -- to get into the United States.

-- Run Gum, owned in part by U.S. 800-meter runner Nick Symmonds, files suit against the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Track & Field, alleging an antitrust claim in connection with logo and uniform advertising rules at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Reaction: 1. Run Gum is a great product. The new cinnamon flavor is excellent. Recommendation: the gum is also great for people with migraines for whom caffeine is, as doctors like to say, medically indicated. Take it from someone who knows. 2. Why, though, the headache of a lawsuit? 3. The antitrust issues are nominally interesting but in the sphere of the Olympics the IOC's rules and, as well, the 1978 Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act almost always control. 4. So why a lawsuit? You file lawsuits when a) you profoundly disagree about something, b) you negotiate but can't reach agreement and/or or c) maybe you're just looking for publicity. 5. USATF, under the direction of chief executive Max Siegel, has made tremendous efforts in recent months to not only reduce friction at all levels but to actively promote collegiality. The annual meeting in December was all but a love-fest. Last September, USATF and its athletes advisory council agreed on a revenue distribution plan that will deliver $9 million in cash to athletes over the coming five years. 6. It's all good to make a living at track and field. Every athlete should be able to do so. That's not the issue. 7. Again: it's why a lawsuit and what's the motive? Symmonds, asked about that Thursday, said with a laugh,"I think Nick Symmonds going on a date with Paris Hilton -- that's a publicity play," adding, "Engaging in litigation -- engaging in litigation with the people putting on the freaking Olympic Trials that I have to compete at -- all that pressure on my shoulders, why would I want to do that, unless I care about the sport?" 8. No question Symmonds cares about the sport. Even so, whatever disagreement you might have, you couldn't talk it out? It's January. The Trials run July 1-10. That's more or less six months away. 9. Symmonds, asked whether there had been an in-person meeting or extensive negotiation on the issue before the filing of the case, said, no. He said he had sought via email only to "engage in dialogue" with Siegel and with USOC marketing guy Chester Wheeler but that was "months ago." He asserted, "The goal is to level the playing field. Whether that's done through [pre-trial] resolution or ultimately to trial, I’m not sure. I just know it seems so unfair that only apparel manufacturers, only registered apparel manufacturers, are allowed to bid on that space. It just seems so grossly unfair. We are just trying to level the playing field." At the same time, he said, referring to litigation, "This option allows me to stay in Seattle and focus on training and and focus on making my third Olympic team, and allows lawyers to have that conversation for me. That's a conversation I don't have the time or energy or resources to have. I know my limitations. I'm not equipped to have that conversation." 9. It's intriguing that the case includes the same lawyers that pursued the O'Bannon antitrust matter against the NCAA. Because you're going for scorched-earth or because you're trying to reach a just result? 10. Symmonds likes to say that he is all for advancing athlete interests. Taking him at face value, because he assuredly has great passion about a great many things, it's also the case that lawsuits cost money. This particular lawsuit asks for triple damages and attorney's fees. As for damages -- who would that benefit? As for attorney's fees -- same question. In the meantime, the dollars it's going to take to defend this case -- whose pocket, ultimately, is that money going to come out of? Big-time lawyers don't come cheap. Try $600 an hour, and up. If you were on the USATF athletes' board, wouldn't you want to ask about that element -- in the guise of finding out who, ultimately, is being served?

-- Kuwait appeals court acquits Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of charges, overturning six-month jail sentence. The sheikh is a major powerbroker in Olympic and FIFA circles. Reaction: 1. What's going on in Kuwait, with various twists and turns, can all be tied to friction between Sheikh Ahmad and the Kuwaiti sports minister, Sheikh Salman al-Sabah. Sheikh Salman ran in 2014 for the presidency of the international shooting federation. He lost. 2. Never bet against Sheikh Ahmad.

Nadia Comaneci takes Havana

HAVANA -- Incredibly, this summer it will have been 40 years since Nadia Comaneci turned her perfect-10s at the Montreal Summer Games. As difficult as those 10s were, the trick she has perfected since is perhaps all the more difficult.

Over the years, Nadia has emerged as one of the very few Olympic stars who is not only known by her first name but known virtually everywhere. She and her husband, the American gymnast Bart Conner, himself a gold medalist in Los Angeles in 1984, are hailed far and wide as first-rate ambassadors for the Olympic ideals.

This perhaps explains why, a few weeks back, the Rome 2024 bid committee tweeted out a photo of Nadia during her competition years:

Buon compleanno a @nadiacomaneci10, una delle più grandi ginnaste del ventesimo secolo. #WeWantRoma2024 pic.twitter.com/ERNyaXmY47

— Roma 2024 (@roma2024) November 12, 2015

Only to have Conner file this rejoinder:

Rome is an incredible city, but don't be misled @nadiacomaneci10 and @bartconner support @LA2024. Go LA! pic.twitter.com/HILTNCx6T4 — Bart Conner (@bartconner) January 22, 2016

With U.S.-Cuba relations moving toward a new normal, Comaneci took part this past weekend in a variety of events in Havana, including an appearance at the Cuban national gymnastics academy, where -- among others -- the 2015 men's world championship silver medalist, Manrique Larduet, trains.

So, too, little girls who dream of being Nadia.

He, and they, were thrilled -- in the kind of occasion the Olympic world needs way more of -- the star herself, the embodiment of dreaming big dreams.

It all reminded her, Nadia would say afterward, of Romania a long time ago. And what was -- still, is -- possible.

More judo, please -- and, yes, more Vizer, too

HAVANA — It is closing in on a year now that Marius Vizer was cast off into something akin to the Olympic wilderness. His crime? Mostly, speaking the truth.

Now, amid scandal enveloping world soccer, track and field, tennis and perhaps extending even to the International Olympic Committee, the contrast with the International Judo Federation — which Vizer leads, then and now — could not be more ready, or more obvious.

In a world in which sport leaders too often pay mere lip service to the values that sport can advance and to the notion of athletes at the center of everything, Vizer and the IJF don’t just talk the talk.

No. They walk the walk, big time, and with judo poised to be one of the breakout sports at the Rio 2016 Summer Games — Brazilian judokas may well win bunches of medals —followed by a return to its spiritual home, Japan, for the Tokyo 2020 Games, the time is ripe for the rest of world sport to take a good look at judo, and see what it is doing so right.

In essence, the world needs more of the values that are at the core of judo: the Olympic trio of respect, excellence and friendship.

Last month, for instance, after a visit to Pyongyang, Vizer said that perhaps North Korea could play host to the 2017 world judo junior championships.

“Some people may not agree with the delivery,” Jose H. Rodriguez, the chief executive director of USA Judo, said here, referring to Vizer. “But the guy really is a visionary.”

 To be clear: other Olympic sports showcase the Olympic values as well. And, since judo involves human beings, the sport has over its history witnessed — as in other areas of sport, and life — accusations of misconduct and wrongdoing.

But in judo, and especially under Vizer's watch at the IJF, the values are typically more than just talk. They’re put into action, and every day.

In November, after health authorities declared the country ebola-free, the Sierra Leone Judo Assn. organized a five-day training camp in Freetown, attracting 70 participants and — maybe even more important — thousands of spectators. The IJF had made a $10,000 donation at the start of last year to the national ebola response center.

Just this week, Sierra Leone saw a major judo demonstration — this time at a 10,000-seat stadium, at what was called the “Ebola Sport Festival,” judo highlighted along with rugby, soccer, volleyball, wrestling and cycling.

The world needs, too, more of what Vizer has always been unafraid of: speaking truth to power. And, with issues of governance increasingly taking center-stage in world sport, sport would be far better served if the reaction to such observations, whether offered critically or not, was less rooted reflexively in recrimination and retribution.

All that does is make for old-style personality politics. With the IOC suddenly stressing accountability, transparency and best-practice governance, there’s no place or time for that.

Enough time has now passed that Vizer’s comments at SportAccord last year in Sochi — which would quickly cost him the presidency of that umbrella sport-federation organization — ought to be given a second look.

For sure, Vizer hardly exercised the diplomacy and politesse that make for common currency in the Olympic sphere; at the same time, he has in large measure been proven right.

The thrust of Vizer’s observations: the IOC lacked transparency and too often ignored the international sport federations, including his plan for new multi-sport competitions. He called the IOC system “expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.”

Speaking moments later to the same audience, IOC president Thomas Bach offered a gracious response. Proxies then stepped in to do the heavy lifting, foremost among them Lamine Diack, then the president of the IAAF, the international track and field federation.

Diack became the first boss of an international federation to suspend its SportAccord membership. He called Vizer a “chief coming from nowhere.”

Vizer, in response: “About the decision from Mr. Diack of the athletics, I want to make just one comment and with that I close this subject. I dedicate and I sacrifice my family for sport, I mean sacrifice in a way of dedication, and in my eyes [Diack is] a person who sacrifices sport for his family."

Last August, at the IOC all-members congress in Kuala Lumpur, Bach took the unusual step of permitting Diack — by then an honorary member — to make an address in response to allegations, spurred by the German broadcaster ARD, that the IAAF had covered up doping tests. Diack called the allegations a “joke.”

Now Diack is under criminal inquiry in France, suspected of accepting more than $1 million in bribes to help Russian athletes evade sanction for tests.

A World Anti-Doping Agency-commissioned report issued earlier this month further declared that Diack orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up tests, creating “an informal illegitimate governance structure outside the formal governance structure.” The report named, among other, Diack’s lawyer, and two of his sons, Papa Massata Diack and Khalil, also known as Ibrahima.

Meanwhile, the Guardian, the British newspaper, after reviewing May 2008 emails from Papa Massata Diack, when Doha, Qatar, was bidding for the 2016 Summer Games, said the notes suggest that six people referred to by their initials — corresponding to six IOC members — had “parcels” delivered through a “special advisor” in Monaco. Lamine Diack is believed to be that “special advisor,” the paper said.

Speaking Thursday at a news conference before competition got underway at the Havana Grand Prix, the first Olympic-sport event in Cuba since the announcement that relations between Cuba and the United States would be increasingly normalized, Vizer said, “I professed already my opinion last year in Sochi, predicting or not predicting everything that arrived after,” adding a moment later, “I can tell you that the unity, the solidarity of the judo family today is much stronger than all … big systems which sometimes try to contest the inherent values of sport.”

He also said, responding to another question, “The role of sport is to build friendships, peace, education and solidarity. Our sport, judo, has proven on many occasions that these values have no borders, even in moments when countries or regions of the world have contested different values or territories or opinions.”

And, as well: “The human spirit of the athletes is friendship, is peace, is to work together,” adding, “Always we have each other. We try, and we are working, to find solutions [to advance] unity, solidarity, peace and friendship.”

When a judo player comes out to the tatami, he or she bows in respect. Facing his or her opponent, another bow. When a match ends, before a decision is announced, belts are tightened, uniforms straightened. Upon leaving the mat, another bow.

In Friday’s opening-day finals, in the men’s under-66 kilogram weight class (145.5 pounds), France’s Loic Korval and Russia’s Kamal Khan-Magomedov were going at it when the Russian got something in his eye. Korval waited patiently while Khan-Magomedov cleared things up. Then they resumed fighting. Just as the final gong was sounding, Korval executed a throw that would have won the match — but it was ruled to have come after time had expired.

Did he throw a fit? Pout? Rage against the referee or the universe? No. He smiled and bowed, exiting with dignity and grace. Later, all four medalists — gold, silver, two bronze — posed for a winning photo.

Another example:

At the 2013 world championships in Rio, in the women’s under-63 kilogram weight class (139 pounds), Israeli Yarden Gerbi took first place. In the final, she defeated France’s Clarisse Agbegnenou in 43 seconds, dislocating Agbegnenou’s shoulder and leaving Agbegnenou momentarily unconscious after a chokehold.

In that moment, Gerbi had just become Israel’s first-ever worlds gold medalist. Did she jump and down, exulting in victory? No. She waited by her friend’s side until Agbegnenou came to, making sure Agbegnenou was as OK as could be. Only then did she get up and walk over to embrace her longtime coach, Shany Hershko.

Here Saturday, Gerbi won gold again, defeating Cuba’s Maricet Espinosa. In all, over the three days, Israeli fighters won two golds and a silver, perhaps signaling what is also to come in Rio.

“I have been waiting for this feeling of winning gold ... and this is too long for me,” Gerbi said afterward. “I’m not at my best right now but it’s important to win even when you are not at your best. Every time I think of the Olympics, I have the butterflies and this is my dream.”

Judo holds enormous potential. At the professional level in the United States, for instance, it barely gets newspaper space or even a mention on television highlight shows. Teddy Riner of France, the 290-pound force who is an eight-time world champion and 2012 London Games gold medalist, perhaps judo’s biggest star, has never competed in North America.

In some ways, the sport, even at a major stop like Havana on a world tour, seems remarkably curious. It’s unclear how many souls in Cuba could have afforded to buy IJF merchandise — but, no matter. There was none for sale in or around the arena at the creaking Ciudad de la Deportiva complex.

That said, on the theory that numbers don’t lie, clearly the sport is doing a lot of things right, and in a lot of places. Here are figures from the 2015 world championships in Astana, Kazakhstan:

Television viewership of 193 million viewers, up 72 percent from 110 million at the 2014 championships in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

On Facebook, during the week-long 2015 championships: 28 million impressions and 4.8 million engagements (meaning likes, shares or comments). Twitter: almost 1 million active users.

As is now usual, the Havana event was live-streamed on www.ippon.org.

Judo can be found pretty much everywhere in the world: 195 national federations.

To that end, IJF events — and, as well, judo’s constructive influence — also travel the globe.

In September, working in accord with the IOC’s Solidarity development program, Hanato Saki, a Japanese judo expert, wrapped up a five-month coaching stint in Laos, by any measure one of the world’s poorest nations, where the means for sport are typically not readily available. At the Southeast Asian Games last year in Singapore, the Laotian judo team won a silver and two bronze medals.

A few weeks ago, the IJF won an award from a major Dubai-based organization for efforts to bring the sport to hundreds of children in the refugee camp at Kilis, Turkey, near the Syrian border. Some 17,000 refugees are there, 10,000 age 15 and under.

In accepting the award, Vizer said that bringing judo to the camp had brought refugee children a “small island of happiness,” adding, “We need to invest in our children. Sport can change the world and judo can teach young refugees honesty and fearlessness.”

The IOC, at its policy-making executive board meeting in December, said it had identified three refugees — a female Syrian swimmer training in Germany, a female Iranian taekwondo athlete training in Belgium and a male judoka from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Brazil — who might be competitive enough to qualify for the Rio Games.

Twice last year, Vizer worked to ensure that Israeli athletes could compete at events in Arab nations — in May in Morocco, and then in late October in Abu Dhabi.

In Morocco, the crowd heavily booed the Israelis — and this after they’d had to wait in a room at the airport for eight hours before Vizer said the entire event was off unless the Israelis were in. In Abu Dhabi, the Israelis competed under not under their own flag but via IJF colors — in the same way that a Kosovo fighter, Nora Gjakova, competed here in Havana.

Were the two situations perfect? No.

Did the Israelis compete, however? And in this way, did the two events mark a step forward? For sure.

In an IJF statement issued at the close of the Abu Dhabi stop with the head of the Israeli Judo Federation, Moshe Ponti, the two said, “Our sport needs heroes. We don’t need martyrs. The Israeli judokas are heroes, as is anyone else who was involved to make their participation in the grand slam possible.”

In an interview here, Ponti said, “I said this the first time: maybe next time we fight with our flag and our anthem.” At the same time, he added of the crowd in Abu Dhabi, “Maybe everyone knew you were from Israel.”

It is in that spirit that judo came for the three-day Havana event — following up a 2014 stop here but, of course, the political scene with the Americans on a different path.

Amid rumors of a Havana visit by President Obama, perhaps as soon as March, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the U.S. chargé d’affaires, came to watch some judo and said, “Cuba has been very active in international sports. I’m happy to be here watching our athletes perform,” adding, “Sports diplomacy is always very important, part of the people-to-people activities.”

Rodriguez of USA Judo said, “Sometimes things work out with perfect timing. Here we have the ambassador attending a judo competition. We were talking many years ago about ping-pong diplomacy. Now we are talking judo diplomacy.”

Antonio Castro, one of Fidel’s sons — Antonio Castro has been active in the campaign to get baseball back in the Summer Games — was also on hand, and said at an IJF gala later here, “Thank you for giving the chance to Cuba to organize a grand prix. Judo teaches values. It teaches how to win but also how to lose, and it gives the opportunity to athletes to share their experience.”

For his part, at that same gala, Vizer said, “There are some things in life we cannot achieve by money or power. This is the spirit,” of judo and of sport itself.

Sebastian Coe is the answer, not the problem

If you have seen Fight Club, the 1999 movie with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton (New York Times: “surely the defining cult movie of our time”), or, better yet, read the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel that inspired it, you know the elemental first rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club.

This is the key to understanding what happened at track and field’s international governing body, the IAAF, in regards to doping in Russia (mostly) and cover-ups, and as a spur going forward, because institutional, governance and cultural changes must be enacted to ensure that what happened under the watch of the former IAAF president, Lamine Diack, can never happen again.

It’s also fundamental in understanding why Sebastian Coe, elected IAAF president last August, is the right man for the reform job.

He’s not going to resign. Nor should he.

To be clear:

We live in a 24/7 world where, increasingly, everything seemingly must be susceptible to immediate resolution.

Regrettably, far too often this jump-starts a rush to judgment.

A powerful driver in this cable-TV, talking-head world, the noise amplified by social media, is protest and moral arousal, as the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in his column Wednesday.

Quoting the leadership expert Dov Seidman, Friedman writes that when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage, “it can either inspire or repress a serious conversation or the truth.”

More from Seidman: “If moral outrage, as justified as it may be, is followed immediately by demands for firings or resignations, it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

Coe is the only person in track and field capable of leading, driving and instituting the change that must now be effected.

Any suggestion that the sport ought to be led instead by an outsider is misplaced, and seriously.

Sport entities carry their own distinct cultures, and failure to appreciate, to understand and to be able to move within those cultures is a recipe for disaster.

Evidence: the U.S. Olympic Committee’s turn seven years ago to outsider Stephanie Streeter as chief executive. That ended within months.

To the point at hand: Coe is not accused of any misconduct or wrongdoing. He was legitimately elected. It’s time to get to the “hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

In a report made public Thursday, a World Anti-Doping Agency independent commission headed by the Canadian lawyer Dick Pound alleged that Lamine Diack orchestrated a conspiracy to cover-up certain doping results, mostly in Russia.

The conspiracy revolved, in the words of the report, around a “close inner circle.” That is, just a few people: Diack; two of his sons, Papa Massata Diack and Khalil, also known as Ibrahima; and Diack’s personal lawyer, Habib Cissé.

With the “consultants and lawyer in place,” according to the report, Lamine Diack created an “informal illegitimate governance structure outside the formal governance structure.”

Their “familiar or close personal ties to [the IAAF president] facilitated the emergence of this powerful rogue group outside the IAAF governance structure, yet operated under the aegis of the IAAF.”

At some level, according to the report, the conspiracy also metastasized to include the Russian treasurer of the IAAF, Valentin Balakhnichev; a Russian national-team coach, Alexi Melnikov; and the director of the IAAF’s medical and anti-doping department, Dr. Gabriel Dollé.

Last week, per the IAAF ethics commission, Papa Diack, Balakhnichev and Melnikov got life bans from the sport, Dollé a five-year suspension.

Lamine Diack and Cissé are now facing criminal inquiry in France.

Balakhhnichev gets to deal with the fallout in Russia. Good luck with that, and enjoy any and all meetings with Mr. Putin, depicted in the report as someone with whom Lamine Diack said he had “struck up a friendship.”

The report is notable for who it names and, critically, who it does not.

Again, Diack and sons; Cissé; Dollé; Balakhnichev; Melnikov.

For good measure, there is also reference to “sports marketing consultant” Ian Tan Tong Han, a business associate (ahem) and close friend of Papa Diack’s — Tan’s baby, born two years ago, is named “Massata” — who “appears to be part of the illicit informal governance system of the IAAF.”

That’s it.

The report notes, meanwhile, that other senior IAAF staff members were quite properly “antagonistic” in regards to the case management of Russian athletes and, from the point of view of the conspiracy, “needed to be bribed to stay quiet.”

These included the director of the office of the president, Cheikh Thiaré; Nick Davies, the deputy secretary general; Dollé; and Dr. Pierre Yves Garnier, at the time in charge of what in anti-doping circles is known as the “athlete biological passport,” a work-up of blood values over time.

From the report: Lamine Diack apparently confirmed in interviews with French authorities that Papa Diack “gave money to one or the other to keep them quiet and so they are not opposed.”

Recent media reports have Thiaré, Davies and Garnier refuting those claims, the report says, adding that Dollé “regrets having been involved.”

Draw your own conclusions about who the “one or the other” might be.

Davies, meanwhile, the longtime IAAF spokesman, is now apparently in line to be made the fall guy for a July, 2013, email to Papa Diack, the report calling the email “inexplicable.” This is a difficult situation for all of us who have known, and worked with, Davies. He cares passionately about track and field, and has sought only to do what — from his perspective — has been the right thing.

At any rate, in the report’s version of the money shot, it declares that “corruption was embedded in the organization,” meaning the IAAF, adding, “It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own. The IAAF allowed the conduct to occur and must accept its responsibility. Continued denial will simply make it more difficult to make genuine progress.”

This begs the obvious question:

What per se is — or, more properly, was — the IAAF?

This inquiry is neither didactic nor pedantic.

The report, unanimously approved by all three independent commission members — former WADA boss Pound, Canadian law professor and anti-doping expert Richard McLaren and Günter Younger, the senior German law enforcement official and cyber-crime authority — also says, “The fact of the matter is that individuals at the very top of the IAAF were implicated in conduct that reflects on the organization itself (as well as on the particular individuals involved).”

In practical terms, for the 16 years he was president, Diack was the IAAF. He ran it like a fiefdom. This he learned from his predecessor, Italy’s Primo Nebiolo, president for 18 years before that.

The report asserts that the IAAF’s 27-member council “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in [track and field] and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules.” It also says the council “could not have been unaware of the level of nepotism that operated within the IAAF.”

Fascinating.

In virtually every other instance, the report goes into incredible, sometimes granular detail, even providing an appendix at the end, to document  “the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules.” Names, places, dates and more.

But in making such a blanket declaration — nothing.

If the council “could not have been unaware” of doping, when were any or all of them made so aware? Where? Who, in particular? By what means?

For this, nothing — no answer. Just this sweeping assertion.

Was the council aware Papa Diack was around? Surely.

But did those on the council, including Coe, an IAAF vice president from 2007, know or appreciate there was corruption afoot?

The report: “It is increasingly clear that far more IAAF staff knew about the problems than has currently been acknowledged. It is not credible that elected officials were unaware of the situation affecting (for purposes of the IC mandate) athletics in Russia. If, therefore, the circle of knowledge was so extensive, why was nothing done?”

Here the report is disingenuous, or at best there is a powerful disconnect.

It is for sure credible that elected officials were unaware.

Why?

Because of the first rule of Fight Club.

Which also happens to be the first rule of any conspiracy.

This is self-evident: the more people who know about something illicit, the more risk that someone who shouldn’t know is going to find out, and do something to disrupt the conspiracy.

Look, let’s have some common sense.

Did Lamine Diack call over Coe — or for that matter, the senior vice president from 2011-15, American Bob Hersh, or any of the others on the council, including Sergei Bubka, an IAAF mainstay, runner-up to Coe in last year's presidential election — and whisper, hey, guess what I’m doing that I really shouldn’t?

There is zero evidence in the report of any such thing.

So, moving forward, as Pound said at a news conference Thursday in Munich in releasing the report, it is one thing to recommend that the IAAF should, for public relations and other purposes, come clean:

“Of course, there was a cover-up and delay, and all sorts of things. Acknowledge this. If you can’t acknowledge it, you can’t get past it.”

He also said, quite rightly, “This started with the president. The president was elected four times by the congress. It then went to the treasurer, elected by the congress. It then goes to the personal advisor of the president, inserted into the management structure. It goes to the director of the medical and anti-doping [department]. It goes to nepotistic appointments. I’m sorry. That affects the reputation of the IAAF. You can deny that all you wish but I think you’ve got to take that on board and come out the other side.”

At the same time, it is quite another to say that Coe should, by association, be guilty as well. It’s not enough — not nearly — that he was part of the structure of the organization, and critically at a time when most of his focus was devoted to organizing the London 2012 Games.

That’s not the way things work. Nor should they.

Which Pound also made plain.

In response to a news conference question about whether Coe had lied in regard to a cover-up, Pound said, “I think you’ve got to understand the concentration of power in and around the president of any international federation.” Too, to understand “the relative infrequency with which something like the IAAF council would meet and the level of information that would be conveyed from those at the top to the council, particularly if it happened to deal with problems.

“If you’re asking to me to give an opinion or not as to whether he lied or not, I would say he did not lie.”

[Watch Pound's comments here.]

Pound also said he he believes Coe had “not the faintest idea of the extent” of Diack’s alleged corruption when he took over last August.

Pound said, too, “I think it’s a fabulous opportunity for the IAAF to seize this opportunity and under strong leadership to move forward. There’s an enormous amount of repetitional recovery that has to occur here and I can’t … think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that.”

Amen.

In the world of possibilities, it must be considered that there is evidence tying Coe to something.

But we don’t live in a world of fiction, or what-if’s. We go by what we can document, and prove. Anything else is just so much more outrage. It’s time now for dialogue and enduring change.

As WADA president Craig Reedie, in a release issued after the news conference, said, “It is now important that the IAAF, under the leadership of Sebastian Coe, adopts the recommendations of the report in full.”

Coe told the BBC Thursday in Munich that the IAAF would “redouble our efforts, to be clear to people we are not in denial.”

He added, “My responsibility is to absorb the lessons of the past and to shape the future. The changes I am making will do that. The road back to trust is going to be a long one.”

Nine days ago, IAAF staff put out a news release in which Coe set forth a 10-point “road map” aimed at rebuilding trust, in both the federation and in track and field competition itself, the idea being that you have to be able to have confidence in the federation itself and, more important, believe what you see on the track or in the field events.

The release drew comparatively little attention. Now is the time for it to take center stage, and the dialogue over how to rebuild that trust and confidence begin in earnest.

“Be under no illusion about how seriously I take these issues,” Coe said in the release. “I am president of an international federation which is under serious investigation and I represent a sport under intense scrutiny. My vision is to have a sport that attracts more young people. The average age of those watching track and field is 55 years old. That is not sustainable.

“The key to making that vision a reality is creating a sport that people once more trust in. Athletics,” meaning track and field, “ must be a sport that athletes, fans, sponsors, media and parents alike know is safe to compete in on a level playing field and one in which clean effort is rewarded and celebrated.”

Where is the joy?

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — To use a favorite saying of Thomas Bach's, the International Olympic Committee president, the IOC’s policy-making executive board and Bach himself did a great job -- over three days of meetings that wrapped up Thursday -- of talking the talk.

Amid corruption and doping scandals in, respectively, soccer and track and field, the IOC board and president talked up the import of maintaining — if not restoring — the credibility of international sport.

There was celebration of the one-year anniversary of the ratification of Bach’s would-be reform plan, the 40-point Agenda 2020. The executive board heard at length from one of the world's prominent business professors, Didier Cossin, based at the Swiss institution IMD; he talked for nearly two hours about best practices and good governance. Bach himself wrote a newspaper-style op-ed that, without once mentioning the soccer and track governing bodies FIFA and the IAAF, described campaigns against the three primary challenges confronting world sport: betting and match fixing, doping and, finally, bribery and other corruption.

All this is, to be sure, excellent talk.

But it totally, completely and fundamentally misses the point about why the IOC is being lumped in — right or wrong, fair or not — with FIFA and the IAAF in the minds of many around our globe, and why world sport, and in particular the Olympic movement, is facing a perhaps unexpected but potentially unprecedented challenge.

For 57 years, British writer David Miller has been covering the Olympic movement. Just before Thursday's wrap-up news conference, the IOC handed out a release that in print ran to three pages; it broke little new ground, if any, amid a lengthy recitation of governance and doping matters. Miller: "It's like a notice from the water board about drainage."

To be blunt: where is the joy?

Increasingly, voters and taxpayers in western democracies have turned against the IOC. Alone in the world of sport, it boasts as its raison d'être a message of tolerance, pluralism and more. But the IOC is failing, time and again, at conveying the inspiration and joy inherent in and provoked by seeing humankind, together, gathered in a real-time reminder of what can connect — not divide — us.

The latest: Hamburg’s bid for the 2024 Summer Games shot down on the last Sunday in November in a referendum.

This comes after the turbulent 2022 Winter Games campaign, which saw Beijing elected over Almaty, Kazakhstan, the only two survivors, after six European entries pulled out: Oslo; Stockholm; Davos/St. Moritz; Krakow; Munich; Lviv.

Beijing! Where the authorities this week had to issue a red-alert smog warning, photos showing the famed Bird’s Nest barely visible in the grey air. This after assurances that the 2008 Summer Games were going to make major headway in solving China’s pollution problem.

Four cities remain in the 2024 hunt: Los Angeles, Rome, Budapest and Paris, in the order in which they will present going forward, according to lots drawn Wednesday at the lakefront Chateau de Vidy, the IOC headquarters.

That is, assuming all four make it to the IOC vote in the summer of 2017. There are no guarantees.

The problem, to be clear, is fear of Games costs and wariness — if not more — with the IOC, and the perception, again right or wrong, fair or not, of the IOC members as elitists and the IOC itself at the head of a system that seems rife with misconduct.

The prompt may be the $51-billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games. It might be the revelations of a culture of deep-seated corruption within FIFA. It is perhaps the spotlight on state-sponsored doping in Russia, with the seeming promise of yet more inquiry into the term of the immediate IAAF past president, Lamine Diack of Senegal, due to be made public in just weeks.

It’s time now for the IOC, again referring to Bach’s dictum, to walk the walk.

It needs not only to recognize but to act upon this fundamental truth:

The conversation needs to move away from money.

It’s that simple and, at the same time, that complex.

The IOC is in business, sure. But it is not, repeat not, fundamentally a business. It is not pushing baby food, chocolate and more like Nestlé; headquartered just down Lake Geneva in Vevey, Switzerland. It is not a bank like UBS, based in Zurich and Basel.

Instead, the IOC is in the business of promoting a set of values — friendship, respect, excellence, all of which add up to hope and dreams — and a universal ideal, the notion of a better world through sport.

What is missing right now, and has been, as evidenced by the 2022 pull-outs and the 2024 Hamburg defeat amid the promotion and implementation of the Agenda 2020 plan, is any real and sustained focus from the IOC in its communication on the basics:

Friendship. Excellence. Respect. Hope and dreams.

For any who might doubt, Bach is super-smart and -sophisticated. He is good at both broad scope and detail. He is an accomplished public speaker, and in English, a second language.

In his op-ed, he closed this way:

“As Nelson Mandela said: ‘Sport has the power to change the world.’ Yes, these are difficult times for sport. But yes, it is also an opportunity to renew the trust in this power of sport to change the world for the better.”

How? Not once in his opinion piece did the words “values” come up. Nor, in that context, supposedly at the heart of everything the IOC does, did “respect,” “friendship,” “excellence,” “hope” or “dreams.”

Thursday's three-page news release? Same. Not a mention in the relevant context.

You wonder why there’s a disconnect?

As the longtime Olympic bid strategist Terrence Burns outlined in a post Wednesday to his blog:

“Not enough people in Hamburg were sufficiently inspired by the Olympic brand.”

He continued:

“To me, the Olympic brand is and has always been about hope. The stated vision of the Olympic movement is ‘building a better world through sport.’ I’ll buy that. But what is the emotional payoff? What is the IOC’s singularly unique promise that no other brand can deliver?

“Again, I think it is hope. Hope inspires human beings to dream with no limitations.

“Hope is the emotional output of the Olympic brand. The Games, and more importantly the athletes, give us hope that something better resides deep inside of us and, if only for 17 days every four years, we are capable of undeniable grace. Nothing other than perhaps theology offers humankind a similar promise through the demonstration of human achievement.

“I am under no illusion that the IOC will suddenly revisit its core values in favor of the word ‘hope.’ What I am suggesting is that by ignoring the concept of hope, we are missing something powerful that is needed right now.”

To be clear, the IOC also cannot and should not adopt the position that it is above the discussion of the funds needed to stage a 21st-century Olympics.

It can and should do a better job of explaining the basic difference between an operating budget on the one hand and, on the other, whatever costs are associated with construction or infrastructure. The latter traditionally is the source of significant cost overrun.

That explanation is simply not that difficult.

According to figures made public Wednesday, the Tokyo 2020 plan is now credited with $2.9 billion in venue-related cost savings, purportedly due to Agenda 2020. It's worth asking: why were the members were so gung-ho for Tokyo in the first instance when, by contrast, rival Madrid’s entire capital budget for 2020 totaled $1.9 billion?

The Rio 2016 budget is now under intense pressure, organizers looking to cut some $530 million from the operating budget of roughly $1.9 billion, about 30 percent. Brazil is confronting a slew of challenges: financial (the country is in its worst recession in 80 years), political (president Dilma Rousseff is facing impeachment proceedings) and more (a kickback scandal centered on the energy giant Petrobas).

Bach said Thursday, referring to Rio 2016, "We are sure history will talk ... like history talks about Barcelona '92 in this respect," one of the greatest of Summer Games. At the same time, he said about Rio, "We know the situation there is not easy."

To paraphrase David Byrne and the Talking Heads: how did we get here?

This question is hardly unreasonable.

Nor -- let's be clear -- is any financially related inquiry in and around the Games.

The problem, big picture, is that the money discussion has all but hijacked any other discussion — in particular, the good the movement can and does do and the benefits that can come with staging an edition of the Olympics.

When Boston went out earlier this year, it was all because, purportedly, the mayor didn’t want to sign the host city contract, citing the worry of cost overruns. This after a vocal “no” campaign from locals worried about, again, the risk and reward of the “value proposition” that might or might not have been a Boston 2024 Games.

Los Angeles has since replaced Boston as the U.S. Olympic Committee’s candidate; in Southern California, the locals remember the glow of the 1984 Games, and polling indicates huge support for 2024.

For emphasis: this is by no means a USOC, or an American, problem.

It’s way bigger than that. 

After Boston went out, the American television show NewsHour on PBS, the public television channel, hosted a debate between vocal Games critic Andrew Zimbalist and George Hirthler. Zimbalist is a Smith College professor. Hirthler is a longtime Olympic bid strategist, an unapologetic idealist for the movement and the author of a forthcoming novel on the life and times of the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern movement.

Hirthler:

“There’s a better story, and it’s the story of the Olympic movement and its value to our world. You never hear about it in the economic financial risk stories of the opponents of the Games.

“Right now the Olympic movement is at work in 200 countries around the world, 365 days a year instilling the values of excellence, friendship and respect — respect for opponents, other cultures, differences — in young children, millions of young children around the world. In our world, we need a positive force like that at work around the world.

“They invest — the Olympic movement invests $1-billion every year in the development of sport around the world. That money flows directly from the sponsorships and broadcast rights that are sold for the cities that are hosting the games. So the IOC draws money from these host cities in order to develop sport globally. I’d like to know what the value of the development of sport, giving kids a chance to choose sport everywhere — what’s the value of that economic development?”

Zimbalist, in response:

“Look, the Olympic movement is a good thing. Olympic values is a good thing. Nobody is contesting that.

“The issue that we were talking about is whether it makes economic sense for cities to host the Olympic Games, whether it pays off for them to do that.”

How hard would it be for the IOC to gin up a road show featuring the president, Games executive director Christophe Dubi, some IOC members (to show doubters that, indeed, they can be supremely normal) and, most important, key athletes?

Who wouldn’t want to be listened to and feel inspired by the likes of — just riffing here — Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, whoever in whatever country?

Is there anyone who doesn’t like a Bud Greenspan movie? Bring the popcorn and the tissues.

In an email exchange this week, Hirthler said, “You can't win the economic argument because the opposition isn't rational -- you have to make the argument about why our world needs the Olympic movement -- why the Games hold more hope and promise for humanity than any other international institution.

“And that has everything to do with the grass-roots work of the IOC and global sport, which is the foundation of Coubertin's vision of uniting all humanity in friendship and peace through sport.”

Hamburg vote makes plain Olympic brand crisis

Hamburg’s 2024 Olympic bid went down Sunday to devastating defeat in a referendum, a result that is — no reason to mince words — bad, just very, very bad, for the International Olympic Committee and, especially, IOC president Thomas Bach.

Even with all kinds of external factors weighing on the vote — the Paris attacks, a scandal involving Germany’s winning 2006 World Cup soccer bid, the refugee crisis in Germany and across Europe, and more — the vote marks a sharp repudiation of the IOC’s Agenda 2020 would-be reform plan and, indeed, Bach’s leadership, both substance and style.

Worse, it’s a repudiation by his own people.

Bach is, for anyone even remotely familiar with the Olympic scene, himself German. Indeed, before becoming IOC president, he was head of the German Olympic confederation, which goes by the acronym DOSB.

This is on him.

The no vote Sunday amounted to 51.6 percent; yes, 48.4 percent. About 650,000, or half, of the eligible 1.3 million voters in Hamburg took part.

It leaves four cities left in the 2024 race: Paris, Rome, Budapest and Los Angeles. The IOC will pick the 2024 winner in 2017.

The balloting Sunday is intriguing for any number of reasons.

It shows what bad business it is — if in many ways understandable — how a few percentage points either way can make or break a massive project, and not just an Olympics. A better result would have been a big number, either way.

It clearly suggests, too, that it’s the end — and probably for a very long time — for bids from Germany, traditionally one of the most important nations in the Olympic scene.

“It looks like thoughts of Olympia and Germany don’t go together,” Alfons Hörmann, now the president of the DOSB, told reporters.

An IOC spokesperson, meanwhile, said, “Having followed the discussions in Germany over the last weeks, this result does not come as a complete surprise. With this decision a great opportunity for the city, the country and … sport in Germany is lost.”

It’s actually way beyond that, and this offers the most intrigue.

Fundamentally, the IOC is looking at a profound brand crisis.

As Nikolas Hill, the Hamburg bid leader, said in a conference call, “As you know the things we had to face in the last few weeks — the attacks in Paris, the soccer crisis, the refugee situation and many more things — all these topics I would see in direct connection to the Olympic agenda, the reform agenda of the IOC.”

It’s now Bach’s job to get out front and fix it.

If he can.

“We noticed a change of mood in the city,” Florian Kasiske of the German opposition NOlympia group, said. “People can see that there are things where the money is better spent.”

Bach, in his two-plus years as IOC president, has acted as a global diplomat of sorts, meeting — by his own count — some 100 heads of state or government. He has traveled repeatedly to the United Nations.

Everywhere he goes, the IOC president takes pictures. There’s invariably a press release.

Mindful that all politics, even global politics, is local, here is the core question: how much time, effort and energy did the IOC president spend over the past six months in Hamburg, talking up the bid with voters and key officials?

The answer: zero.

What is the point of meeting heads of state x, y and z if you can’t even get your own home country to understand the financial picture and then get excited about the Olympic enterprise?

To draw an American analogy, Bach has been like the congressman who is always in DC but never at home, listening to and engaging with his constituents. In Bach’s case, that means he has been either at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, or at some presidential palace, somewhere.

The IOC, in fact, has a great story to tell. Why isn’t it — and in particular, the IOC president — out there doing exactly that?

This is so obvious:

When people don’t want you, something’s wrong. Very wrong.

And in recent months around Europe, the IOC’s traditional base, voters and public officials have made it increasingly clear they either don’t want, or plain-out fear, the Olympic brand.

The Olympic story is supposed to be that the Games come to town and that’s a good thing — promoting not just the sometimes-ethereal notion of a better world through sport but the concrete concept of a positive after-Games legacy.

Even so, in the afterglow of arguably the greatest Summer Games ever, London’s 2012 Olympics, taxpayers in six western European democracies dropped out of 2022 Winter bidding, five of the six put off to varying degrees by the $51-billion figure associated with the Sochi 2014 Winter Games or with the IOC itself:

Oslo; Stockholm; Davos/St. Moritz, Switzerland; Krakow, Poland; and Munich.

The sixth 2022 European entrant — Lviv, Ukraine — fell out because of war.

Munich bid for the 2018 Winter Games, and lost, to Pyeongchang, South Korea. A Munich 2022 bid probably would have won going away.

Instead, the would-be Munich effort was killed — just as Hamburg’s was Sunday — by voter referendum. So, too, Davos/St. Moritz. Krakow, as well.

Oslo put on the 1952 Winter Games, Lillehammer the 1994 Winter Games; Stockholm, the 1912 Summer Games; St. Moritz, the 1928 and 1948 Winter Games; Munich, the 1972 Summer Games. So it’s not as if there isn’t historical precedent to make the case to the locals all about the upside of an Olympics.

Moreover, within a few days of the St. Moritz/Davos balloting, voters in Austria rejected a 2028 Summer plan. Innsbruck put on the 2012 Winter Youth Games; it staged the 1976 and 1964 Winter Games. And Salzburg bid for the 2014 and 2010 Winter Games.

In early 2012, the then-prime minister of Italy called off Rome’s 2020 bid, citing uncertain costs associated with the project. Rome put on the 1960 Summer Games.

What else did the IOC need to hear, and start grappling with, the problem?

By the end, the 2022 race proved completely illustrative of the dynamic, featuring just two survivors, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

In IOC voting this past July 31, Beijing won for 2022, even though there is little to no snow in the mountains roughly two hours away where the ski events would be held, and the bid budget did not include, for instance, the billions it’s going to take to build a high-speed rail line from Beijing up to the ski venues.

In December, 2014, the IOC members had approved, unanimously and with almost no public dissent, Agenda 2020, Bach’s 40-point reform plan.

How was a vote for Beijing, with environmental and human rights issues, and budget fudging from the outset, in line with Agenda 2020?

Two days after the 2022 vote, meanwhile, at that very same IOC general assembly in Kuala Lumpur, at Bach’s invitation, the members heard at length from Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive officer of London-based WPP, the global advertising and marketing group, about — its brand.

In large measure, the speech focused on digital opportunities, including the one undeniably new initiative in Agenda 2020, the creation of an Olympic TV channel.

That said, Sorrell’s broad observation is worth revisiting anew.

To stay relevant in an ever-changing world, Sorrell made plain, the IOC must keep re-inventing itself. He said it had — and must still — show “a willingness to continually adapt, even if that change has not always been easy.”

Now is precisely such a moment.

Communication about what the IOC is, and the Olympic Games can be, needs to be radically revised. And Bach ought to consider far-reaching changes in the the way the IOC president approaches the bid process.

As the IOC’s then-executive Games director, Gilbert Felli, said some 16 months ago in observation about the 2022 fiasco, “So in the communications, and that’s the lesson from this campaign here, we lost good cities because of the bad perception of the IOC.

“So we have to learn our lesson and the ones to blame is the IOC.”

There remain those four cities for 2024. Again, Paris, Rome, Budapest and LA. Four, yes -- but for how long?

What is the chance the Italians pull out again? Rome has municipal corruption and fiscal woes, big-time.

How serious, really, is the Budapest effort?

Bach would probably — strike that, almost definitely — say that as IOC president, his job is to remain studiously neutral in any IOC election.

But he can take a neutral position with regard to the cities themselves even while doing what he should — strike that, must — now be doing: rallying support for the Olympic movement itself, and the notion of a local Games.

The president is too smart and sophisticated not to understand this basic: his job is not to stand by and watch the fraying, if not destruction, of the Olympic brand. All because he wants to remain neutral?

No.

In this context, he is the farthest thing from neutral. He has to be an advocate. Bach needs to go in the next several weeks and months, and repeatedly if need be, to the four markets remaining in the 2024 race — note, four major global markets — and, as Sorrell advised, make the case for why the Games are relevant, fun, interesting and deserve to come to town.

Enough with the heads of state and the photo ops, at least for now.

Talk to real people.

Be accessible. Be real. Be relevant.

Leadership means accepting responsibility, confronting challenge and delivering solutions.

If there was any doubt before, Sunday’s vote in Hamburg can leave none. It’s time to see some real leadership at and from the IOC. And that starts at the top.

Let the Russians clean up themselves? No way

A first read of the communiqué issued over the weekend by the International Olympic Committee after president Thomas Bach's urgently taken meeting with Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov might well prompt the response, "Atlichna." That's Russian for "excellent." Indeed, in the statement, the IOC quotes Zhukov this way: "The Russian Olympic Committee is determined that the clean athletes should compete in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Anyone found guilty of using illegal drugs or anyone who facilitated or was complicit in their use must be punished.”

Atlichna, right?

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Max Cobb wrote this guest column, published now at 3 Wire Sports.

Cobb is the president and chief executive officer of US Biathlon Association and the chairman of the International Biathlon Union's Technical Committee. He served as the technical delegate for the Biathlon events at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. He has been a part of every Winter Games since 1992, including serving as biathlon competition chief at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

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Gone are the denials of a problem and gone are the accusations of a western plot to embarrass Russia. The leaders of sport in Russia recognize there is a problem and are eager to fix it so they can participate in the Olympic Games just nine months away.

But history and the very roots of this, arguably the largest-scale doping scandal ever uncovered, should give pause to those responsible for protecting the rights of clean athletes: the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency.

It is they who must carry out a full and independent investigation into doping in all sports in Russia, not just track and field. It is they who must identify and hold liable all athletes, coaches, and others who violated the World Anti-Doping Code.

The matter carries all the more import with the full WADA board meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to consider next steps.

Why not let the Russians do it themselves?

First of all, the Russians have had 16 years -- since the creation of WADA -- to put in place a successful anti-doping program. They failed. Is it reasonable to expect them to reform the system in just nine months?

Given the governmental funding structures and the level of involvement of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, in the Moscow lab, there seems little question that the conspiracy to dope athletes and protect them from anti-doping controls was known and condoned, if not ordered, by those responsible for leading sport in Russia. That includes the Russian Olympic Committee and the Russian Ministry of Sport.

Neither WADA nor the IOC should accept this effort by the ROC as anything but a thinly veiled attempt to find scapegoats and preserve the structure and positions of the very leaders who oversaw the creation of the largest and most sophisticated cheating syndicate ever to plague sport, one that evokes memories of the notorious East German regime of the 1970s.

Secondly, it is not just those "found guilty of using illegal drugs” who need to be punished.

It is all those found guilty of violating the WADA Code who need to be punished.

This includes those who evaded anti-doping controls.

Process can be, to say the least, boring. But in the legal world that surrounds the efforts to protect the rights of clean athletes, process is critical.

Whistleblowers within the Russian anti-doping agency, RUSADA, which serves all sports in Russia, have indicated that it was not just track and field athletes who were protected from anti-doping controls.

The scale of what was done, in the words of RUSADA staff member Vitaliy Stepanov, reached as well to “swimming, cycling, biathlon, athletics, weight lifting, nordic skiing.”

Not only that, but the WADA-appointed independent commission report, published last Monday, reported both that RUSADA doping control officers routinely informed athletes days ahead of time that they would have a “no-notice” out of competition test, and then did not properly supervise the collection of a sample.

That means, simply, that athletes were given the opportunity to provide a stored clean sample, effectively avoiding the doping test.

RUSADA also failed to enforce the required reporting of accurate athlete “whereabouts” information, a requirement for all athletes in order to ensure that they are always available for no-notice testing. Repeated failure to submit accurate whereabouts information can result in a ban.

In short, the evidence strongly suggests that those who were doping in Russia colluded with RUSADA and the WADA-accredited lab in Moscow to ensure they would not “be found guilty of using illegal drugs,” Zhukov’s measure of guilt.

But all signs indicate guilty they are of serious violations of the WADA code.

As has been said again and again over this last week, track and field is not the only sport with doping issues; WADA must investigate the other sports as well to identify all those who violated the Code.

Failure to do so calls into question WADA's relevance and resolve to protect clean athletes.

As has also been noted repeatedly since the publication of the commission report, doping is not just a serious problem in Russia.

But make no mistake:

The shocking essence of this scandal is not that there was doping.

It is that the doping was thoroughly integrated into the elite sport culture in Russia, in a coordinated effort to perpetrate a fraud that anti-doping tests were being rigorously carried out, all the while using the most advanced scientific methods to dope the very same athletes to maximum effect.

And contrary to what Russian sport minister Vitaly Mutko has said, this was not a choice made by individual athletes. This was a system that compelled the athletes to dope or lose support of the sport organization funding their training and competition.

The WADA commission’s report strongly suggested that the doping program was “state-supported.” That means the Russian government.

The report also found that the FSB infiltrated the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow where the anti-doping tests were carried out during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games. That means the Russian government knew about the conspiracy to systematically dope Russian athletes and fraudulently cover it up.

There is no credible way that any Russian sport or government organization can properly and objectively investigate this enormous corruption scandal.

The IOC and WADA should recognize the huge job they have in front of them. They should remember their pledge to protect clean athletes and dig deep into their war-chests to set up the independent commission needed to assess and punish those who have violated the WADA code in Russia while at the same time giving Russia the "road map" for clean sport they have asked for.

When this is in place, everyone will say, atlichna.

Then it will be time to welcome the clean athletes from Russian to compete at the Olympic Games in Rio.

A historic "road map" for Russia?

Track and field’s governing body, the IAAF, did what it had to do Friday in provisionally suspending Russia after shocking revelations of systemic, perhaps state-sponsored, doping.

The IAAF action followed by a few hours a step taken by a World Anti-Doping Agency panel. It, too, did what it had to do. Among other things, it found Russia non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code.

What it all amounts to is this, the real story: a historic opportunity is now upon us, all of us, that may not come again quite some time, to get Russia — if you will — to behave, and stay behaving.

And not just in track and field. Across all sports.

To reiterate an important point: Russia is not inherently any better or worse than anywhere else. But when evidence emerges of a doping scheme that may well have been state-sanctioned, evoking memories of the notorious East German system in the 1970s, that’s a call to significant action. That was the take-away, loud and clear, in a report made public Monday by a WADA-appointed independent commission.

The twin messages that emerged amid Friday’s action were also manifest:

— One, there is recognition, admission, acknowledgement — use whatever term you want — from the Russians. None of this happens — hello, Mr. President Putin — without the Russians recognizing that, for real, they are up against it.

On Wednesday, Putin, ordering an investigation into the WADA-appointed report findings made public Monday, had said there ought to be “professional cooperation” with international anti-doping bodies.

His coded language makes plain: the Russians realize they have to play ball.

Again, after everything set out in Monday’s report, there is no other option, particularly with the 2018 FIFA World Cup yet to come. You’re naive if you don’t think emissaries further emphasized — at senior levels within the Russian sports and government infrastructure — that this was, indeed, the message.

Message received, the Russian sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, telling the R-Sport news agency on Friday, "We're prepared for broad cooperation." He also said he has asked WADA president Craig Reedie to provide a "road map" Russia could follow.

All the other stuff Mutko is saying? Allegations that the IAAF concealed more than 150 doping cases, mostly from countries other than Russia? Maybe. The British anti-doping system held “zero value” and was “even worse” than Russia’s? Come on.

Look, within international politics at its keenest, which is indisputably what this is, face-saving can be an important skill.

— Two, and this is the challenge in front of WADA and the IAAF: how to push the Russians — hopefully, themselves — into putting new systems in place that can survive both the short and long term?

Of course there is going to be push-back.

Here, for instance, was Yelena Isinbayeva, the Russian pole-vault queen, the 2004 and 2008 Olympic gold medalist:

“To ban innocent … athletes from competing in international events and [the] Olympic Games in Rio is not fair,” she wrote in a letter published on the Russian track federation website hours before the IAAF met via teleconference.

With all due respect, Isinbayeva’s logic proves too simple.

If one runner in a relay tests — and proves — dirty, everyone’s medals get taken away. The entire team has to deal with the sanction.

Same here, just on a systemic level.

Because this is, as the WADA panel’s report made plain, a systemic problem.

The clean athletes in Russia — a note on behalf of skeptics: assuming, indeed, there are any — ought now to be just as eager for change in the Russian track and field system as everyone anywhere else.

Otherwise, the clean Russians don’t get to take part in the world indoors, in March in Portland, Oregon, and in the Rio 2016 Olympics in August.

That ought to make for internal leverage.

The external leverage came Friday from the IAAF, which voted, 22-1, to provisionally suspend the Russian track and field federation.

It’s not clear who the sole holdout is. Talk about being on the wrong side of historic change.

An intriguing issue before Friday’s IAAF teleconference was whether the Russians would declare themselves unfit or, for a variety of political reasons, let the IAAF do it — which ended up being the course.

Make no mistake: the clear intent of the IAAF and WADA actions Friday, all around, is to give the Russians every opportunity to get things fixed, if not by Portland, then for sure by Rio.

As Mutko told Associated Press, “We may miss one or two competitions. But for athletes to miss the Olympics and world championships would be real stupidity.”

The full WADA board will meet Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Colorado, presumably to ratify what has already been done and then — prediction — deliver a study group on the notion, suddenly pushed by the International Olympic Committee, of an independent body that would be responsible not just for drug testing but sanctioning, too.

Observations: the last thing world sports needs is a new layer of structure. Give WADA significantly more means and commit to its authority. If you want someone independent to run the doping scene, that’s sensible. But look to WADA, already with 16 years experience.

WADA, for the record, already deserves significant congratulations.

It had the cajones to set up an independent commission in the first place; it fully authorized commission head Dick Pound and his two associates, Canadian law professor Richard MacLaren and German law enforcement official Guenter Younger, who along with staff proved relentless; and it had the will Friday to act decisively in finding Russia non-compliant.

You know who else deserves kudos?

Seb Coe, elected in August the IAAF president.

No, really.

Coe has taken withering media heat this week, with many, particularly in the British press, suggesting he was — because he served for eight years as an IAAF vice president — part of the problem and thus neither can nor should be part of the solution.

There has been, and repeatedly, the suggestion that because Coe was vice president he must have known what the former IAAF president, Lamine Diack, who stepped down in August after 16 years, was up to. French investigators allege that Diack accepted more than $1 million in bribes to allow at least six Russian athletes to compete, including at the 2012 London Olympics.

Also under investigation are Diack’s legal adviser, Habib Cissé, and the former head of the IAAF anti-doping department, Gabriel Dollé.

The figure at the center of all this is probably one of Diack’s sons, Papa Massata Diack. Interesting how he has known in recent days to avoid France.

Ask yourself: would Coe really have been in the loop?

During 2011 and 2012, what was Coe’s focus? Yes, he was an IAAF vice president. At the same time, this is what he was really doing: he was running the London Olympics.

Further, there were — and are — four IAAF vice presidents.

What we know from French authorities is not complete. Nonetheless, the suggestion is that Diack was part of a conspiracy. The only way a conspiracy works is for those involved to keep it, you know, quiet. Do you think Diack called the four 2011-15 IAAF vice presidents — Coe, Ukraine’s Sergey Bubka, Qatar’s Dahlan al-Hamad and the American Bob Hersh — and said, hey, guess what I’m up to, fellas?

Further: French authorities interviewed Coe in recent days. Have they since said anything about Coe being a target of any sort? No.

A side note for those who intently follow USA Track & Field: Hersh was the senior IAAF vice president from 2011 until elections this past August. The USATF board opted last December not to re-nominate him for an IAAF role but to put in his place Stephanie Hightower — even though USATF membership, which typically knows next to nothing about international track, had voted overwhelmingly for Hersh.

Guess that USATF board decision is looking pretty good right about now.

At any rate, a 22-1 vote makes clear the IAAF council is in Coe’s corner.

In an IAAF statement, Frank Fredericks of Namibia, the former sprint star who is now chair of the IAAF athletes’ commission, said the council was “100 percent in support of President Coe and believe that he is the leader that our sport needs to instigate the necessary actions swiftly and strongly.”

A vote of 22-1, meantime, also spotlights a fact of life in international sport that came up time and again at a conference last week in New York sponsored by the Qatar-based International Center for Sport Security:

International sport is big business. Far too often, the governance structures in international sport have not caught up to that reality.

The focus for most now is on Russia, and whether the Russian track and field team will get to Rio. But if you’re paying attention:

The IAAF council, for example, currently stands at a full 27. That’s too many. It should be more like 15. That’s the number on, among others, the International Olympic Committee executive board, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s board of directors and the USATF board.

Further, if the IAAF was too often run by Diack and, before him, Italy’s Primo Nebiolo as expressions of autocratic power in word and action, now is the time for the IAAF to put in place a chief executive officer, and empower him or her to run the thing day to day.

Coe for sure seems to be paying attention, another reason he deserves to be cut some slack. In our 24/7 world, everyone seemingly wants answers now. But process and governance take time.

The IAAF statement announcing the 22-1 vote also included a note about what was called Coe’s “reform program,” Coe’s No. 2 at the London 2012 organizing committee, Paul Deighton, appointed to oversee a far-reaching review, to be carried out by Deloitte.

The plan is to feature, among other facets, a “forensic” accounting and, as well, the creation of an “integrity unit.” The unit, to be made up of a board and review panels, would oversee issues relating to anti-doping and more.

Coe, in the IAAF statement:

“Today we have been dealing with the failure of ARAF [the Russian track federation] and made the decision to provisionally suspend them, the toughest sanction we can apply at this time. But we discussed and agreed that the whole system has failed the athletes, not just in Russia, but around the world. 

"This has been a shameful wake-up call and we are clear that cheating at any level will not be tolerated. To this end, the IAAF, WADA, the member federations and athletes need to look closely at ourselves, our cultures and our processes to identify where failures exist and be tough in our determination to fix them and rebuild trust in our sport. There can be no more important focus for our sport.”

Who knew what, when? And what is to be done?

The World Anti-Doping Agency-commissioned report that shines a long-overdue spotlight on Russian doping in track and field begs a question in Russian history. As Lenin himself wrote in the famous pamphlet published in 1902: what is to be done? At the same time, and though the report, released Monday, has little to nothing to do with the United States, a bit of political history from the American archives is worth noting, too. From the Watergate years: who knew what, and when?

Make no mistake.

On the surface, this report is about track and field.

Not really.

This is about the intersection of sport and politics, indeed domestic and geopolitics at its highest, most complex, indeed most nuanced levels. Its roots are in the way countries can, and do, lean on sports to advance nationalistic agendas of all sorts.

The report is lengthy, more than 300 pages.

Much like the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s “Reasoned Decision” in the Lance Armstrong matter, made public in 2012, and for the same reason, it reads like a John le Carré spy novel.

That reason: it’s designed not just for insiders but for everyone.

The report is rich with Olympics 101, spelling out the acronym- and influence-rich scene, explaining who is who and what is what — for instance, on page 88, the helpful note that “stacking” means mixing oral steroids with injectable drugs.

In sum, this is what the report says:

— Corrupt state-funded agencies helped Russian athletes to dope and evade detection. These include the Russian athletics federation, which goes by the initials ARAF; the WADA-accredited testing laboratory in Moscow; and RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency.

— The successor to the KGB secret service, the FSB intelligence agency, oversaw the lab and embedded spies at the 2014 Sochi Games, according to witnesses.

— The Russian sports ministry exerted influence on the Moscow lab, issuing orders for athletes’ samples to be manipulated. There was a second, secret lab in Moscow; there, samples — blood and urine — would be pre-screened to identify clear ones for the WADA process.

— Finally, athletes would also get false identities to travel abroad to evade possible testing.

The first question in wondering what is to be done is to ask: if the scale of Russian doping was this monumental, evoking comparisons to the notorious East German regime in the 1970s, how did it take until now to get uncovered?

Answer:

It’s not as if certain people didn’t at the least have strong suspicions. They just couldn’t prove anything.

You don’t just stroll into Russia and go, hey, I have some questions for you — buy you a coffee and we’ll chat?

The report makes manifestly plain the lengths to which athletes, coaches, trainers and more sought to evade the providing of answers.

Further, the international sports movement moves in English. Russia does not.

Beyond that, to secure proof you need either cooperation or, to use a word, leverage. That leverage usually means action from the public authorities, police and prosecutors, who can demand answers at the risk of jail time or financial ruin.

This is what’s happening in France, where Interpol, the international police agency, is based, and where Part II of all of this is due to drop later this year. Last week, the French authorities said they had put under criminal investigation Lamine Diack of Senegal, the former president of track’s international governing body, the IAAF, on suspicion of corruption and money laundering. At issue are allegations Diack accepted more than $1 million in bribes to allow at least six Russian athletes to compete, including at the London 2012 Olympics.

Also under investigation are Diack’s legal adviser, Habib Cisse, and the former head of the IAAF anti-doping department, Gabriel Dollé.

Sports agencies do not wield subpoena power. And those who seek to enforce the rules of fair play have not always found easy sledding.

WADA is now 16 years old. As Monday’s report notes, “WADA continues to face a recalcitrant attitude on the part of many stakeholders that it is merely a service provider and not a regulator.”

The report actually underscores a fundamental flaw in the way, big picture, international sports work. There typically is no check-and-balance within the system.

The only reliable check is good journalism, and kudos here to Hajo Seppelt and the team from the German broadcaster ARD for the documentary last year that led to the WADA-appointed commission, and this report.

Reality: far too often, Olympic and international sports officials treat journalists with that pair of favorites, skepticism and derision. This week’s international federations forum at the IOC base in Lausanne, Switzerland — closed to the press.

Why?

Maybe because far too many are afraid of — the truth? And having it reported?

Earlier this year, Marius Vizer, the president of the International Judo Federation and at the time of SportAccord, said at the SportAccord convention, referring to Diack, “I dedicate and I sacrifice my family for sport, I mean sacrifice in a way of dedication, and in my eyes [Diack is] a person who sacrifices sport for his family."

Quickly, many others in the so-called Olympic family turned on Vizer. He lost the SportAccord job.

Time has now seemingly proven him right. So why were so many in senior positions so uneasy at hearing what Vizer had to say? Why was he so ostracized?

And what else -- beyond FIFA -- might be out there?

At any rate, and moving on to the rocks-and-glass houses department for those who think doping in sports is a Russia-only problem:

Cheating is never going to go away. There will always be doping. That's human nature.

From the WADA-appointed report: “… in  its considered view, Russia is not the only country, nor athletics the only sport, facing the problem of orchestrated doping in sport."

Just consider what the United States has been through in recent years: Marion Jones and BALCO, MLB’s steroid problem, Armstrong.

Here, though, is the key difference:

There is no federal sports ministry in the United States.

Dick Pound, the longtime Canadian IOC member and former WADA boss who headed the commission that produced Monday’s report, called what happened with regard to Russian track and field “state-supported.”

He said, “I don’t think there's any other possible conclusion. It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system."

The report: “While written evidence of governmental involvement has not been produced, it would be naive in the extreme to conclude that activities on the scale discovered could have occurred without the explicit or tacit approval of Russian governmental authorities.”

This is where things get really interesting.

In the Olympic sphere, Russia is arguably the most important country in the world.

The short list why:

The $51 billion that went toward the 2014 Sochi Games. Hosting of the 2013 world track and field championships in Moscow, and the 2015 world swim championships in Kazan. The 2018 World Cup. The 2015 SportAccord convention, back in Sochi. And more.

Without question, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is one of the top five most influential personalities in world sport.

That short list:

Thomas Bach, the IOC president; Putin; the FIFA president, whoever that might be; Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees and a member of the FIFA executive committee; and Sebastian Coe, the recently elected head of the IAAF.

Why Putin?

When Bach was elected IOC president, in September 2013, it’s wise to remember, the very first phone call he took was from Putin.

The chairman of the 2022 IOC Winter Games evaluation commission? Alexander Zhukov, the head of the Russian Olympic committee.

There can be zero question that, as in the Cold War days, Putin is using sport — and its prestige — to advance his reputation and his nation’s standing, both domestically and geopolitically.

Either that, or you think that hosting the Winter Games, the swim and track championships and the World Cup are all just because Russia and Putin are just good sports.

So, mindful that the FSB was in on the deal, and that control in state-directed Russia can be everything, how far up the chain did the activities detailed in Monday’s report go?

Is it believable that Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister, really didn’t know?

Mutko reports to Putin. Really, neither knew?

Referring to Mutko, Pound said Monday he believes it was “not possible for him to be unaware of it.” And if he was aware, “he was complicit in it.”

Consider:

After the 2010 Vancouver Games, where Russian athletes won only three gold medals, the-then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, made a point of declaring that a raft of sports ministry officials ought to hand in their resignations, or be fired. The resignations ensued.

Medvedev, who segued back to prime minister after Putin took over the presidency again in 2012, also observed that Russia "has lost the old Soviet school ... and we haven't created our own school -- despite the fact that the amount of money that is invested in sport is unprecedentedly high."

Mutko, who has been an ally of Putin’s for years, survived.

The Russians then won the medals count in Sochi, with 33, and the most golds, 13.

A reasonable question: how did that happen?

Pound on Monday: “I don’t think we can be confident there was no manipulation” of doping tests at the 2014 Winter Games.

Monday’s report says the 2012 London Games were “in a sense, sabotaged” because athletes ran who shouldn’t have, because they were dirty. The report targets five Russian runners for lifetime bans. Among them: the London 2012 800 gold and bronze winners, Mariya Savinova-Farnosova and Ekaterina Poistogova.

They got to compete, the report said, because of the “collapse of the anti-doping system,” blaming RUSADA, ARAF and, lastly, the IAAF.

The report recommends that Russia be suspended until there is compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code.

Travis Tygart, the head of USADA, went hard Monday, saying in a statement that the “evidence released today demonstrates a shocking level of corruption,” adding, “If Russia has created an organized scheme of state-supported doping, then they have no business being allowed to compete on the world stage.”

Late in the day, Mutko's sports ministry put out a statement that said, "We are not surprised by most of the points in the report." It declared "we have undertaken measures to remedy the situation, including the appointment of a new ARAF president and head coach. It then turned on the IAAF, saying the ministry "is waiting for such measures from IAAF, where the new president also has zero-tolerance for doping."

Coe took over for Diack in August. On Monday, the IAAF issued a statement saying it would consider appropriate sanctions; such measures could mean no Russian track and field athletes at next year’s Rio Olympics; the Russians have until the end of the week to respond.

“The allegations are alarming,” Coe said. “These are dark days.”

Perhaps, then, that is what is to be done: no Russians in track and field in Rio.

Consider: Yelena Isinbayeva, the pole-vault diva and two-time (2004, 2008) gold medalist, the IOC Youth Olympic Games ambassador and Sochi Games Olympic Village mayor herself, would not get one more chance for gold.

Or perhaps Mr. Putin might not like that idea of no Russians in Rio, might not like at all the notion that Isinbayeva, a favorite, might not get the chance for a third Olympic gold.

And where would that lead?

What will be done? Who knows? Who thinks that sports and politics are, truly, separate?

We are living, in real time, in history.

The Olympic scene drops in on the USA

WASHINGTON — What got done here this week at the Assn. of National Olympic Committees meeting was not nearly as noteworthy as two other essentials: the fact that the meeting was held in the first place in the United States and that delegates from 204 entities were on hand.

As the session gaveled to order on Thursday, there in their place in the rows of seats were, for instance, representatives from North Korea.

From Syria.

Russia.

Everywhere in the world, including two new national Olympic committees, Kosovo and South Sudan.

There are actually 206 national Olympic committees. The Republic of Congo didn't make it. And elements of the government of Kuwait are involved in a fight with the IOC, meaning the national Olympic committee is now suspended, for the second time in five years, amid political interference; moreover, on Thursday, the IOC announced it had revoked the Olympic qualifying status of a shooting championship in Kuwait, due to begin next week, because an Israeli official was denied a visa for the event.

The assembly marked the first time the ANOC session has been held in the United States since 1994, two years before the Atlanta 1996 Summer Games.

With Los Angeles now bidding for the 2024 Games, the stakes were high here for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

As the familiar saying goes, LA surely could not win anything here -- but a poor performance could cost it and the USOC, even though the 2024 race is still in its early stages.

The International Olympic Committee won’t pick the 2024 winner until September 2017. Five cities have declared for the 2024 race: LA, Paris, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany.

The tentative verdict: no major missteps. All good.

"No problem with [U.S. entry] visas. It was fantastic," the ANOC general secretary, Gunilla Lindberg of Sweden, said Friday, adding of the assembly and related events, "The organization went really well. I heard only positive comments."

Does that mean LA is on course to a sure victory?

Hardly.

Indeed, by most accounts, Paris is considered the 2024 front-runner.

"Two years is a long time," Paris 2024 chief executive Etienne Thobois said. "It's a long journey ahead. 'Favorite' doesn't mean anything."

The calm here simply mean it's on to whatever the future holds, with both the strengths and the challenges underscoring the American effort here this week on full display.

A clear and undisputed strength: Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti.

Garcetti, bid chairman Casey Wasserman and Janet Evans, the 1980s and 1990s Olympic swimming champ, make up the public face of the LA 2024 bid. The Olympic movement in recent years has rarely seen a personality like Garcetti: a mayor who leads from the front and in a style that is both fully American and decidedly international.

Garcetti got to welcome to the United States, among others, Tsunekazu Takeda, the Japanese IOC member and Tokyo 2020 leader who for the past year has also been the IOC’s global marketing commission chair.

Takeda speaks English. But no. Garcetti spoke with him in Japanese. When they parted, the mayor passed to Takeda a business card — in Japanese.

Meeting Julio Maglione, the IOC member from Uruguay who is president of both the international swimming federation, FINA, and PASO, the Pan-American Sports Organization, Garcetti spoke in Spanish.

South Sudan? Garcetti, a Rhodes Scholar some 20 years ago, knows the region; he said he lived in East Africa, studying Eritrean nationalism, in the mid-‘90s.

The mayor’s back story — which surely will become ever more widely known — is, truly, remarkable.

Garcetti served for years on the LA city council before becoming mayor. As LA Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote the week before that 2013 mayoral election:

“[Garcetti] seems to have done everything in his 42 years except pitch for the Dodgers and kayak to Borneo,” adding later in the column, ”He’s George Plimpton, Bono and Seinfeld’s Mr. Peterman all rolled into one. When he says: ‘And then there was the time I commandeered a snowmobile at the North Pole while on a climate-change fact-finding mission and located Salma Hayek’s lost purse in the frozen tundra,’ he’s not kidding. He actually did that. And Hayek said he’s a great dancer.”

It was salsa dancing, for the record. And one small correction: the dancing took part in Iqaluit, the provincial capital of Nunavut, Canada.

More from Lopez on Garcetti:

"He was a cheerleader, led his Columbia U. literary society, headed a discussion group on gender and sexuality and served the homeless while composing musicals. He went on to conduct research or serve humanitarian causes in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Burma, worked for Amnesty International and became a university instructor. And did I mention that he speaks fluent Spanish and currently serves as a Naval Reserve officer?"

Larry Probst, the USOC board chair, said of Garcetti, "That guy is our secret weapon." After this week, "He's no secret anymore."

Some 1200 people were accredited for the ANOC assembly, filling a huge hall on the lower level of the Washington Hilton. Garcetti called it “breathtaking” to see such global diversity on display.

Throughout his several days here, Garcetti played it very low-key, saying repeatedly he was here to listen and learn.

After the failures of Chicago 2016 and New York 2012, it’s abundantly plain that any American bid must walk a fine line between boldness and, probably even more important, humility.

As Garcetti told Associated Press, ”People want us to be assertive and brave about the Olympic movement but not to tip over to being arrogant. It’s like, 'Win it on your merits, be a good team player. We already know how big you are, how many athletes and medals you have. Just be one of us.' "

The USOC has in recent years been oft-criticized for not playing a role commensurate with its standing — or its expected standing — in the movement. To that end, Probst said at a Wednesday night welcome gala, no fewer than 10 world championships have been or will be staged in the United States this year alone.

Upcoming: the international weightlifting championships in Houston next month. Just past: the world road cycling championships in Richmond, Virginia, which attracted 640,000 people over nine days.

The USOC, Probst said, was “delighted” to play host to the ANOC meeting, part of a plan to “become a full partner in the Olympic family and appropriately engage everywhere we thought we could make a positive difference.”

ANOC president Sheik Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, a major Olympic power-broker, said time and again this week how important it was to gather on American soil.

At a Tuesday dinner, he said, “I just want to [emphasize] that we are back in the United States,” he said. At Wednesday’s gala, he said, referring to the Americans, “You are a main stakeholder in the Olympic movement,” adding, “Come back,” and, “You are most welcome and a big part of this family.”

A key ANOC initiative: the development and staging of the so-called Beach Games, a bid to reach out to and more actively engage with teens and 20-somethings, arguably the key demographic in the Olympic sphere. The full ANOC assembly on Friday approved the awarding of a first Beach Games, to be held in 2017, to San Diego, at a projected cost in the range of $150 million; some 20 sports are to be on the program, including surfing, volleyball and triathlon.

Just two hours, maybe less, from Los Angeles?

To avoid conflict with the IOC rule that bars members from visiting bid cities, the San Diego event is due to be held in the days after the 2024 vote.

Like that is going to stop site visits by influence-makers in the Olympic world.

What? If someone is in San Diego, are they going to be fitted with five-ringed ankle-monitors to track them from making the short drive north to LA? Are trips to Disneyland, in Orange County, halfway between San Diego and LA, off-limits?

Silly, and, again, another reason why the no-visits rule ought to be dropped, even acknowledging all IOC paranoia about sport corruption, a topic that IOC president Thomas Bach visited at length from the dais Thursday in remarks about the FIFA scandal in which he did not even once mention the acronym “FIFA.”

“Follow the news,” Bach said, adding, “Think about what it means for you: it means for you that if you do not follow these basic principles of good governance, your credibility is at risk, that the credibility of all you may have done in the past and all the good things you are doing is at risk.”

The FIFA matter, sparked by a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, clearly poses an uncertainty for any American 2024 effort. What will the status of that matter be by September 2017? And the status of would-be systemic FIFA reconstruction?

The sheikh, who also serves on the FIFA executive committee, sought here to strike a light tone. “FIFA — we believe FIFA needs a lot of reforms,” he said at Tuesday night’s dinner to laughter.

Also a U.S. challenge: how effective can any American delegation prove at lobbying the IOC for the big prize? There are three U.S. IOC members: Probst, Anita DeFrantz, Angela Ruggiero.

USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun and Probst have worked diligently for six years at relationship-building, and Blackmun is likely to assume an ever-wider role as the bid goes on. He struck exactly the right tone at Wednesday’s gala in exceedingly brief remarks: “It’s great to have you here in the United States.”

Meanwhile, the scene at that gala, and indeed for most of the week, highlighted a significant American challenge.

It’s typical at a large-scale Olympic gathering such as an ANOC assembly for a senior federal official from the host country, typically the rank of a president or prime minister, to make -- at the least -- an appearance at which all are welcomed to wherever and wished a good time.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, for instance, opened last week's World Olympians Forum in Moscow, with Bach and Monaco's Prince Albert on hand, calling for the "de-politicization of sports under international law."

Roughly half the 100 or so IOC members were here for the ANOC proceedings -- "almost ... a quorum," as the sheikh quipped. Thus: a major opportunity.

Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? No senior U.S. officials.

The mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, offered Thursday’s welcoming remarks. Washington and San Francisco were also in the U.S. mix for 2024 along with, of course, Boston.

"As you consider future sports event, please consider Washington, D.C., a worthy option,'' Bowser said, adding later, "See you in 2028."

Talk about off-message.

President Obama, of course, made a trip to the IOC session in Copenhagen in October 2009 to pitch for Chicago, which got booted in the first round of voting. Since then, the Obama White House has played it decidedly cool with the Olympic scene.

Within the IOC, Obama is typically mentioned in discussion either with the security-related logistics of that 2009 Copenhagen visit or 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. He selected 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.)

In just over two years as IOC president, Bach has met with roughly 100 heads of government or state. Obama? No.

On Wednesday, while ANOC delegates gathered in DC, the First Lady, Michelle Obama, and Jill Biden, the vice president's wife, met with Britain's Prince Harry in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, not far away, to promote the 2016 Invictus Games. The Paralympic-style event, to be held next May in Orlando, Florida, is intended to raise awareness for wounded service members.

“OK, ladies, Prince Harry is here. Don’t act like you don’t notice!” Mrs. Obama said, adding at another point to laughs, “I’d like to apologize for all the gold medals we will win in Orlando.” The prince said in response, “You better bring it, USA!”

Later Wednesday, the prince met President Obama in the Oval Office, again to promote the Invictus project.

So -- on Friday morning, while the Rio 2016 delegation was already in the midst of its presentation to the assembly, what was this? A surprise appearance from vice president Joe Biden, the Olympic equivalent of a protocol drive-by.

The sheikh literally had to ask producers to stop a Rio 2016 beauty video as Biden stepped up to the microphone. There, flanked by the sheikh, Bach and Probst, Biden said he'd had breakfast earlier in the week with Garcetti, who had said it was an "oversight" that "no one from the administration has been here."

"He was right," Biden said. "It was an oversight. For that, I apologize. I am a poor substitute, and I am delighted to be here." He also called the Olympics the "single unifying principle in the world.''

More Biden: "I will be the captain of the U.S. Olympic team. I'm running 100 meters. Don't I wish I could! I bet every one of you here wish you could, too."

And this: "I am not here lobbying for any city. Though I do love Los Angeles. All kidding aside, Garcetti is my friend and he won't let me back in LA unless I say something nice."

Biden closed with a note that he intended to attend the Summer Games and that when he did, "I hope when I come up to you and say, 'Hello,' you won't say, 'Joe who?' "

And then he was gone, out of the big hall.

In all, just over seven minutes.

Did Biden -- like Putin -- say anything substantive? No.

Then again, the vice-president did show up. So, ultimately, the big-picture argument can be made, Probst calling Biden's appearance "incredibly important," adding, "The message is our government at the very highest levels cares about the Olympic movement, and I hope that's a message that will resonate."

Patrick Hickey, the IOC executive board member who is also head of the European Olympic Committees, called Biden's remarks "most charming" and his appearance a "superb move," observing that "lots of people" had remarked about the prior absence of a ranking administration official.

And security? This was not Copenhagen in 2009. No disruptions. The room wasn't suddenly cleared and swept. There were no -- there have not been all week -- airport-style metal detectors.

This, then, is perhaps the ultimate take-away of this week, one likely to emerge as a key talking point for LA24 and the USOC: the United States is different. Yes, there are 206 national Olympic committees. The way stuff gets done in the U.S. can often be different than anywhere else. Not better, not worse. Just different. But, for sure, it gets done.

For emphasis: different does not mean better or worse. It's just -- different.

Come January 2017, meantime, the issue of U.S. federal involvement may prove a minor footnote in the 2024 Olympic story. That's eight months before the IOC election. That's when a new U.S. president takes office. Maybe even sooner -- whenever it will be in 2016 that the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees assume their roles.

For now, Probst said, referring to Garcetti, "We're thrilled this guy is here."