A 2024 dose of -- common sense

Back in the day, a young person who was maybe having a little trouble understanding a concept might meet up with an older fella. This older fella might feel so inclined to help impart some wisdom rather directly by means of what in some parts of the United States might be referred to as a switch.

This practice has largely fallen out of favor, given as a switch is pretty much a tree branch and beating people about the head with a stick is no longer considered what we in modern times would call best practice. Actually, we would probably call that a felony.

Even so, when it comes to the race for the 2024 Summer Games between Los Angeles and Paris and, now, perhaps the joined-at-the-hip contest for the 2028 Summer Games, too, let us turn for just a few moments to our new imaginary friend, the common-sense switch.

Good lord.

This is not difficult. Indeed, the way this is trending it is so painfully obvious. It’s truly simply common sense.

Item No. 1:

Tony Estanguet, the Paris 2024 co-president, gets sent to London earlier this week to meet with a gaggle of reporters.

It’s telling that Estanguet is the guy who gets sent to London in the first instance — but let's not digress.

There he delivers through the press an ultimatum: “It’s now or never. We will not come back for 2028. If the IOC can find a solution with Los Angeles, that’s great — but our project is only possible for 2024.”

Reaction: why adopt a black-and-white, either-or position six months before the purported decision date? Ask any sophisticated business person: how often does an ultimatum prove a successful negotiating position?

Item No. 2:

Jules Boykoff, an American professor, writes an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times loaded with trigger words (first paragraph alone: “profit-gobbling cartel” when the International Olympic Committee is not in the business of turning a profit) that asserts, amid all the glibness, that LA and Paris should press the IOC to assume a larger share of cost overruns.

In particular “… it’s time the organization stepped up and contributed to infrastructure costs as well.”

Since 1960, Mr. Boykoff says, “every single Olympics with reliable data has gone over budget, by an average of 156 percent in real terms.”

To be clear:

Zero quarrel here with Mr. Boykoff and his focus on reforming certain elements of the Olympic movement. Trigger words get attention. Mr. Boykoff wants to position himself as one of the Olympic voices in academia to turn to. All good.

The quarrel here is with my former employer, the LA Times, which didn’t challenge the underlying premises of the piece.

A little fact-checking would have made plain what is, again, so obvious — the key distinction between the Los Angeles and Paris plans for 2024, and why, as this space keeps pointing out repeatedly, the IOC would do well to seize the common-sense opportunity right in front of its very face or be prepared to face what the potentially (not being dramatic here) existential consequences.

Because, after 25 years of boondoggles, taxpayers in the west are mightily pissed off.

To explain:

The single most important difference between the LA and Paris bids is that everything that matters in Los Angeles is already built. It exists. Now.

Oops. OK. Wait. Mea culpa. The new NFL stadium in Inglewood doesn't exist yet. But it's being privately financed in a deal driven by the guy who owns the LA Rams. That's a $3-billion, state-of-the-art stadium for which LA24 organizers would not have to pay anything to help construct. So, thanks, right?

Paris would have to build an athletes’ village, media housing and an aquatics complex. Those are big projects, and history shows they inevitably produce cost overruns. They would in Paris. Guaranteed.

The Paris bid files (click here, see pages 28-31) project the village at $1.607 billion, the media housing another $373.8 million. Aquatics would be another $158.05 million. Now you're talking over $2 billion. As an AP story noted, there's also discussion of new public transport infrastructure to make the athletes' village more accessible, via a new train station and construction of a road interchange so that you could get to the village from central Paris in 20 minutes, at least in theory, by car.

Who wants to guess, when the cash register stops wildly spinning and cha-chinging, what obscenely large number would be in neon-bright digits?

And who would end up paying for a big chunk of this?

French taxpayers.

Reality: for credibility purposes, the IOC cannot afford these kind of building sprees anymore, not after 25 years of massive overruns — Barcelona 1992, which jumpstarted the whole Olympics-as-urban-renewal thing, is celebrating its anniversary even now.

Compare and contrast: if you don’t have anything to build, why would you have infrastructure cost overruns? This is the LA story.

Thus to the central thesis of the LAT op-ed piece? Why would the LA24 people want to challenge the IOC on cost overruns when LA24 doesn’t have logical reason to anticipate even one red penny? Hello? LAT editors -- 17 years for me as a staff writer there and have things really gotten that sloppy in the 10 years since I left Spring Street?

Further:

Paris is largely a government project. LA is privately financed. Because LA is a private deal, just like it was in 1984, there is no margin for error, no room for costly boondoggles.

Indeed, LA 2024, early on, considered the construction of a new athletes’ village near downtown Los Angeles. But officials decided not to do it. Why? Because it would have been too expensive! Instead, completely in line with the purported reforms known as Agenda 2020 championed by the IOC president, Thomas Bach, LA 2024 turned to the existing dorms at UCLA. Which are world-class.

Turning to the 156 percent figure:

That comes from an academic survey published last year. Click here if you want to read it in detail. Be mindful that, like any survey, it is only as good as the underlying data — for instance, as it notes, the “vigilant reader” may well be suspicious of some numbers, because “the lowest cost overrun of all Games was found for Beijing 2008,” a reported 2 percent on a reputed $40-billion all-in monster of a bill, because “China is known for its lack of reliability in economic reporting.”

Oh.

At any rate:

You know what else is really fascinating in that survey?

Turn to page 12, Table 3, “Sports-related cost overruns, Olympics 1960-2012, calculated in local currencies, real terms.”

Here, for instance, you see that the Montreal 1976 Games incurred a 720 percent cost overrun.

Barcelona: 266 percent.

You know what’s missing from this chart?

Los Angeles 1984. Totally not there.

Turn, please, to page 25. There the authors have referenced the LA 84 official report. Now turn to page 309 of that official report, section 11.01.10, “Revenue and the operating surplus.” There it says the LA84 organizing committee turned a surplus — attention, LA Times editors, when referring to non-profit enterprises such as the IOC, it’s “surplus,” not “profit” — of at least $215 million, perhaps as much as $250 million.

The final number, as history would prove, was $232.5 million.

Since, through the LA84 Foundation, millions upon millions of dollars have gone into the promotion of youth sport around Southern California. That is real Olympic legacy.

Returning, as we were, to Table 3:

Let’s assume friends in France and Canada (Montreal 76) are more transparent in reporting financial details than friends in China, because these numbers seem genuinely fascinating in considering a Paris bid for 2024:

Grenoble, France, 1968 Winter Games, cost overrun: 181 percent.

Albertville, France, 1992 Winter Games, cost overrun: 137 percent.

Item No. 3:

The California legislative analyst’s office, the state legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal and policy advisor’s arm, issued a report Thursday on the LA24 bid that could not have been more — common sense.

The state, like the city of Los Angeles, has an interest in protecting taxpayers. The reason taxpayers in and around Southern California have repeatedly proven so high on a return of the Games to LA is the consistent belief that a privately run Games will not dent their wallets.

That's just — common sense.

From the report, and be mindful that these legislative offerings tend to prose measured with exacting precision. It is not often one sees “fun” or successful” in the stylings of an official California state report:

“… Los Angeles’ bid makes significant efforts to reduce the financial risks that have plagued prior Olympic cities. Basing its bid on existing or already‑on‑track venues and infrastructure reduces the chance that cost overruns will occur. More broadly, if Los Angeles is selected, Olympic organizers and local leaders can focus largely for the next seven years on preparing the region to host a fun, successful event for athletes and visitors, rather than focusing on keeping big construction projects on time and on budget. We agree with city officials that the current Olympic bid plan is fairly low risk for the city and, by extension, the state as well.”

Jason Sisney, the chief deputy legislative analyst, added in an email, and note again the emphasis from a government official whose No. 1 priority it is to look out for the interest of the taxpayer:

“So far, the efforts of Los Angeles city officials and LA24 to manage financial risks are noteworthy. If Los Angeles wins the Games, this means city officials can spend the next seven years planning a fun, successful event and be less focused on the sometimes thankless task of guiding big Olympic infrastructure projects to completion.”

Let’s once more compare and contrast, because unlike the LA24 people, our Paris 2024 friends would indeed have to guide “big Olympic infrastructure projects to completion,” the biggest that athletes’ village.

If you don’t read French and in particular the fascinating reports detailing notes of interest in immobilier en France, French real estate, perhaps you missed this gem:

Last week saw a building and property trade show in Cannes (that's the sun-splashed ville where they do the film festival). It was called MIPIM.

Who put up a booth?

Paris 2024!

This is itself interesting, since the idea of the stand was to attract private investors but the Paris bid book makes plain that "government" is, for the athletes' village, the "body responsible for funding venue from construction until Games time."

At any rate, maybe the way you go about attracting investors and financing in France is different.

In the United States, you would call, say, Goldman Sachs or some other heavyweight for a project estimated in the billions. 

There, it’s a booth at a trade show. What, did our Paris 2024 friends give away pins? Better yet -- some of those 1.5 million Paris 2024 cloth bracelets (2 euros apiece!) that 18 months ago were touted as a crowdsourcing funding vehicle. Maybe a few are now left over? 

The story quotes a local dignitary from Seine-Saint-Denis, the Paris suburb where they want to plunk the village:

"This is an opportunity to reduce noise pollution, by creating noise-barriers along the A86 expressway (a major local highway), but also to decontaminate the soils and to place underground the EDF (French utility) electric networks and lines."

This is what an Olympic Games is supposed to be about?

Soil decontamination? Noise barriers? Utility lines?

Or a fun, successful event?

Common sense, people.

Feeling 22, and everything is so all right

The American racer Mikaela Shiffrin on Friday clinched enough points to win the fancy crystal globe that goes to the alpine World Cup tour’s best overall female skier.

She becomes just the third American to win the season title. Tamara McKinney won it in 1983. Lindsey Vonn has won four big globes, as they like to call it on the tour, most recently in 2012. Now comes Mikaela Shiffrin, who just this past Monday turned 22.

Taylor Swift could not have put it any better. Everything will be so all right.

This is the stuff of compelling cross-over stardom.

Mikaela Shiffrin is already an Olympic champion, the heavy favorite to win again at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea in not just one but perhaps three events — slalom, giant slalom and combined — and already so much more, the rare athlete who not only has a calm and a presence about her but, at 22, understands who she is, what she is doing and why.

It’s elemental.

Mikaela Shiffrin is who she is because she loves it, and passionately.

She loves every bit of it. She can take that passion and distill it into a killer work ethic and uncompromising want-to.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you forge the sort of great champion who, come Winter Games-time, makes for must-see TV.

Unlike the schedule at most Winter Olympics, at Sochi in 2014, for instance, when the so-called technical events ran near the back end of the 17 days, in Pyeongchang next February, guess what goes off on Day 2? Women’s giant slalom. Day 4? Women’s slalom.

Why? This missive from the Department of the Obvious: Mikaela Shiffrin.

Here is the thing that separates someone like Shiffrin from the rest of almost everyone else on skis.

For her, the racing is the fun part. For real. In the start gate, the mission is not just to see if she can be good but to see how good she can be.

Nervous? Like, why?

Why be nervous, why have a thought bubble full of anxious reminders cluttering your mind, when you have done everything you can possibly do to put yourself in the best position you can be?

For Mikaela Shiffrin, there are no shortcuts. She loves the training, the hours upon hours in the gym, the repetitions in the weight room and on the icy snow, the attention to detail, all the stuff that doesn’t get reflected in the photo snaps, what our 24/7 what-now culture demands, the pics that flash across the globe in milliseconds of a winning smile and a fancy crystal globe.

“I am always at my best,” she said, calmly, evenly, “when I get good preparation and I feel strong.”

That simple, that elemental, and Mikaela Shiffrin’s 2017 overall win marks an intriguing moment if, like most Americans, you are just checking in on what’s what in alpine skiing.

Alpine racing is, generally speaking, divided into two kinds — the technical events and the speed races.

When most casual fans think alpine, they think speed, something like Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer,” which goes all the way back to 1969. (Warren Miller's love sonnets on film to the sport do not count for the casual fan.)

Making this easy:

The speed events are the downhill and the super-G.

Downhill: spitballing it here, you see how fast you can get down the mountain. There are gates, but whatever— the main thing is the speed, like 80 miles per hour, which is a lot on a freeway in a car made significantly of metal and other durable parts, much less on skis chattering down a river of ice. A world-class course runs to two minutes. Try to imagine it: ice (it's ice, not fluffy snow), 80 mph, two minutes, skis, yikes.

Super-G, same general idea but some widely set gates and the course is set lower down the mountain, meaning it's shorter.

The tech events, on the other hand, are the twisty, turning ones, the ones with all the gates close together.

Making this easy, again:

Per someone clever, those tech events, the giant slalom and slalom, will be coming to your living room early in the 2018 Olympic run.

A fifth alpine event, the combined, is just what it sounds like, one speed event and one tech, say a super-G and a slalom. You add the times of those two races together, lowest total wins.

On the men’s side, an Austrian racer, Marcel Hirscher, has won the World Cup overall title six seasons running — 2012 through 2017.

Hirscher is a tech specialist, the king of slalom and in the 2015 and 2017 seasons, giant slalom, too.

Compare that to the American standout Bode Miller, a five-event skier who won the overall title in 2005 and 2008.

Shiffrin is a tech specialist, too. She is the Sochi 2014 slalom gold medalist. She is the World Cup slalom winner for the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 seasons. (She spent two months away from racing during the 2016 season after a fall.)

Compare that to Vonn, the German Maria Höfl-Riesch (2011 overall winner), the Slovenian Tina Maze (Sochi 2014 downhill and giant slalom champ, showing her versatility, and 2013 World Cup overall winner with an otherworldly 2,414 points, breaking the legendary Austrian hammer Hermann Maier’s record of 2,000, set in 2000).

All three of these women: four- or five-event racers.

Would Shiffrin this season have been competing in more speed events if the Swiss racer Lara Gut, the 2016 overall champ, had not, in a Feb. 10 warm-up at the world championships, torn an ACL?

If, similarly, the Austrian Anna Veith was not coming back from injury? Before she got married, she was Anna Fenninger — the name by which she won Olympic gold in 2014 in the super-G and, moreover, won the big globe in 2015 and 2014.

Heading into the weekend’s racing in Aspen, Shiffrin stood at 1,523 points. No matter what happens, she can’t come within a canyon of Maze’s 2,414. Does that matter, even a little? Gut had 1,522 in winning last season. Shiffrin already is better. Again, does that matter, even remotely?

Questions without answers and, anyway, it’s not as if Shiffrin can’t ski speed.

Shiffrin did, after all, win a combined this season, in late February, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and it’s for sure the case that as she goes and grows, all involved expect Shiffrin will do more speed.

A comparison: when Michael Phelps was a much younger swimmer, his coach, Bob Bowman, would allow him only to swim distance. As he grew into his ability, Bowman saw to it that Phelps broadened his repertoire.

Same general idea with Shiffrin.

The thing is, she and her team have a plan, and what Shiffrin and her team do, and exceedingly well, is develop and execute that plan.

As Julia Mancuso, the American skier who is herself a four-time Olympic medalist, including a gold from the Torino 2006 Games, said, “If it isn’t broke, why fix it? That’s their mindset.”

Mancuso added, “It takes a lot of strength to not deviate from that plan as well.”

Ski racing is full of numbers — so many it can become numbing — but just consider a handful.

Before this weekend’s races, Shiffrin had stood in the start gate 103 times. She had produced 31 wins and 43 podiums.

As Patrick Riml, the U.S. Ski Team’s alpine director, put it, “Her strike rate is unbelievable.”

It is often said that hitting a major-league curve ball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Those who say that have never stood in the start gate of a World Cup course and looked at the gates and the ice. Shiffrin’s win rate would make her, in baseball terms, an All-Star, a .300 hitter. Her podium rate puts her in Rogers Hornsby or Ted Williams category.

Long-range: Vonn has 77 World Cup victories. Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark has the most, 86.

“Kudos to [parents] Jeff and Eileen for teaching Mikaela what it takes,” Riml said.

“Look,” he said, “everyone who skis the World Cup has talent. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be there.

“Who wants it? Who wants it bad enough? Who wants it bad enough on race day?

“You can see it,” he said, “from the start gate,” and indeed you can.

Mikaela Shiffrin wants it. And she is feeling every bit of 22.

Could it be more plain? IOC needs time, stability

The International Olympic Committee, like the Kremlin, speaks in code.

Let us now decode Friday’s announcement from a meeting in South Korea of the IOC's policy-making executive board that a “working group” made up of the four IOC vice-presidents has been set up to "explore changes" in Olympic bidding. The obvious subtext: the possibility later this year of jointly awarding the 2024 and 2028 Games to Los Angeles and Paris or, you know, Paris and Los Angeles.

This panel is due to make its report at what is called, in IOC jargon, the “technical briefing” in mid-July in Lausanne, Switzerland, the show at which those two candidate cities get to make presentations before the big event itself, the September 13 vote — if there is going to be a vote — in Lima, Peru.

The announcement Friday comes as IOC confronts almost everywhere it looks what in gentle terms would be called a credibility gap. The IOC stands as the symbol of an establishment that regular people increasingly resent, and a lot. These regular folks, who in western democracies are taxpayers, have made it plain that they will accept the IOC only on certain terms.

Meaning their — taxpayer — terms. Which means back to the future. Which means 1984.

In this volatile and perhaps even existential moment for the Olympic movement, you know the sort of thing that further erodes IOC credibility, and in a big way?

When the 73-year-old Swiss head of the international ski federation, Gian-Franco Kasper, opens up his mouth and, like he did at that very same IOC meeting in Korea, draws an analogy to allegations of Russian doping: "I'm just against bans or sanctioning of innocent people. Like Mr. Hitler did — all Jews were to be killed, independently of what they did or did not do.”

He also reportedly said, "We call this sippenhaft in Germany — where the place you come from makes you guilty.”

The place Mr. Kasper is from is a canton in Switzerland where sits St. Moritz, site of the 1928 and 1948 Winter Games. There, twice in the past four years voters have been asked via the ballot whether they would be interested in staging the 2022 or 2026 Winter Games. Twice the answer, most recently during the 2017 alpine ski championships: no.

Mr. Kasper’s words were so offensive and ill-timed, given everything at stake, that the IOC itself issued an apology on his behalf.

It is with this sort of ever-shifting and complex backdrop in mind that one approaches a more subtle decode of IOC "working group" messaging.

No. 1:

Whatever the IOC president wants is what the “working group” will “present” in July.

This is the way the IOC works. Now, then, presumably always.

If you don’t understand this basic premise about the IOC, you are still charmingly enrolled in naive school, which is fine but not the way the Olympic sphere operates.

The current IOC president, Thomas Bach of Germany, learned this from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, president from 1980-2001. Outsiders hold to a stereotyped perception of Mr. Samaranch. The long view of history is more likely to trend toward a keen appreciation of Mr. Samaranch's style and manner of global leadership.

No. 2:

The four vice-presidents do not come to the table as neutrals.

Australia’s John Coates has every reason to push a Brisbane bid for 2028. Turkey’s Ugur Erdener, same for Istanbul. Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., absolutely for Madrid.

Then there is China’s Zaiqing Yu, and after Beijing for 2008 and 2022, why not Nanjing (Summer Youth Games 2014) or Shenzhen (Summer University Games 2011) or Shanghai for 2028?

Coates, Erdener and Yu are already on record as publicly opposed to the idea of a 2024-2028 double-double.

(Advice, IOC: you want the youth audience? Bring the Games back to SoCal sooner than later and send everyone to In-N-Out for the No. 1 special: double-double, fries, drink. Also, In-N-Out is a chain that encourages young people to, you know, read — a free burger for every five books that kids check out from the library and read. But I digress.)

Others who have said an Olympic double, hold the fries, may not make the best option: Gerhard Heiberg of Norway, the former IOC marketing director, and C.K. Wu of Taiwan, another executive board member and the boxing federation president.

That such heavyweights do not come as neutrals? Does not matter.

Why? See No. 1.

Moving on to No. 3:

With the announcement of this “working group,” the executive board bought itself roughly four months for Bach to canvass the Olympic scene’s wide range of stakeholders on the notion of a 2024-2028 double.

In this case, canvass is again code. It means, from the IOC president’s position, sure, I am glad to listen to you. Done? OK, now my turn, and be sure to listen closely, please, because we are facing some issues and we need to find a solution.

Mr. Bach, meanwhile, is walking a tremendous high-wire act, which he and perhaps only a few confidantes truly understand.

— Starting with the IOC members themselves:

In December 2014, Mr. Bach pushed through the IOC membership a purported wide-ranging reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020.

As evidence that the IOC does what the president wants: Agenda 2020 (all 40 points) was approved unanimously.

The reforms have so far failed to convince taxpayers in any number of European cities that they are in the least bit meaningful, leaving only two candidates in the 2015 vote for 2022 (Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan) and, now, for 2024 (LA, Paris).

A good many of the members already complain, if not for attribution, that being a member might make for a great way to speed through passport lines but what else? Being an IOC member is entirely a volunteer position. It carries no defined mandate. A member’s key “job” has in many ways been reduced to voting in the candidate city elections. And now, for 2024 and 2028, the IOC president would take that away?

Even more, for the 2022 Games race just two years ago, the situation was exactly the same — two cities — and yet the members duly exercised their franchise?

What’s so different now?

— Sticking with Agenda 2020:

In discussion about a 2024-2028 double, this space has made plain that the only way such a twist would work is that if it were LA for 2024, Paris for 2028.

Some European friends have floated the idea of Paris first, LA for 2028.

Our Paris bid friends suggest that it would have to be Paris first in any such rotation because the tender for the land on which an athletes’ village would have to be built is only available for 2024.

If past history is a reliable guide, and it is, the village would indisputably sink into a fat and ugly construction cost-overrun and delay-plagued boondoggle.

To reiterate, that is the very last thing the IOC — and beyond, the broader Olympic movement — wants or needs.

What all involved want and need is time and stability.

At any rate, if that tender is the sticking point, French friends: if it’s that critical to your project, get a better lawyer. That is just common sense. Maybe, you know, find a way to figure out how to make it happen instead of saying, all French-like, non, we cannot.

— Back to the IOC president and Agenda 2020:

Mr. Bach was elected to a first eight-year term in 2013.

Let’s say for purposes of discussion that the IOC’s fascinatingly insightful new friends in the French prosecutor’s office, having already reached out to Frankie Fredericks, the IOC member from the west African nation of Namibia, don’t so intrude on Mr. Bach’s fate that he can fulfill not only that eight-year term but can, indeed, serve — as is IOC custom since the reforms associated with the late 1990s Salt Lake City affair — a second four-year term as president.

Math: the year 2013 plus 12 would take us to the year 2025.

Common sense:

Agenda 2020 is Mr. Bach’s project.

He is hugely invested in, indeed professionally identified with, making it real.

Assuming 12 years in office, the only Summer Games on Mr. Bach’s watch during which Agenda 2020 could be seen through, start to finish, would be 2024.

Of the two bids, the only Summer Games that even remotely aligns properly with Agenda 2020 is Los Angeles.

The Paris people may well protest.

They say that 95 percent of their stuff is already built, and good for them.

It’s the items to be built that are the killers — that athletes' village, an aquatics center and media housing. Those are big-ticket projects, and big-ticket items are at the core of what is killing the IOC’s credibility with taxpayers, because these projects are marketed as cost-factor x but then inevitably become real-cost x-plus. (Tokyo 2020: 2013 bid book $7.8 billion; post-2013 win as high as $30 billion; maybe now $15.2 billion, according to Bach. See, French friends? If the Japanese can cut $15 billion, you can find a good lawyer!)

The IOC president would never, ever — repeat, never, ever — say in public that big-ticket items like these are, in fact, killers.

Sports politics is absolutely politics, and you do not get to be the IOC president without being an adept politician of the first order.

But, and he knows this, the IOC absolutely needs to get out of the government-backed project business. That’s not what the Games are about.

It perhaps may have been little noticed except within certain Olympic precincts but last week offered up 110 percent evidence to that exact point: why the IOC desperately needs to get out of the business, at least for a safe-harbor seven-year stretch, of having sports events essentially backed — as Paris is and Los Angeles is not — by government.

There's something of an irony here: the IOC held its 2011 assembly in Durban, South Africa, and it was there that the IOC elected Pyeongchang, South Korea, the site of the 2018 Winter Games, which was where the IOC announced Friday it was going to have this "working group" all about 2024 and 2028.

Earlier in the week, Durban backed out of hosting the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the president of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee saying that “without the necessary government guarantees, we couldn't move on.”

This comes of course just a few weeks after Budapest dropped out of the 2024 Summer Games campaign — following earlier exits by Rome and Hamburg, Germany.

It’s just so obvious what is what.

As in 1984, the LA 2024 project would be privately financed.

Decoding, again:

That’s what these next four months, and the behind-the-scenes talks, will be about while the "working group" does its thing.

If ever you wanted proof of how the IOC itself is struggling mightily in 2017 to bridge that credibility gap, consider:

At that meeting in Korea, the Games’ executive director, Christophe Dubi told a small pack of reporters that the Summer Games last year had “changed the sewer system” in Rio de Janeiro.

First and foremost, an Olympics is not now, was not then, will not ever be about changes to a city’s sewer system.

To appropriate one of Mr. Bach’s pet phrases, that is not what gets 16-year-old would-be surfing and skateboarding couch potatoes off the couch.

Secondly, with all due respect for Mr. Dubi, who is a fundamentally decent guy whose position often puts him between a rock and a sewage outlet, so to speak, that assertion simply cannot be true.

Each and every day in Rio, on the way into the Main Press Center, thousands of us were welcomed by the delightfully fragrant, indeed welcoming bouquet of an open sewage trench.

Decode: let’s cut the crap, people.

For 2024, Los Angeles. That buys time and stability, and access to the key youth demographic and the buzz and tech of California, and all those things are critically what's at issue, as well as perhaps the chance for Mr. Bach to see his reforms put into action while he’s IOC president. If Paris wants 2028, that’s altogether another matter. Some good lawyers can work that out.

No-brainer: only way to make Agenda 2020 real

From the Department of Olympic Smack Talk, and you would think that International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s much-vaunted Agenda 2020 40-point purported reform plan would have taken care of this kind of thing:

Tony Estanguet, the co-president of the Paris 2024 bid, was giving an interview to the Reuters correspondent Julien Pretot in mid-December when the topic turned to politics, French and American.

“We are supported by the city,” meaning officials in the municipality of Paris itself, “the region and the state, who are not on the same political side,” Estanguet said, and no problem with any of that.

“We’ve met several candidates,” a reference to the forthcoming French presidential elections, “and we have the feeling that they all support the bid.” Also no problem. But, then: “There is stability, which may not be the case for Los Angeles, who have a municipal election,” scheduled for, as it turns out, March 7, meaning Tuesday.

Dude. Seriously.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky Monday in Southern California ahead of Tuesday’s balloting, at which LA mayor Eric Garcetti is widely expected either to be re-elected outright or put in solid position to do so at the May 16 general election. Everything seemed pretty, you know, stable. Even the usually crabby LA Times said a few weeks ago in a piece on the mayor that the city is in the midst of a “renaissance” and in a separate endorsement offered this: “Garcetti is the best — really, the only — choice on the ballot.” Garcetti faces 10 opponents — one nicknamed “Zuma Dog,” another nicknamed “Pinky,” typical LA, typical California — so it’s unclear whether the mayor avoids the May runoff simply because a ballot with that many people is a ballot with that many people.

At any rate: you wonder why Agenda 2020 is in most precincts viewed as rhetoric without reality?

Politics, whether the mayoral election in Los Angeles or this spring’s seemingly volatile presidential race in France or the race for the 2024 Games pitting LA against Paris, is politics.

Though there have been stabs at implementing the reforms, the 2024 campaign marks the first Agenda 2020 race.

In December 2014, the IOC members unanimously bought into Bach’s 40-point plan.

As Bach emphasized in a far-ranging Q&A last week with a German-language outlet, “The Olympic Agenda [2020], initiated by me, [will] for the first time [be] fully applied to the Summer Olympics in 2024.’

To be fair, Bach’s instincts are solid.

The package could — should — have proven itself to be way ahead of the power curve.

To date, however, Agenda 2020 has been mostly noise devoid of substance.

Just words on a page.

In Lima on September 13, when the members make their 2024 choice, the question is whether Agenda 2020 will mean anything more than the paper it’s written on.

Put another way:

Do the members genuinely care about the future, about the strategic vision of the IOC?

The core issue is whether they get — that is, whether Bach can make them understand — that for Agenda 2020 the time is now or never.

The IOC is a multibillion-dollar global entity with a variety of stakeholders. Its primary goal is spreading its values — respect, excellence, friendship— through sport, and particularly its franchise, the Games. Its key mission is figuring out how to stay relevant with its key audience, teens and 20-somethings.

All this makes 2024 a classic case study, and if September 13 in Lima were not a secret ballot but a straightforward corporate-way decision, the sort of thing McKinsey or Bain or Deloitte get hired all the time to assess and provide consulting-style strategic roadmaps for, this would be a no-brainer.

Paris would simply be more of the same — like Athens, Beijing, London, Sochi, Rio and, now Tokyo, government-run bids and follow-on organizing committees that see huge cost overruns skyrocket into exorbitant billions, the No. 1 shock to the system the reputed $51 billion associated with the Sochi 2014 Games.

Paris needs to build an athletes’ village, along with media housing and a swim complex. These three cost centers have repeatedly proven problematic, and the history of recent government-underwritten Games — see the list over the last 20 years from the previous paragraph — shows definitively that the bills inexorably get fat.

When a 17-day sports party ends up costing $51 billion, $40 billion, $30 billion, $20 billion or even *just* $15 billion, you can trace a direct logic line: this is why taxpayers across Europe are now in revolt against the IOC.

Too, this is why, increasingly, social media and the threat of referendum make for an existential threat to the establishment across Europe, in particular the juicy target that is the IOC.

LA, a privately run bid (and, like 1984, Games), stands out as the change option.

Now is precisely the time for that change.

The model of Games as urban development catalyst is — done. That is over.

To reiterate:

That is exactly why taxpayers are so completely and thoroughly pissed off. They don’t want the Games to be a blank check anymore for roads, airports, metro lines and more.

Bach knows this. Again, the logic line: the drafting and enactment of Agenda 2020.

To be explicitly clear, the president has not — and will not — play favorites in public in this 2024 race. He cannot afford to be seen to be favoring Los Angeles or Paris, and will not be seen favoring either. He has not, will not express a position and nothing in this column should be inferred or implied that he has, or will.

That said, he assuredly has a vital interest in making concrete the Agenda 2020 reforms.

He clearly has some work to do in this area — let’s explore — but you can see he is trying to find ways.

In that German-language interview last week, Bach tried out, again, this trial balloon:

“Without Olympic Agenda 2020, we would not have a single candidate for the Games in 2024.”

This is just not true, not helpful and that balloon should be let go.

The truth is that Bach had five candidates when the race formally kicked off in September 2015, and three have already fallen by the wayside: Budapest, Rome and Hamburg.

Agenda 2020 did not save them. If the reforms were of demonstrable utility, maybe the IOC could have helped the respective bid committees better press their cases. But no.

The further truth is that Los Angeles does not in any way, shape or form need Agenda 2020.

Just the opposite: the IOC needs LA to make Agenda 2020.

That IOC evaluation commission team that’s due in town in April is going to find what — that Los Angeles is capable of hosting the Games? Duh.

Let’s explore another tack, please, Mr. President.

“We have to reduce the planning costs,” Bach said, meaning the bid costs. Therefore, “Every facility on which a world championship or a World Cup took place is considered approved. This will determine the discussions of the next time in the IOC.”

This is flawed, too.

Like Staples Center in downtown LA, which has not played host to a world championship but puts on Lakers, Clippers and Kings games on a nightly basis, would have to be approved — but Kazan, Russia, which put on the 2015 world swim championships in a temporary pool in a soccer stadium, would be automatically in?

Beyond which:

The cost of bidding is a problem but it is not the problem. Let’s say you’re a European government. Bach also said, “Europe is the core continent of the Olympic movement. It would not be wise to ignore this,” and as an aside this is indisputably the case but also not the sort of declaration that means going somewhere else (Asia, Australia, the Americas) is mutually exclusive.

Anyway: let’s say a bid campaign runs to the range of 75 million euros. If your federal budget is — pick a number — 2 trillion euros, 75 million is a sneeze.

From the government finance minister’s office, that is.

Not, though, for the taxpayer or the local community organizer. That is an entirely different prism.

Again, the challenge is not those 75 million euros. It’s the $51 billion, $30 billion or $15 billion in infrastructure costs tied to the Games.

This is the thing that must be confronted.

It is the collection of white elephants in the room.

If you prefer, the Olympic Voldemort. Who dares speak out about this thing?

OK, here goes:

These infrastructure projects are the primary drivers, the elemental reason that — since the transformative makeover of Barcelona for 1992 — governments worldwide have sought the Games, because an Olympics as public-works catalyst comes with a fixed seven-year deadline.

In the real world, presidents, prime ministers, governors or mayors have to deal with wonky parliaments or state assemblies or city councils for 20, 30 or 40 years to try to get stuff done, if then.

Bach, same article, trying to have it both ways, acknowledging that the entire thrust of Agenda 2020 is to move away from these projects and yet:

“You have to see the whole picture. This is like in Munich in 1972. Munich might not have a subway today without the Olympic Games. And Rio would not have a functioning transport public transport system. Before the Summer Games, 18 percent of citizens in Rio had access to a proper urban transport system. Now, 63 percent. Tens of thousands benefit from the legacy of the Games day after day.

“In addition to this, a newly designed harbor district, a few hotels with their jobs, the Guanabara Bay is not perfect but much clearer than before because the introduced dirty water is now clarified. The handball hall will be converted into schools.

“The mayor of Rio recently said something that is equally true of the IOC: it was never claimed to be able to solve all political and social problems in Rio with the help of the Olympic Games. But through the Games, investments could be made, investments the inhabitants of Rio could only dream about for 50 years.”

See the conflict?

The problem is, genuinely, the IOC can’t figure out — without going to Los Angeles for 2024 — how to bring Agenda 2020 to life.

From the same article, Bach sought to explain how, after the passage of Agenda 2020 back in December 2014, the IOC almost immediately sought to pressure — my words, not his — the Korean organizers of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games to consider moving the bobsled track to Japan.

That would have given the IOC something to show the world. Agenda 2020! See! It works!

“This almost led to an insurrection,” Bach said.

To be honest, this sort of belittling observation does not reflect well on the president or the IOC nor does it constructively serve anyone’s interest.

Facts:

When the IOC approached the Koreans, it was three-plus years after the July 2011 IOC selection for PC for the 2018 Games. The bobsled track was already well past design and into construction. In practice, sunk costs were considerable. Plus, hundreds of people were at work on a job site.

The IOC was asking the Koreans to consider going to Japan — Japan ruled Korea from 1910 until 1945 — meaning Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Games. Would there be refurbishment costs for the Nagano track? If so, how much? How much would it cost to transport and house athletes? What about TV? What about a range of other issues?

In the end, timing and financial issues made it all, roughly, a wash. So: why would the Koreans invite domestic fury by 1. having to essentially bow to wartime masters 2. on a project, the Winter Olympics, of immense domestic pride, just like 1988 in the summer in Seoul 3. and being made to appear inferior by far-away Europeans on, of all things, precisely the sort of thing Koreans typically do extremely well, a design and manufacturing project?

Better: how could the IOC (first word “International”) not have taken into account these factors in a seemingly blind rush to make something of Agenda 2020? When these Winter Games were in — 2018? Which is two years before (Agenda) — 2020?

Bringing Agenda 2020 forward since:

For Tokyo 2020: the Japanese bid, won in 2013, promised all-in costs of $7.8 billion. Now estimates out of Tokyo are floating around the $25-30 billion range. (Back to PC 2018 for a note of irony: the Koreans in 2014 were suddenly supposed to agree that the Japanese way would be superior because — why?)

For Beijing 2022: the Chinese, $40-billion spenders for 2008, must build a high-speed rail line from the capital up to the mountains, where there is no snow. To keep the financial reporting numbers down, the Chinese have said they have no intention of disclosing the costs of that rail project as part of Olympic spending.

If you wrote all this as fiction — who would believe it?

But it's real, which is why Agenda 2020 — so far — is not.

The Olympic movement, the interviewer in that German-language Q&A piece, said to Bach, “has the impression of the monstrous.”

“Olympic Agenda 2020 will pay for the organization of Games and sustainability,” Bach said. “What we have not foreseen is the change in the process of candidacy — namely, the use of the Games by political anti-establishment movements.”

Such drives “do not work with facts but with slogans — such as ‘gigantism’ or ‘money-laundering.’ We can complain but not change [that]. That is why we have to do something ourselves.”

What the IOC has to do — besides maybe advising Tony Estanguet to play fair — is, again, a no-brainer.

Here’s to the next six months and the notion of the IOC making Agenda 2020 real, and doing just what it did in 1984. Which, not coincidentally, will buy itself time and what it really needs — stability.

Real and significant threats to the IOC

If Frankie Fredericks remains in position as chairperson of the International Olympic Committee’s 2024 evaluation commission past, say, Tuesday, then everybody has a big problem.

At the same time, the real question is whether the IOC itself has big problems.

Very big problems.

Way beyond Frankie Fredericks.

Like whether both the winning Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 bids were fixed.

This represents one of two very real and significant threats not only to the IOC’s traditional way of operation but to the presidency of Thomas Bach, elected in 2013.

The other, little-understood, especially by the IOC itself, is this:

Community organizers, particularly in Europe, have discovered the power of social media to amplify grievance and conflict. Who's to blame? The establishment, not limited to but including the state. In this context, there's a ready target: a government-underwritten and -sponsored Olympic bid.

The IOC is in a jam.

These next few months could be among the most significant in its modern history.

Bach, in a German-language interview last Thursday, appropriately noted that the social media-to-referendum connection is “the target of anti-establishment movements that we have in many European countries,” later identifying, again correctly, that the IOC is “also part of this establishment.” Too, he said, “You can not go through,” meaning make a convincing counter-argument, “with facts.”

A starting place is easy.

At the same time, it’s hard, because it means shaking up that establishment.

The era of Games as government-run infrastructure development model has run its course.

Simply and bluntly put, that needs to change — starting with the 2024 campaign, pitting Paris, more of the same (government-run, history all but guaranteeing gargantuan cost overruns) against the change option, Los Angeles (privately run, just like 1984, which ended with $232.5 million surplus).

From the Paris bid books, and ask this elemental question as you remember that the dorms at UCLA exist right now and are more than suitable while the French authorities propose a 126-acre, 3,500-unit to-be-built athletes' village described, variously, as a "significant catalyst" and an "outstanding urban regeneration project": is this what the Olympics are supposed to be about?

"The construction of private housing for ownership or lease will be funded by private developers and any social housing units will be funded by public entities, under the traditional arrangements of urban development projects in France. Transport and other public infrastructure, such as roads, riverbanks, open areas and public facilities will be funded by the state, the region and local authorities, in accordance with the usual split of responsibilities."

Change is never easy. But it is the IOC’s essential option.

Unless the IOC goes to LA, it can’t make a convincing counter-argument, because it literally cannot come up with the winning facts Bach is seeking.

Example:

Bach, in that very same German Q&A, noted that the IOC gave Rio 2016 organizers $1.5 billion.

Again, absolutely true.

But so what?

For the past 20 years, there have been two separate but intricately related budgets in any Olympics. The first is the organizing committee’s operating budget. That’s where the IOC money goes. For Rio, that made up roughly half the Rio 2016 committee’s revenue.

The second is capital investment. That's why the public authorities are so eager to bring a Games home.

In winning the bid in 2009, the Rio people pegged total costs at $14.4 billion.

So nobody was exactly playing hiding the ball.

The total post-Games Rio 2016 tab is not in but given delays, cost over-runs and the economic crisis that devastated Brazil over the past couple years: probably $20 billion. Maybe more.

Look, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. But everything is context. If the IOC president wants to go through with facts, let's compare apples with apples. To use $1.5 billion when the real discussion is probably $20 billion is disingenuous, at best.

This is the sort of stuff that tends to fuel grievance and conflict with the establishment, you know?

All the while, the newspapers are filled with pictures of decrepit swimming pools and busted-up stadiums in Rio, of horrifying budget woes in Tokyo (bid: $7.8 billion, current estimate $25-30 billion) and stories, like Friday’s in Le Monde, suggesting more to come on a scale perhaps unseen since the scandal in the 1990s over Salt Lake City’s winning bid for the 2002 Winter Games.

Salt Lake City won the Games in 1995 after wooing IOC members and their relatives with more than $1 million in cash, gifts and other inducements.

The Salt Lake crisis led to the expulsion or resignation of 10 members and a 50-point reform plan.

Will more details now under wraps in France become public? When? Unclear all around.

For emphasis, even as his name started popping up Friday around the world in media accounts, Frankie Fredericks is assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Fredericks is arguably the most famous person to hail from the west African nation of Namibia. He has four Olympic silvers in the 100 and 200 meter sprints. He has both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from Brigham Young University.

Now 49, he has always been one of the amiable and approachable guys on the international track and field and Olympic scene. He served as a member of the IOC athletes’ commission from 2004-12 and as that panel’s chair from 2008-12; for those last four years, he was on the IOC’s policy-making executive board, too.

He was made a “regular” IOC member in 2012.

Back to 2009, and the IOC session in Copenhagen. That’s where Rio won the 2016 Games. The others in the race: Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago.

Fredericks served at that IOC assembly as what’s called a “scrutineer.” There typically are three. The scrutineers count the electronic votes before passing the results to the IOC president — then Belgium’s Jacques Rogge.

Friday’s account in Le Monde would seem to establish a timeline for the exchange of money. Connecting the dots: what, if anything, got proven? Not clear.

The newspaper report will now trigger an ethics commission inquiry into what IOC spokesman Mark Adams on Friday called “serious allegations.”

The ethics inquiry is perhaps the least of Frankie Fredericks’ concerns. If he has retained reputable legal counsel, this advice would surely have been forthcoming: don’t set foot in France.

A basic rundown:

Ahead of the Copenhagen vote, a company called Matlock Capital Group paid $1.5 million to Pamodzi Consulting, a company founded by Papa Massata Diack, and transferred another $500,000 to Papa Diack’s Russian bank account.

Papa Diack’s father, Lamine, served from 1999-2015 as president of track’s international governing body, the IAAF. He was IOC member from 1999 to 2013.

The son was a former IAAF marketing consultant.

French prosecutors are investigating Diack, father and son, on corruption charges in a separate scandal — the alleged cover-up of Russian doping cases.

In January 2016, citing the Russian matter, the IAAF banned Papa Diack for life.

Le Monde said Matlock is a holding company linked to a Brazilian businessman, Arthur Cesar de Menezes Soares Filho.

Soares reportedly is close to Sergio Cabral, the former governor of the state of Rio.

Cabral stepped down in 2014. He was arrested last November, after the Rio Games, and is now awaiting charges he diverted millions in bribes for the renovation of Maracanā Stadium before soccer’s 2014 World Cup and two other

The IOC picked Rio on October 2, 2009.

That very same day, Le Monde says, Papa Diack transferred $299,300 to Yemi Limited, an offshore company linked to Fredericks.

In an email exchange with the newspaper, Fredericks said, “The payment has nothing to do with the Olympic games,” explaining he had a marketing contract with Pamodzi from 2007-11.

The IAAF has long had a far-reaching marketing agreement with a Japanese company called Dentsu.

It’s unclear whether or not the Dentsu program is or ought to be at issue.

Also uncertain: if the Dentsu program is relevant or material, why or how Fredericks would undertake independent or even related marketing schemes in Africa, as he suggests in the emails published by Le Monde, much less a program worth $300,000, why such a four-year program would be worth $75,000 per year or, critically, why the payment for such a deal would arrive, perhaps coincidentally, on the very same day the IOC picked Rio.

What is clear:

Chicago got kicked out of the 2016 voting on the first round. The president of the United States had been on scene and he was humiliated.

Fredericks was one of the guys counting votes — in position to know, even before Rogge did, what was what. This is fact, not the suggestion of anything amiss. The scrutineers know before the IOC president does.

The Americans were so stung by Chicago’s exit, which followed New York’s loss for 2012, that they sat out the 2020 election — won by Tokyo.

Now come Los Angeles and Paris for the 2024 Olympics.

Who, at least until Friday’s Le Monde report, is sitting as the chair of the IOC committee evaluating the candidates’ so-called “technical” readiness— that is, inspecting factors as sports facilities, roads, airports, hotels and more?

The guy who at the very least knew before almost anyone else that Chicago was out in the very first round is now due to be passing judgment on Los Angeles?

Even if he spent college and grad school in Utah, and is super-familiar with the way things work over here in these United States, how can the IOC allow that?

Isn’t that just a big-time optics problem?

If Frankie Fredericks doesn’t do the right and honorable thing, let’s say by Tuesday latest, you’d have to think it’s going to be done for him.

Meanwhile, stay tuned.

This is, all things considered, preliminary skirmishing. The IOC may yet be looking at very big problems.

Very big.

Social media and the referendum: made for sharing

Snap Inc., the Venice, California-based parent company of Snapchat, went public Thursday. It’s now worth $34 billion.

As the Washington Post pointed out, that’s more than Macy’s and American Airlines. The New York Times noted that $34 billion is more than “the old-line media company CBS,” and about three times the value of the social-media presence that is Twitter.

What does this have to do with the Olympics?

Everything.

Snapchat, for the unfamiliar, is the mobile app that allows you to send pictures and videos that, after a few seconds, self-destruct. Once you learn the basics, you can add filters, everything from rabbit ears to dog noses to whatever. You can also add tags that show where in the world you are.

Grown-ups go — what’s the big deal? Teens go — awesome, mom and dad can’t figure it out.

Snapchat is actually way more. There’s another part to the app, and its NFL content during the recently concluded season drew 42 million unique viewers. Translation: a lot of people. Snapchat literally has changed the way people shoot pictures — as Ad Age pointed out, brands and publishers wanted to reach that sort of massive audience, which in turn meant shooting vertically instead of horizontally for video on mobile phones.

When it comes to Snapchat and social media, the signals of change are all around us. But most grown-ups within the Olympic scene — the International Olympic Committee in particular — have proven way too slow on the pickup.

The ongoing campaign for the 2024 Summer Games, down now to just two candidates, Paris and Los Angeles (see above, Venice, California), is in every way the very first real social-media bid race.

Snap is now worth crazy money. Twitter is the essential news feed. There are roughly 7 billion people on Planet Earth, and Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2016. Let’s not forget the pretty pictures on Instagram, the recipes on Pinterest and on and on.

What does this mean?

For a global enterprise such as the Olympics, there assuredly are positives to the way social media can crush time and space. But as the 2024 bid campaign has made abundantly plain, there are negatives, too, with which the Olympic movement must reckon.

Instead of doing so, it is instead facing grave risk.

And its most senior officials barely comprehend what is it at issue.

This is not hyperbole.

Paris is very fond of its bid slogan: “Made for Sharing.” It is super-clear that bid and government officials think it’s super-positive. But history shows that construction and infrastructure costs inevitably skyrocket. What happens when concern over such costs reaches a trigger point? Cue — on social media — outrage, grievance, agitation. What if “Made for Sharing” flips into a negative, and quickly?

Never have the Games been awarded in an era when social media has shown how easy it can be to amplify such grievance and conflict.

See two of the other cities that started this 2024 race: Budapest and Hamburg, Germany.

Both are now out because of social media and, in Hamburg’s case, an attendant referendum, in the case of Budapest, the threat of one.

The warning signs are all blinking red for Paris, too.

To be blunt: the IOC does not fully appreciate this.

Nor does it understand the essentials: how itself to use the power and reach of social media and, on the other hand, how to help those within its orbit blunt or confront social media when employed as an attack on the Olympic movement.

You see this in so many ways.

The IOC’s most important communications outreach remains stuck in 1982 if not before: a beautifully designed and elegantly produced quarterly coffee table-style magazine called Olympic Review.

The IOC says it wants to reach the kids. The kids are glued to their phones. And the IOC puts out a magazine that arrives by snail mail every three months, and then only to a selected mailing list.

Wait, counters the IOC: we have 4.9 million Twitter followers.

That’s not anywhere near top 100 in the world.

The Barcelona soccer team has 20 million. Real Madrid, 22.3 million. LeBron James, the basketball star, has 34.3 million. The soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, nearly 50.2 million.

Top 10 starts with Justin Timberlake (58.1 million) and goes up to Justin Bieber (No. 2, 91.9 million) and Katy Perry (No.1, 96 million).

Katy Perry says on her bio, “Artist. Activist. Conscious.”

The Olympic values: “Respect. Excellence. Friendship.”

Why is she so big and the IOC so — not?

The Olympic charter is, essentially, a rough facsimile of one of the American organic documents, the Declaration of Independence.

What makes the Olympic movement different from for-profit sports entities is the values at the core of the charter. Those are democratic values — democratic with a little d.

Right now, again no exaggeration, all this is at risk.

The proof is in the races for the 2022 and 2024 Games.

For 2022, five cities in western Europe dropped out of the running, put off by the costs of an Olympics, in particular the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Games.That left the IOC to choose between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The members chose Beijing, site of the 2008 Summer Games, by four votes. The Chinese figure to keep infrastructure outlay down by not including however many billions it’s going to cost to build a high-speed rail line up to the mountains — where there’s no snow.

If you take away a fair accounting of what's what and the humanistic ideals that underpin this entire Olympic thing, you very quickly have to ask what this is all about— and, of course, if this Olympic thing isn't really dealing from a position of weakness.

It’s entirely reasonable to ask what position the IOC is in now.

Two surviving bids. (2024, 2022)

"Choosing" between a totalitarian or autocratic regime. (2022)

In December 2014, the IOC, urged by president Thomas Bach, passed a 40-point purported reform plan dubbed Agenda 2020. Virtually nobody believes that any of the reforms, particularly as they relate to Olympic bids, are meaningful. Why? Because there’’s no factual evidence any of them are real.

Instead, what we have is blather and puffery.

The Rio 2016 Games were nothing less than an organizational and financial calamity. Yet the IOC, in December, called them the “most perfect imperfect Games.”

This sort of thing is why, even before Rio but amid the 2022 campaign implosions, the locals in Boston said no — social-media agitation playing a key role. The U.S. Olympic Committee made the dumb choice early on to go to Boston before reversing course and heading to LA.

Boston’s no-Games activists took their social-media expertise to Germany. A 2015 referendum there sank the Hamburg bid.

It can hardly be coincidental that over time the results of these referendums are, for the IOC, getting worse. A vote four years ago in St. Moritz — in Switzerland, of all places, the IOC’s longtime base — asked voters if they wanted 2022. No, by 53 percent. They tried again last month, again in St. Moritz, for the 2026 Games. No, by 60 percent.

Rome pulled out last fall for different reasons: the mayor said the city had better things to spend money on than the Olympics.

Who, on January 1 of this year, thought a Budapest referendum might be in the offing?

Now the Budapest bid is dead. Layers of government had spent years putting together investment, strategy and branding. It all blew up that quick.

A campaign stitched together by local organizers, Momentum Mozgalom, in a matter of weeks — weeks! — managed to collect 266,151 signatures in favor of holding a referendum on the bid.

Blather:

“It is disappointing that this [Budapest] decision had to be taken — the candidature committee had presented an excellent project, which was built on the reforms contained in Olympic Agenda 2020,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, and poor Mark Adams, because if the “reforms” were truly meaningful and the bid truly was so “excellent” it’s hard to see how 266,151 people thought maybe they ought to have a vote on that, and nonetheless he has to get up and say this sort of stuff.

So what is the lesson of Boston, Hamburg, Budapest and, perhaps, Paris?

It’s not who is president of the United States or France or wherever. Donald Trump, whatever. Marine le Pen, François Fillon, Emmanuel Macron, Benoit Hamon, whoever.

Presidential politics matters, but not now in the way most in the media are trying to wrap their minds around. That was then, so 2007, and this is now:

The real threat to the Paris bid — and it is potentially lethal — is social media and the possibility if not probability of a follow-on referendum.

That threat is immediate. It is, too, this spring and summer. It is even after September 13, the day the IOC is due to meet in Lima, Peru, to decide the 2024 winner.

To explain:

In 2017, the ability to communicate directly via social media— and, critically, to organize — is more ready than at any time in human history. See Trump’s presidential campaign. See the so-called women’s marches upon the Trump inauguration. See any number of other examples.

Practically, what this means — for the Olympic scene — is this logic tree:

1. Any democratic society that has a 2. government-run Olympic bid and/or organizing committee but at the same time 3. community activists who 4. are fired up over something, whatever that may be 5. with unfettered access to the internet 6. will inevitably, and probably sooner than later, figure out that they can leverage that activism and gain not just political notoriety but power through social media by seeking a referendum on the Olympic project. Consequently, 7. the referendum absolutely, positively will significantly threaten if not sink the project.

This sound overly dramatic?

It’s not.

This is what the IOC needs, and now, to take stock of.

Social media is not just Katy Perry or Justin Bieber’s marketing fun. It is a tool for political activism and organization. If people sniff out a con or a problem — even if it is not true — it can, and will, explode. If there is concern or anxiety, it can — and will — explode.

Hungary, a democratic parliamentary republic since just 1989: 266,151 signatures on a Budapest 2024 referendum in a matter of weeks.

Just imagine what could be done in France, where democracy has been in action for considerably many more years. That is a powder keg waiting for the spark.

Maybe it’s already lit. Activists say they have collected 5,000 signatures toward a referendum.

The Paris 2024 argument can essentially be boiled down to two factors: One, we’re Paris. Two, it’s 100 years since we held the 1924 Games.

To be clear, there has never been a legitimate poll in Paris assessing public support for the 2024 project.

Let’s say a poll comes out and the yes numbers are at 60. A no campaign that starts looking up only at 10 points — that, given social media, would be so easy to wipe out. The bid would essentially be DOA.

Let’s say further that the IOC were to foolishly opt for sentiment instead of common sense. Even so, the risk to the Paris project extends beyond September 13.

By no means would an IOC vote for Paris in any way stop the prospect of a referendum. Has the IOC even paused for a moment to consider this notion?

Over seven years, the time from awarding a Games to opening ceremony, governments change. If a referendum passes, what is the IOC going to do — go where it’s not wanted? Sue? Oh, sure — litigate (in some forum) and then force the French government to pay, because that is just the thing to make other governments want to take on a Games down the line.

By contrast: LA.

The difference between LA and Paris is as obvious as it is critical.

Paris for 2024 is a government-run enterprise. To reiterate the point made in this space over the past several weeks, recent editions of government-run Olympics have been bloated, and that is why taxpayers are mad as hell and that is why in the west they are both turning on the IOC and turning to social media to agitate: Sochi $51 billion, Beijing 2008 ($40 billion), Rio 2016 (projected $20 billion), Tokyo 2020 (now looking at $25-30 billion when the bid promised $7.8 billion). Given this record, there is no reason to expect anything but the same from Paris.

Los Angeles, the bid and, if it wins, the organizing committee, is privately funded. (Just as in 1984, which produced a $232.5 million surplus.)

What that means: a privately run LA 2024 project is, for the most part, out of the reach of government.

This is why surveys consistently have shown incredible taxpayer support for LA 2024 — 80 percent and higher.

In any democracy, there are always some people who don’t like something. That’s just life.

But if you wanted to start a referendum against LA 2024, it wouldn’t make any sense.

That would be like voting on whether you want the neighborhood grocery store run by Cousin Marvin to be open or closed. What? He’s a private business, just like Mrs. Anderson's bakery down the street. Leave him alone. And her, too.

Beyond which, mindful both of 1984 and of the Boston experience, the LA 2024 people at the outset went around town to hold 30 community meetings — not only to gauge but to build community support.

Did Paris have community meetings in every arrondissement? Hmm. Here is Danielle Simonnet, a Paris councillor for the city’s 20th arrondissement, telling Le Monde in its February 23 editions, “Of course we need a referendum,” later in the story calling Games costs “enormous,” adding, “The bill is going to be salty.”

Also, and this is just common sense talking along with some 30 years of journalism experience, if the LA plan was dicey or not well-cooked, and there needed to be a journalist to expose it, you can believe that journalist would already have found someone in that LA 2024 bid team. Or some soul within the bid team would have reached out to the journalist.

That has not happened, is very unlikely to happen, in Los Angeles.

Because, one, of that neighborhood reach-out in LA and, two, the LA plan is solid and privately funded. Example: the original thinking was, let’s build an expensive athletes’ village downtown. The bid team thought it through and shifted course, to the already-existing dorms at UCLA.

The Paris plan, again to contrast, calls for building a hugely expensive village in what is now a violence-marked banlieue called Seine-Saint Denis.

Wait until someone on the ground in Paris or elsewhere in France, angry about something, figures that out.

That’s what referendums are for: made for sharing, indeed.

A theater-of-the-absurd hearing in Congress

You know what was missing from Tuesday’s theater-of-the-absurd hearing in Congress on what was billed as “ways to improve and strengthen the international anti-doping system?”

Besides, you know, a big check or a ready-to-implement action plan aimed at improving and strengthening the international anti-doping system?

This hearing had nothing to do with either of those things, really. Nothing at all.

It was an excuse for the fine ladies and gentlemen representing various districts of Congress to take pictures with the likes of Michael Phelps and Adam Nelson — gee, who could have predicted that? — and, more to the point, play to the C-SPAN cameras while bashing Russia and touting truth, justice and the American way.

All the while coming off like the camera-seeking hypocrites that skeptics might suggest they are.

Representative Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon: “Now you’re going to give us confidence that … U.S. athletes, who play by the rules, can compete against other athletes who play by the rules?”

“Thank you,” a smiling Representative Kathy Castor of Florida, a Democrat, told Travis Tygart, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief executive, “for having the intestinal fortitude to stand up for our athletes and clean competition around the world.”

Oh! So that’s what this was about!

“Our” athletes, not “ways to improve and strengthen the international anti-doping system”?

Who woulda thunk?

There were so many choice moments during this nearly 150-minute paean to America the beautiful before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee (whew).

It was so stirring you might well have expected all in attendance to brandish special cereal-box Captain America power shields if, say, Ivan Drago had bolted into Room 2123 of the Rayburn Building to announce that, of course, he was there to break each and every one of them.

Maybe the best moment, however, was when Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat from New Jersey, clearly reading from notes prepared for him, misspoke and referred to the “bobsled and skeletal federation.”

It’s “skeleton.”

There’s so much wrong with Congress having hearings on an issue the elected ladies and gentlemen know virtually nothing about and, more to the point, can’t and aren’t going to do anything about.

But Mr. Pallone’s glitch is altogether so revealing.

So, too, the rhetoric, which in an effort to make one point simply proved the other.

“It starts with the athletes. They own the culture of sport,” Tygart asserted.

“And it’s wonderful — it’s sad it took this scandal to mobilize them in the way that it has but it’s wonderful that they’re now mobilizing and realizing how important this right is to them. They also have to have confidence in the system.”

You'd think it was 1984 all over again, and Marty McFly had just parked his DeLorean on Capitol Hill with the cassette tape blasting Bruce Springsteeen's "No Surrender," or something.

Soviets? Russians? Which? Whatever.

Oh. Still us and them. Got it.

But wait, just to put what Tygart said in some context:

Phelps said he didn’t believe he had ever competed internationally in a totally clean event. Nelson, too.

So what is the only reasonable, logical deduction about the so-called “culture of sport”? The brutal truth?

Athletes all over the world cheat, and if they can get away with it, they damn sure will.

Why?

Because, again, logic:

Illicit performance-enhancing drugs work.

Following that to the stark conclusion:

For many athletes in whatever country — and don’t be fooled, the United States has produced some whopping world-class cheaters — the risk-reward ratio makes for an easy tilt.

Indeed, if you were in the Russian Duma, following Tuesday’s spectacle in Congress, why wouldn’t you hold a hearing in which you splashed pictures on a really big screen and howled in laughter at Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Marion Jones and scads of baseball stars?

In the background, you could work up a digital sampling loop of Mr. Walden from Oregon saying, “U.S. athletes, who play by the rules …”

Oh, again — in Russia the defining difference is, according to the second of the 2016 reports produced by the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, “institutional control”?

All that does is point up what happens when you have a federal sport ministry, like they do virtually everywhere else, and when you don’t, as is the case in the United States.

Here, we do our cheating red, white and blue capitalist-style:

To quote Ivan Drago's movie wife, the equally awesome Ludmilla, dismissing allegations that her husband could have used steroids: "He is like your Popeye. He eats his spinach every day!"

Just to underscore the raging hypocrisy of Tuesday’s hearing:

Dial the history books back to 2012, a couple of months before USADA tagged Mr. Armstrong.

That summer, a longtime Wisconsin Republican congressman, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, sent a letter to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the funnel for significant USADA funding, declaring, “USADA’s authority over Armstrong is strained at best.”

Also included were even more laff-out-loud party lines:

“Armstrong, however, has never failed a drug test despite having been tested over 500 times.”

“As attorneys for Armstrong asserted, ‘USADA has created a kangaroo court … ‘ “

“The actions against Armstrong come in the midst of inconsistent treatment against athletes.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner, still a member of Congress, was at the time the chair — he still sits on — the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security. That panel held jurisdiction over ONDCP. Moreover, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s district is home to the then-longtime Armstrong sponsor, Trek Bicycles.

Big picture take-away from Tuesday’s event:

The anti-doping campaign is not easily reduced to sound bites and headlines.

It’s complicated.

Making any sort of real progress is going to take way less rhetoric, far more cooperation and considerably more cash.

This field is simply not susceptible to Tuesday's display of red, white and blue.

Or, more to the point, black and white. It’s a lot of grey.

— Russia bad, Russia bad, Russia bad. Got it, Congress.

Over the weekend, the International Olympic Committee, citing a Feb. 21 WADA meeting, sent out a letter referring to the pair of McLaren’s 2016 reports, from December and July, acknowledging that “in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases.”

So even if Russia bad — it is at the core of the notions of truth, justice and the American way that each and every person is afforded the chance to test any and all evidence the authorities say they hold.

If it’s “not sufficient,” you’re free to go. In this context, to compete.

Same deal for Russians, for Americans, for whoever.

As Dr. Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical director, put it in the statement he submitted Tuesday to Congress, “In accordance with the principles of individual justice, clean athletes should not be sanctioned or punished for the failures of others.”

— Tygart: “If you continue to have sport overseeing investigations, determining compliance, acting as a global regulator of itself, it’s no different than the current status quo, which is the fox guarding the henhouse.”

Tygart’s argument holds intuitive appeal. Moreover, he knows full well that a good many people don’t understand the anti-doping landscape, laced with science, law, politics and diplomacy, so they rely on him — indisputably an expert — to lay out for them in easy-to-follow terms (fox, henhouse) what might seem most constructive.

Fair enough.

At the same time, it’s far from crystal clear that “sport” ought to go anywhere.

Governance is rooted not just in structure but in culture. Eight years ago, the USOC tried to separate the two, when Stephanie Streeter, who had no significant “sport” experience, was named chief executive. She lasted all of a year, resigning amid a 40-0 no confidence vote from the American national governing bodies — that is, from sport.

Culture matters, a lot, and it’s also a fair argument that the anti-doping machinery ought not take significant dollars from sport while churlishly then banishing any and all goodwill, good faith and experience that comes with those dollars to the penalty box.

That’s called rude and ungrateful, and no system can sustain itself like that for long.

— WADA’s 2017 annual budget is $29.7 million. The U.S. government is due this year to put up $2.155 million, or 7.3 percent.

That’s way more than any other country puts up.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another view:

There are 206 national Olympic committees. The U.S. Congress thinks it’s entitled to hold hearings when the American government is putting up 7 percent toward an entity because — why?

Is any other parliamentary or legislative body in the world holding such hearings? No. Obvious question: why not?

Ethiopia recently criminalized sports doping. The new head of the country's track and field federation is Haile Gebrselassie, the distance running great. A 22-year-old marathon runner, Girmay Birahun, is now facing at least three years in Ethiopian prison after testing positive for the controversial Latvian heart medication meldonium; Maria Sharapova is due to return to the tennis tour in April after her sport ban for the same substance was cut from 24 months to 15. Ethiopia, where there's a lot to discuss in the anti-doping scene, is due to contribute a grand total of $3,239 to WADA in 2017. Not a typo — $3,239, and already has paid $3,085.

Should Ethiopia hold a hearing? If it did, should WADA and the IOC send representatives, like they did Tuesday to Washington?

Does Mr. Birahun own the "culture of sport"? Or do only western athletes, and in particular Americans?

Yet another view:

The 2016 U.S. federal budget was, ballpark, $4 trillion. Yes, $2 million is real money. But, context: $2 million over $4 trillion equals pretty close to nothing. And Congress is yapping for more than two hours?

“We can have all the governance review in the world. Which we welcome and we want. I have been in this business for 20 years. And it’s time for change. It’s time to put investment into this business,”  Rob Koehler, the WADA deputy director general, said in response to a question from Representative Chris Collins, a Republican from New York.

“If I look globally at the amount of money being put into national anti-doping organizations,” Koehler said, “it’s simply insufficient. There’s the crux of the issue.”

He added a moment later, “Until that happens, we’ll never see change.”

— The U.S. Olympic Committee is giving USADA $4.6 million this year, up 24 percent from $3.7 million the year before.

That’s real investment, and the USOC should be applauded for seeking to effect real change.

— Much was made Tuesday of a WADA-commissioned report from a team of so-called “independent observers” who reported after the Rio Games that 4,125 of the 11,470 athletes on hand may have shown up in Brazil without being tested even once in 2016, 1,913 in the 10 sports deemed most at risk for cheating, among them track and field, swimming and cycling.

The problem with these numbers is that they are both entirely accurate and thoroughly misleading.

Would more testing be helpful? Probably.

But as the Armstrong case proves, being tested — or passing a test — proves absolutely nothing.

As Sensenbrenner, and even Armstrong himself, noted:

https://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/71358750434402306

Passing a test does not prove an athlete is clean.

This is a core misconception.

Testing is not, repeat not, a failsafe. To believe otherwise is naive in the extreme.

— In a similar spirit, it’s not unreasonable if Phelps — who has never given any indication that he is anything but an honest champion — might have had to get up at 6:05 in the morning for drug testing.

You say otherwise?

Here is the way the “whereabouts” system, as it is called, works.

It would defeat the entire purpose of out-of-competition testing for an athlete to know exactly when drug testers are coming. At the same time, it would be entirely unreasonable for Athlete X to be on call 24/7. So the system strikes a balance.

Via the sort of paperwork that Phelps noted Tuesday he repeatedly had to fill out, Athlete X makes himself or herself available to drug testers one hour a day.

Whatever 60 minutes that is — it’s his or her choice.

So, for instance, if the tester shows up at 6:05, it’s because on that form Phelps, or whoever, put, say, 6 to 7 a.m.

Phelps, referring to his baby son Boomer in responding Tuesday to Collins, the New York Republican, said, “I don’t know what I would — how I would even talk to my son about doping in sports.

“Like, I would hope to never have that conversation. I hope we can get it cleared, cleaned up by then. For me, going through everything I’ve done, that’s probably a question I could get asked. I don’t know how I would answer.”

Easy:

Just because you’re American doesn’t mean you’re good, just because you’re Russian doesn’t make you bad.

Everybody has temptations. Do the right thing, son, the way mom and I raised you.

In the meantime, it’s up to the grown-ups to make sure the people running, say, the swim meet have enough money to do every part of what they do the right way.

Also, next time mom and dad will tell those people in Washington to find someone else to take pictures with, OK? Like Ashton Kutcher. When he was doing the same sort of thing daddy did on Tuesday, Ashton blew a kiss to John McCain.

When the presumption of innocence meets la-la land

It’s Oscar Sunday here in Los Angeles. “La La Land” is expected to clean up.

Ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls, let’s turn the lights down low, settle back into our comfy seats with a big tub of popcorn and, what with the weekend's super-interesting script ripped from the Sunday Times over in London tied to a Fancy Bears hack all about Alberto Salazar and Sir Mo Farah and others, let’s revisit some showstoppers from years gone by.

What an interesting idea, just generally speaking: when the presumption of innocence meets la-la land.

But first:

Just like at the movie theater, when they tell you to turn off your cellphone, this disclaimer, brought to you Saturday from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency:

“Importantly, all athletes, coaches and others under the jurisdiction of the World Anti-Doping Code are innocent and presumed to have complied with the rules unless and until the established anti-doping process declares otherwise. It is grossly unfair and reckless to state, infer or imply differently.”

https://twitter.com/Ry_Madden/status/835659821059735553

Oh, wait.

For clarity: do these rules apply with the same import to Russian athletes?

Because this would be the same U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that over the past 18 months has helped promote the charge to ban each and every Russian athlete because of allegations involving what an independent World Anti-Doping Agency-commissioned report alleged was “institutional control” of the Russian anti-doping control system.

Just to reiterate from the USADA press aide's tweet, italics and underline mine: "all athletes, coaches and others … are innocent and presumed to have complied with the rules unless and until the established anti-doping process declares otherwise.”

For emphasis:

“It is grossly unfair and reckless to state, infer or imply differently.”

A U.S. Congressional subcommittee meets Tuesday to consider “ways to improve and strengthen the anti-doping system.” Perhaps this can be on the agenda.

La, la, la, la, la.

Returning, as we were, to a story seemingly crying out for a Hollywood-style treatment:

The Sunday Times, citing a Fancy Bears hack of a March 2016 USADA report, says Farah and others were given infusions of a research supplement based on the amino acid L-carnitine.

The newspaper says Salazar boasted about the “incredible performance boosting effects” of the stuff and emailed Lance Armstrong before Armstrong was outed for doping: “Lance call me asap! We have tested it and it’s amazing.”

Farah, in a Sunday post to his Facebook feed, said it was “deeply frustrating” to have to respond to such allegations and asserted he was a “clean athlete.”

To reiterate, Farah is, and the others in the Salazar camp are, assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Scriptwriters out there: do you know what might, just might, make for a really interesting take on the Farah saga? In retrospect, if you will, maybe the turning point in the whole thing?

In 2011, at the IAAF world championships in Daegu, South Korea, Farah lost the 10,000 meters by just this much, to a guy perhaps only true track geeks have ever heard of, Ibrahim Jeilan of Ethiopia.

After some 26 minutes of racing, Farah ran the last lap in 53.36 seconds, which is crazy fast.

It wasn't enough.

Jeilan won, in 27:13.81.

Farah got the silver, in 27.14.07.

Since, Farah has pretty much won everything of import, including both the 5 and 10k races at London 2012 and Rio 2016.

Jeilan isn't exactly a total chump. He was the 2006 world junior 10k champion. He is the 2013 10k world silver medalist.

But since that fateful evening in Daegu, Aug. 28, 2011, their career paths have — diverged.

One might ask: how come?

Moving along, as we were.

In 1978, when I was a second-year student at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, the best-picture winner was “Annie Hall.” Talk about neurotic. You want neurotic? Here was neurotic: a second-year news writing class, taught by a crusty curmudgeon straight from central casting, Dick Hainey, in which we were taught that one mistake, even one, would get you an automatic failing grade and, son, you deserved to fail and, better yet, start learning to suck it up, because anything less than perfect obviously equals abject failure.

Here is another decree from the oracle atop the mountain that was Professor Hainey, and while anything less than perfect turns out maybe to be not such great advice for life, this next nugget is a worthwhile journalism lesson that has stuck for more than 40 years:

If your mother tells you she loves you — check it out.

In that spirit— and, once more for emphasis, Sir Mo and the others in the Salazar pack are assuredly entitled to the presumption of innocence — let us visit some hits from the wayback machine even as we note that Julia Roberts is, according to Variety, set to produce the film adaptation of the New York Times best-seller “Fool Me Once”:

Armstrong, 1999: “I have been on my deathbed, and I’m not stupid. I can emphatically say I’m not on drugs.”

Armstrong, 2005: “I have never doped. I can say it again but I’ve said it for seven years.”

Armstrong, 2005: “How many times do I have to say it? … Well, it can’t be any clearer than, ‘I’ve never taken drugs.’ “

Armstrong, 2010: “As long as I live, I will deny it. There was absolutely no way I forced people, encouraged people, told people, helped people, facilitated. Absolutely not. 100 percent.”

Armstrong on Twitter, May 2011, as his former teammate Tyler Hamilton was about to go on “60 Minutes”:

https://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/71358750434402306

Armstrong, 2013, after USADA got him: “All the fault and all the blame here falls on me. I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. I made my decisions. They are my mistakes, and I am sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I’m sorry for that.”

Hamilton, interview in his Boulder, Colorado, living room, 2005: “I didn’t blood dope, that’s for sure.”

Hamilton, May, 19, 2011, confession letter to family and friends: “During my cycling career, I knowingly broke the rules. I used performance-enhancing drugs. I lied about it, over and over. Worst of all, I hurt people I care about. And while there are reasons for what I did — reasons I hope you’ll understand better after watching — it doesn’t excuse the fact that I did it all, and there’s no way on earth to undo it.”

Hamilton, describing a July 2000 blood transfusion during that year’s Tour de France, as relayed as part of the USADA case against Armstrong:

“The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Kevin Livingston and I received our transfusions in one room and Lance got his in an adjacent room with an adjoining door. During the transfusion Lance was visible from our room, Johan, Pepe and Dr. del Moral were all present and Dr. del Moral went back and forth between the rooms checking on the progress of the re-infusions. Each blood bag was placed on a hook for a picture frame or taped to the wall and we lay on the bed and shivered while the chilly blood re-entered our bodies.”

Floyd Landis, his very own 2007 autobiography, the ironically titled Positively False, chapter 11:

“I did not use performance enhancing drugs in the 2006 Tour de France or any other time in my career. All I ever did was train. I put training first, even before my family. When you want to win, you eat, drink, sleep and breathe cycling. Knowing it’s not forever is what makes it doable. So I made the sacrifices I had to make, and I did so honestly.”

From page 278-79 in the book, Landis describing a post-2006 Tour de France trip back to where he was from, Farmersville, Pennsylvania, amid the largely Mennonite area of Lancaster County:

"One by one, hundreds of people walked across the yard to my parents to congratulate them. One woman went to mother with tears in her eyes. 'She said that she and her husband had lost their son in Iraq seven months before,' Mom said. 'She told me, 'My husband has never gotten over it, but he rides a bicycle and he watched every single stage. He's a different person since your son won. It was like healing to him.' I just felt so blessed that you were able to inspire someone while doing something that you love,' Mom told me. I never rode my bike in order to have an effect on anyone else, but I understand that people are influenced by what they see. When my mom told me this story, I was really touched that I had helped someone."

USADA Reasoned Decision, just one of many harrowing passages describing Landis' doping: “They shared doping advice from Michele Ferrari," the Italian doctor identified by USADA as a key player in the Armstrong scheme, "and when Floyd needed EPO Lance shared that, too.”

Marion Jones, her very own 2004 autobiography, and in big red capital letters about 175 pages in:

“I have always been unequivocal in my opinion. I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them and I will never take them.”

Government sentencing memorandum, 2007, United States v. Marion Jones:

“The defendant’s use of performance-enhancing drugs encompassed numerous drugs (THG, EPO, human growth hormone) and delivery systems (sublingual drops, subcutaneous injections) over a substantial course of time. Her use of these substances was goal-oriented, that is, it was designed to further her athletic accomplishments and financial career. Her false statements to the [investigating] agent were focused, hoping not only to deflect the attention of the investigation away from herself, but also to secure the gains achieved by her use of the performance-enhancing substances in the first place. The false statements to the [investigating] agent were the culmination of a long series of public denials by the defendant, often accompanied by baseless attacks on those accusing her regarding her use of these substances."

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas, 2007, in sentencing Jones to six months in custody, emphasizing that what she did was not a “momentary lapse in judgment or a one-time mistake but instead a repetition of an attempt to break the law.”

Who knows what will happen at the Oscars?

What the next few weeks or months will bring with Sir Mo, Salazar and others?

Surprises and plot twists galore, perhaps.

La, la, la, la, la, everyone. Keep a watchful eye on your sweet mother and the popcorn.

Less rhetoric, more constructive problem solving

Last December, in the second of his two World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned (but, to be clear, independent) reports into allegations of doping in Russia, the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren wrote:

“It is time for everyone to step down from their positions and end the accusations against each other. I would urge international sport leadership to take account of what is known and contained in the [two] reports, use the information constructively to work together and correct what is wrong.”

It is through that prism that one ought to view, one, the love note the International Olympic Committee dropped in classic late Friday afternoon PR-style on what it called “the reform of the anti-doping system” and, two, the sanctimonious political grandstanding sure to be coming at next Tuesday’s U.S. House of Representative subcommittee hearing on “ways to improve and strengthen the anti-doping system.”

The U.S. Congress and the IOC would do well to listen to Mr. McLaren’s wise counsel.

But no.

Turning to Congress first:

One, you might think the U.S. House of Representatives might have better things to do than hold hearings about Russian doping.

Because, like, that is the House of Representatives for the United States and the allegations about doping involve another country. That country is called Russia. Russia is not the United States.

Maybe the ladies and gentlemen of the 115th Congress might have more pressing priorities in regard to American life. Maybe, you know, jobs. Then again, it’s February. This is why Sports Illustrated features swimsuit models this time of year. It’s silly season.

Two, everything you need to know about how dumb, what an absolute waste of time and resource this hearing is going to be, can be explained in the headline to the committee news release: “Gold medal lineup: Tuesday hearing on anti-doping brings together all-star panel.” For emphasis, “gold medal lineup” is in capital letters.

Wow! Sports stars come to Washington! Congresspeople! Staffers! Get out your cellphones so you can get your selfies with witness No. 4 on the testimony list — “Mr. Michael Phelps, American swimmer and Olympic gold medalist”! Let's count! 28 Olympic medals in all! 23 gold!

Get back to me, anyone, when you tell me how many of those 28 medals Phelps — and I have been there for every single one of his Olympic races, maybe even written a best-selling book with him — has lost to a Russian swimmer.

Hint: zero.

If Congress wants to investigate some current issues involving doping in American sports, since it can turn to subpoena power and everything, here are some suggestions:

— Lance Armstrong is facing the prospect of civil trial. In February 2012, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, headed by Andre Birotte Jr., abruptly dropped, without explanation, a two-year criminal investigation into Armstrong’s activities. That October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency made its case against Armstrong, revealing that he had, in fact, been doping for years. In April 2014, Birotte was nominated to become a federal judge in LA, where he now sits. How does that happen?

— What’s really on that Tom Brady cellphone? Even a sitting U.S. judge on a circuit court of appeals in New York, in oral argument nearly a year ago, said it made no sense whatsoever for Brady to have destroyed the phone. And is there any connection to that phone’s destruction and these kinds of stories?

— What about the extent and scope of the use of illicit performance-enhancing substances in the NBA and NFL, among other U.S. major pro leagues? Or do you, congresspeople, really think, oh, linebackers are built and run like that naturally?

Moving along:

Three: it is the height of hypocrisy for the legislative arm of the United States government to be holding a hearing into ways to “improve and strengthen the anti-doping system” when, as this space pointed out recently, the American government contributed not one penny to either of the two Pound or two McLaren reports, which together cost $3.7 million.

Suggestion: you want to improve the anti-doping system?

Easy. Like most problems, it can be made way better by throwing money at it.

WADA’s 2017 budget is $29.7 million. The U.S. government’s dues are expected to total $2.155 million. That’s by far the most of any country anywhere. Britain, Russia, Germany: $815,630 apiece.

The U.S. money has for the past several years been funneled through a White House agency called the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

But lookee here, according to a Feb. 17 New York Times account: the Trump Administration may be poised to move ahead with elimination of nine programs, most “perennial targets for conservatives.” One of the nine: ONDCP.

Now that would be something to investigate.

Particularly since — lookee over here, too — the very same Republican chair of this very same subcommittee, Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, according to the Wall Street Journal, co-signed a letter sent Thursday to, whaddya know, ONDCP that said:

“On top of opioid overprescribing and heroin overdoses, we believe the United States is now facing another deadly wave: fentanyl.”

The way these sorts of Capitol Hearings hearings typically work is that the members and staffers stroll in, now with cellphones in hand, with a briefing memorandum.

That’s the background they get.

Meaning that’s usually pretty much the sum and substance of what they know about the topic at hand.

These sorts of memos tend to be a matter of public record. This particular memo runs to eight pages and 47 footnotes.

Of those 47, 33 are news stories, press releases, op-eds, TV shows or the Pound or McLaren reports themselves.

A good chunk of most of the others, including a bunch of the first dozen, are who-we-are and what-we-do-documents (No. 2, WADA mission statement, etc.)

So, again, what is this hearing about?

News stories, press releases, op-eds and TV shows.

Not actual reform.

That, to reiterate, would take the one thing the United States government has only marginally been, and may not now at all be, willing to shell out:

Hard cash.

Which brings us to the IOC.

Same issue.

The IOC took in $5.6 billion over the 2013-16 cycle.

In his letter, circulated widely within Olympic circles but not formally addressed to WADA itself, the IOC director general Christophe de Kepper notes that in the first WADA-commissioned independent report, made public last July, Mr. McLaren “describes a ‘state-sponsored system’ whilst in the final full report in December he described an ‘institutional conspiracy.’ "

The IOC panels now studying what’s what, de Kepper said, “will now have to consider what this change means and which individuals, organizations or government authorities may have been involved.”

Oh, please.

If anyone thinks this trail is going to lead to the cellphone of the Russian president, think again. It’s not going to be found, anyway.

Hmm. Weird coincidences, sometimes. Or not. Whatever.

Mr. de Kepper further notes that "it was admitted" by WADA that "in many cases the evidence provided may not be sufficient to bring successful cases." This is a pointed note aimed at the WADA position of an all-out Russian ban and the IOC stance in favor of individual justice. This space, almost alone in the western press, has argued that of course every single person in the world deserves to have his or her case heard on the basis of the evidence against him or her -- not a group grope.

At any rate, along with the possibility if even probability of soaring legal principle and individual justice, at issue with Mr. de Kepper's position, without doubt, is the IOC seeking advantage in a push-and-pull with WADA over who is going to control what over what comes next.

Mr. McLaren made clear what “this change means." See the second paragraph of this column: all involved should be invoking less rhetoric and seeking more cooperation.

In that spirit, here are some words of wisdom that won’t be in any of those footnotes and that won’t be referenced in that IOC letter.

They were spoken at a WADA executive meeting in September by the WADA director general, Olivier Niggli, and for sure the IOC is aware of them, or ought to be on what lawyers would call the theory of constructive notice, because an IOC vice president, Turkey’s Ugur Erdener, was in the room listening.

This sort of thing isn’t ripped from the headlines. No cellphones. No news releases touting gold-medal lineups or all-star panels.

This is the nitty-gritty of the anti-doping scene.

To make an anti-doping system work takes tons of hard grinding, along with patience, science, leadership and collaboration from sports officials and earnest government officials, and it takes a lot more money than is right now at anyone's disposal, especially WADA. The inescapable fact is the IOC has to put up that coin. Governments come and go; congresspeople pose and prance and dither; the IOC is the only big-picture revenue source with an ongoing interest in making sure international sport is as clean as can be.

That’s going to take checks and balances along with trust, will and faith.

As Mr. McLaren said, that means constructive problem-solving.

“The report,” Niggli said in September, referring to Mr. McLaren’s July document, “had generated a lot of comments and discussions over the past few months.

“WADA should not lose the focus, which was that it was an issue with Russia, and WADA still had to deal with that issue.

“It was a very important issue, and the fact that Russia had been cheating everybody for a number of years needed to be addressed. That was the key focus, and it probably should have been the focus of the discussion over the past months, too.

“Unfortunately, the discussion had been on trying to attack WADA and blame the anti-doping system, and that had not been helpful. The members should bear in mind that WADA did not operate in a vacuum.

“WADA was made up of governments and the Olympic movement, and the Olympic movement had been around the table from Day One,” in the late 1990s, “and had supported the work of WADA and the revised World Anti-Doping Code, and it had been paradoxical to see how the entire anti-doping system had been questioned after the McLaren report.

“…  The system was [not] the issue; the issue was how the system was being practiced by some, and the members should not forget the fact that the system had been cheated.

“One could design a great system but if those applying it were cheating, it was difficult to achieve success.”

Exactly.

'The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change'

Every now and then the Olympic movement produces one of the really good guys. (And women, too. Stand down, politically correct police.) The Budapest 2024 bid came Wednesday to a crashing end. It became the latest, if predictable, victim of a taxpayer revolt in Europe tied to obscenely bloated and, no coincidence, government-funded Olympic-related infrastructure costs.

Balázs Fürjes led the Budapest 2024 effort. He is one of the world’s really good people. Smart, clever, imaginative, dedicated, devoted, resourceful, patriotic, the vision thing.

It may seem perhaps a small note amid a very big problem confronting the International Olympic Committee that Balázs Fürjes will likely be sidelined, at least for a while, from the Olympic scene.

But it is altogether exceptionally telling.

Ladies and gentlemen, this column marks another in a recent series dedicated to developments in the campaign for the 2024 Games. It is straight talk; there is zero point in anything else at such a critical juncture. Apologies in advance for the length.

It’s not just that the Olympic movement is reeling from the fallout of yet another city from its last two bid races, for the 2022 Winter Games and 2024 Summer Games.

Voters in Europe are, in a phrase, pissed off, and the IOC is at an inflection point, the question being whether the members will do the only sensible thing at their assembly this September — that is, pick a privately funded entity, Los Angeles, for the 2024 Summer Games. The only other candidate left is Paris, another government-funded outfit.

Along with the assembly-line disappearance of so many cities goes a corollary, if little noticed, piece: the human capital that animates the bids, the campaigns, the would-be organizing committees.

This is, in a word, a disaster.

The Olympic movement depends on a lot of things.

It needs money, of course. A significant chunk of which, it should be noted, is American.

It needs technology and other resource.

Mostly, though, it needs people, and what people of goodwill from all corners of our imperfect world can bring to the table: creativity, innovation and inspiration.

That is why the IOC needs LA for 2024.

Yet again, here goes the disclaimer:

Yes, I live in Los Angeles, and have since the end of 1992. I married an LA girl. Our kids were born and grew up in Southern California.

For all that:

I am not an agent for the Los Angeles bid.  I am not a consultant for the Los Angeles bid. I am not being paid by them. I am not, in any way, working for or on behalf of the bid.

If you know anything about the politics and geography of Los Angeles, this would be manifestly plain.

The LA 2024 people are, generally speaking, UCLA people. I teach at the USC journalism school. I live in Palos Verdes, about a half-hour south of USC on the 110 Harbor Freeway. Palos Verdes is USC country. Very close family friends are such USC freaks that they get up every USC football Saturday to claim a Coliseum tailgate space at 3 in the morning. Wednesday is trash day in our neighborhood; when I went out at 6:55 this morning to take our trash cans to the street, I said hi to my neighbor, Richard, who as ever was walking his two dogs; Richard was wearing his cardinal-and-gold USC sweatshirt.

The LA24 bid has been up and going for roughly 18 months. In that time, I have not had one coffee, one lunch, one dinner with the bid team. We have kept a respectful professional distance.

Ed Hula of Around the Rings and I are perhaps the only American reporters to have covered in depth every single IOC bid contest since 1999. I am highly confident I know what I’m talking about when it comes to these campaigns.

This is why — and even if you are a critic of my work, totally fine, you nonetheless ought to acknowledge I have at the least been thoroughly consistent — I was the first journalist anywhere to say that Boston was doomed, that the U.S. Olympic Committee had made a huge mistake and that the USOC needed to re-group and come to LA. That was way back in March 2015.

My French friends in particular may not like how explicitly straightforward this column has been in expressing why, for two years now, LA was the plain answer to the Olympic movement's obvious problem.

C’est la vie. Reminder to all: this is not personal. This is journalism.

The IOC has got itself — and this is its own damn fault — in a crack.

For roughly the past 20 years, the IOC has turned to government-underwritten Games that, time and again, have proven hugely, inappropriately expensive.

This model can be traced to Barcelona in 1992. Those Games jolted mayors, governors, prime ministers and presidents into this realization: the Olympics could serve as a seven-year public policy (that is, public works) catalyst to get built what would otherwise take 20, 30, 40 or more years to get done, if ever.

Short list from many examples: Athens (2004) metro and airport, Beijing (2008) building spree, Sochi (2014) literally two new cities (Adler, Krasnaya Polyana) from scratch.

The problem with government-funded Games is easy to explain. It's a three-step follow:

One, over the seven-year stretch from when the IOC awards a Games to the moment the cauldron is lit at an opening ceremony, governments typically can — and do — change. (See South Korea political turmoil, Winter Games 2018. Same, Rio 2016.)

Two, over those seven years, economic conditions can — and do — change. (See Rio, 2009-16).

Three, as a consequence, government commitments can — and do — change.

What this means, again in easy-to-explain language:

The bill for all those infrastructure projects, which were the in-fact underpinning of everything that led to that cauldron lighting, inevitably become grotesquely fat like yo mama.

Numbers:

$12-15 billion Athens 2004, $40 billion Beijing 2008, $15 billion-ish London 2012, presumed $20-billion Rio 2016, worries over $25-30 billion for Tokyo 2020 when the bid said it would be done for $7.8 billion, and the No. 1 monster, $51 billion, Sochi 2014.

When a bid and follow-on organizing committee are government-financed, who gets stuck with these bills?

This is elemental: taxpayers.

Now, taxpayers in western democracies are saying, no more.

Layered on to the cost concerns:

As events keep proving, taxpayers are fed up to here with the establishment and the “elite.”

The IOC — right or wrong — is the very definition of that.

In a move that underscores the IOC’s ongoing disconnect, president Thomas Bach announced a huge sponsor deal with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Of all places. Davos, symbol of the global elite.

This is why taxpayers, particularly in Europe, are telling the IOC to go, you know, itself.

This past Sunday, voters in Davos/St. Moritz, in a referendum, said no to the notion of a 2026 Winter Games. Four years before, they had said no to the idea of a 2022 Winter Games.

Indeed, for 2022, six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion 2014 figure: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

Five cities started for 2024 in September 2015: LA, Paris, Budapest, Rome and Hamburg, Germany.

Hamburg went out in a referendum. With it went the likes of the bid's creative chief executive, Nikolas Hill, and a hugely talented spokeswoman, Susanne Jahrreiss.

Rome pulled out because the mayor said the city had other priorities. Just like, four years beforehand, the prime minister had said the country had better things to spend money on.

Now Budapest is out.

“Many of us are already thinking of when next and how next,” Fürjes said in a late Wednesday night telephone interview from Hungary, adding, “The perception and the reality of the Olympic Games must change.”

This makes for the natural bridge to why LA for 2024.

There is now considerable worldwide talk — look it up, last September I was the first in the press to write at length about this notion — of awarding two Games at one time.

My point was LA 24 and Paris 28, not the other way around.

If there is to be a two-fer, it has to be that way: LA 24, Paris 28.

This space has made this point before so here it is again: the IOC formally accepts bids via national Olympic committees, and 2024 is the end-game for the USOC.

The IOC can not ding the United States of America’s Olympic committee three times — New York for 2012, Chicago for 2016, LA for 2024 — and expect the Americans to keep coming back. That story will be done. Finished. Over. For a long time.

If you want to believe otherwise, fine, maybe you want to believe in unicorns or fairies, too. Line up here: I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

Everybody needs to wrap their heads around what is, truly, reality, and the sooner the better, because in the United States it takes private money to run bids and private money to run Games and after $240 million in private money over three bids and some 14 years devoted to the three largest cities in this country, the USOC and all those generous donors would be spent, financially and, probably more important, emotionally. Done. Finished. Over.

That said:

It seems increasingly unlikely there would be a 2024-2028 two-fer. Why? There’s all kinds of resistance.

• From other would-be bidders in Europe: if the French go down for 2024, a bunch of cities would love to bid for 2028. These would likely include Madrid, Budapest, Milan, even St. Petersburg (laugh if you wish but Mr. Putin, still, tends to have significant influence in the Olympic orbit) and, let’s face it, Paris. You can throw all the Brisbane talk you want onto the barbie but no way the IOC is going to Australia in October — not with the way television ratings tanked in September in Sydney in 2000.

• From the IOC members: there was no two-fer in the 2022 Winter Games race, when the race got down to two, just Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, so why a Summer 2024 two-fer? Many of the IOC members already complain they do less than Tarzan’s tailor. Voting on the site of the Games is their one big responsibility. Taking that away would be yanking away the essential perk of membership.

• From LA24: if you are the LA people, why hedge? In a two-dog race, if you are LA, you would have to quietly and humbly like (to take) your chances against Paris.

Why?

What is the IOC’s No. 1 problem?

Again, keeping it simple: as this taxpayer revolt has proven, the IOC has a massive credibility problem.

At the core of that credibility problem is a branding problem.

Let’s put sentimentality away. You like French wine? Awesome. There’s great wine in California, too.

At issue is what is best for the Olympic movement, not just for 2024 but for years into the future.

Paris is talking only 2024. LA is talking 2024 and — beyond, well beyond. That is what is at stake.

Let’s frame what’s what this way:

• Does the IOC want a 2024 Old World Games … in an older city … that will be paid for by government … a government almost surely subject to change/s over seven years … when Frexit is suddenly a major issue … when the government will have to build an athletes’ village … that if history is a reliable guide will cost way more than budgeted … in a precinct that is currently being rocked by violence … not far from where the central stadium was hit by a terror attack … in a city where over seven years the city will no doubt endure public strikes … and the weather every summer, which is why the locals flee, is hot and muggy?

Or:

• Does the IOC want a privately run Games that, because it’s privately run, has no margin for error and has to come in at or under budget, just like 1984 … with an already-built village at UCLA where thousands of college kids happily come and go every day … in perfect California summer sunshine …  in a city where the Olympics have an approval rating nearing 90 percent … in a region and state that’s full of youth, tech and social media and that will, like 1984, kickstart it all over again for the movement for an entire generation?

To reiterate: in Europe, the IOC is getting thrashed but in LA, based on sunny memories from 1984 and 1932, the locals when most recently polled said yes to the Olympic Games to the tune of 88 percent.

When logic is applied, what about this is even remotely a remotely difficult choice?

Earlier this month, the Paris bid unveiled its slogan on the Eiffel Tower to what officials thought was great fanfare: “Made for Sharing.” In English. With great respect to the French academy, because its job is to protect the French language, next came the howls of protest. The next thing you knew, the slogan was suddenly “Venez Partager” along with the English version.

What 16-year-old skateboarder or surfer would possibly care?

https://twitter.com/TonyESTANGUET/status/834374881919762432

In announcing that "sharing" slogan in English, our Paris friends had a good laugh at American expense, they thought, because it was a not-so-subtle play on bridges and walls and the American president. Then it turns out the French authorities are, for security purposes, going to build a wall around the Eiffel Tower.

Karma, people.

Back to Rio, and the government chaos that bedeviled nearly everything there. Whether Marine le Pen wins the French elections this spring or not, who wants to believe that for the next seven years the French government is going to rest in a state of calm serenity?

Rail on Donald Trump, or whatever. A privately funded Los Angeles enterprise means that whatever is going on in Washington is, for the most part, going in Washington. LA is LA is LA. This is the key distinction that underpins a privately organized American bid, and right now this is the secret to what the IOC needs — it needs time, it needs stability and it needs all the other stuff LA and California can bring to the table, in particular creative energy.

The world’s leading brands are based in California. More logic and rational thinking — ask whether this isn’t precisely what the IOC needs a little or maybe a lot of for 2024 and beyond:

The range of Hollywood studios. Disney. Snapchat. Facebook. Apple. Twitter. Netflix. Electronic Arts. Oracle.

Feeling a little more creative? Annex Oregon and Washington just up the Pacific coast: Nike and Microsoft, for starters. Throw in Starbucks. Or, back to LA, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (big in Asia, too).

Seriously, why the Olympic movement doesn’t have an association with Starbucks or Coffee Bean — where do young people hang out and soak up the free WiFi, for god’s sake — is beyond common sense.

Balázs Fürjes was careful on the telephone not to endorse either of the remaining two bids. Even so, the IOC president, executive board and members — for that matter, anyone with an interest in the Olympic movement’s future — ought to pay careful attention to his words.

“Something,” he said, “is going in the wrong direction.”