Track geeks: you can't rewrite history

To consider the absurdity of what track and field is considering with regard to its records, let’s turn to baseball. The comparison is apt. Both sports are heaven for stats-freak geeks.

Who holds the Major League Baseball record for most home runs in a career and, as well, most home runs in a season?

Hey, in both categories it’s that guy Barry Bonds. He hit 762 over his career. In the 2001 season, he slammed 73.

Now, does baseball say that Bonds leads the charts for guys whose hat size mysteriously, peculiarly got way, way, way bigger when he played for San Francisco as compared to the years he played in Pittsburgh? Not a chance. Bonds sits there, at No. 1.

Look at No. 4 on the all-time homer list: Alex Rodriguez, with 696. Rodriguez is an admitted user of performance-enhancing drugs. Who’s No. 4? Rodriguez.

People: what happened, happened.

This is the thing about history. It happened. You can’t say in 2017 — whether it’s baseball, track and field, tiddlywinks, whatever — that something didn’t, or arbitrarily propose new rules, like the European Athletics Records Credibility Project Team did on Sunday (the report was made public Monday) in proposing reforms that would wipe out more than half of Olympic-discipline world records from the books.

The European report is being forwarded to track and field's international governing body, the IAAF, which is said to be giving it serious consideration.

To be clear: the contributors to the European committee deserve considered respect for effort. They are good people and they mean well. Officials deserve extra marks for including Gianni Merlo, the longtime Italian sports writer and current president of the International Sports Press Association, in their deliberations. Awesome -- we’re not just running dogs!

As was articulated in the charge to the committee, track and field is purportedly beset by doping issues.

OK.

But that is not track and field’s central problem.

Baseball has had huge doping problems, too, and baseball is thriving. Track and field is wallowing. So that makes for a pretty easy conclusion: doping is not track and field’s central problem

Instead, track and field suffers from a multitude of other issues. This is what the very bright minds on that committee, and others around the world who care about track and field, should be focusing on.

For starters:

— Track and field is a professional sport. But the way it presents itself, by almost every metric, is sorely inconsistent, especially when compared against a wide range of other professional products. It is competing against those other entities for sponsor and audience attention and dollars. Pick it: European soccer, American basketball or football. Whatever. Now, how does track and field stack up?

— The best athletes don’t race against each other enough. Justin Gatlin and Usain Bolt maybe race each other at perhaps one, maybe two, meets each year. Compare: the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees play each other 19 times each season. Why are the NBA playoffs must-see TV? Because the teams play each other every other day for two solid months, April to June. Real Madrid and Barcelona play each other all the time. In NFL football, Dallas and Washington play at least twice each season. This is a no-brainer, people!

— Track and field is sport at its essence: run, jump, throw. Yet for the average spectator, a track meet is bewildering. It’s confusing. There’s too much going on, often at the same time. And this is an awful secret: a lot of very serious track fans make like super-snobs, which is a complete turn-off to the would-be newbie fan, who just wants to know what’s going on, not get lectured about “negative splits” as if it’s Fermi and Einstein and physics at Princeton. Ugh.

— Meet presentation has barely evolved since the 1970s. There are some genuinely good track announcers out there but the PA systems at many fields are high-school quality, if that.

— Music? Lights? Fan-friendly experience? What?

— The world championships, which this year will be held in London, run from August 4-13. This is awesome for the niche of super-committed track fans, and organizers will justly point out that — just like the 2012 Olympics — the event will be sold out. But a 10-day run is a l-o-n-g deal. The U.S. track nationals are only four days. Why do the worlds run to 10?

Why, with all of that, is track and field obsessed with its records?

From the European committee report:

“… The power of any record depends on its credibility.

“If there is suspicion that a record was not achieved fairly or the conditions were somehow not correct, people become skeptical or worse they ignore it.”

Look again at baseball.

Here, for easy reference, are baseball’s top 10 single-season home run leaders. For fun, identify how many may have, you know, taken something stronger than an aspirin and those you absolutely, positively, indisputably, unequivocally know with 110 percent certainty are cleaner than Mr. Clean:

1. Bonds, 73, 2001

2. Mark McGwire, 70, 1998

3. Sammy Sosa, 66, 1998

4. McGwire, 65, 1999

5. Sosa, 64, 2001

6. Sosa, 63, 1999

7. Roger Maris, 61, 1961

8. Babe Ruth, 60, 1927

9. Ruth, 59, 1921

10. Jimmie Foxx, 58, 1932

      Hank Greenberg, 58, 1938

      Ryan Howard, 58, 2006

      McGwire, 58, 1997

Also for fun: name the year Bonds gets elected to the Hall of Fame. Bonds landed on 53.8 percent of ballots this year; that’s up from 44.3 percent in 2016; he has five years of balloting left; historical trends suggest that players who get at least 50 percent almost always end up in the Hall by the end of their eligibility.

Reality suggests that whatever you believe about Bonds’ hat size, 73 and 762 are the numbers and he’s headed for the Hall of Fame. The relevant audience: for those who are not aware, voters for the Hall are from the baseball writers association, meaning the most skeptical running dogs themselves.

If more than half of the skeptics think those numbers are credible, and those cranky skeptics increasingly are proving willing to vote for the guy’s Hall of Fame enshrinement, he is — and the records themselves are — hardly being ignored, right?

Which holds considerable parallels for track and field, and the errant proposal to get rid of half of track and field’s records.

For one, the committee didn’t do the appropriate due diligence.

They did not, before announcing it to the world, secure the buy-in of athletes. Predictably, some of the world’s biggest stars from prior generations — the long jumper Mike Powell, the marathoner Paula Radcliffe, the middle-distance star Wilson Kipketer — were justifiably outraged. So, too, the families of former stars, including Al Joyner, the husband of U.S. sprint star Florence Griffith-Joyner.

“That’s dishonoring my family,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I will fight tooth and nail. I will find every legal opportunity that I can find. I will fight it like I am training for an Olympic gold medal.”

Asked after a seminar Wednesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles if she supported the European proposal, Allyson Felix, the nine-time Olympic medalist, said, "I guess I'm not."

She had said a moment earlier, "You don't want to take away a clean record from a clean athlete. I don't know how you solve that issue."

Further, the basis for the recommendation of this would-be policy rests on a fallacy — that “new” records can be deemed reliable because athletes who set them will be “clean” because they will have passed a certain number of doping tests.

A little background:

Samples are now kept for up to 10 years. The IAAF began storing samples in 2005. Current world records that don’t meet the new guidelines would no longer be called a “world record” but would remain on an “all time” list, according to the European proposal now off to the IAAF.

“Do we really believe,” Radcliffe wrote in a lengthy Twitter post, “a record set in 2015 is totally clean and one in 1995 not?”

Radcliffe’s opposition is particularly notable. She is close to IAAF president Seb Coe.

Indisputably, technology has advanced since October 6, 1985, when East Germany’s Marita Koch set the women’s 400-meter world record, 47.6, running in Lane One in Canberra, Australia.

But this is ever a cat-and-mouse game, and to build on Radcliffe’s notion, who is to say that someone somewhere is not using some 2017 variant of THG — the designer steroid at the core of the BALCO scandal 15 years ago. You can’t test for something if you don’t know it exists. Again, logic.

This is the flaw with reliance on any system that turns to testing. It creates in the public mind the illusion of confidence in that system. But, and this is critical, that confidence is only an illusion. That confidence is wholly false.

Look at Lance Armstrong. Consider Marion Jones. Each passed hundreds of tests.

Tests maybe can deter. But they do not prove with 100 percent certainty that an athlete is innocent of anything.

One final point.

Let’s say that track officials disregard the world’s best athletes and common sense and make this proposal the rule in track and field.

It’s not going to do what officials want. Indeed, it would do exactly the opposite. All it would do is sow confusion, which — right now, when track and field needs to simplify things and find ways to market itself to a new generation of fans — ought to be the very last item on its agenda.

Example:

For reference, Powell’s long-jump world record, set in 1991, is 8.95 meters. That’s 29 feet, 4 1/2 inches.

Let’s say, under this would-be policy, that at some meet somewhere someone jumps 8.90, 29-2 1/2. Let’s also say that’s deemed the new “world record.”

Any report from that meet — indeed, any report going forward about that 8.9 jump — would inevitably include a reference to Powell’s 8.95.

One would thus be called a “world record” when it really isn’t and one would be called a mark from the “all time” list when, in fact, it is the “world record.”

This is what happens when you try to re-write history. It can’t be done.

Track and field, you know, needs smarter thinking under that hat size, whatever it might be.

Not fake news: is IOC looking at real crisis?

The Paris 2024 media team, in anticipation in the coming days of both the French presidential election and the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation visit, undertook a media blitz of sorts, with bid leader Tony Estanguet quoted Monday in leading U.S. newspapers.

Talk about fake news.

There’s a (huge, and perhaps two-pronged) scandal perhaps waiting to erupt in the Olympic world, the latest twist possibly involving one of its most influential power brokers.

Olympic stories hardly take up newsprint in off years. Yet this is what’s being fed to readers as what matters?

Estanguet, to the LA Times:

“ … We want to reduce the involvement of the political world. They are there to support. But we decide where to put the Olympic village. We decide the global concept that has been there since the beginning.”

Estanguet, to USA Today, even bolder:

“We want to reduce the involvement of the political world. They are there to support. They are there to be tough. But we decide where to put the Olympic village. The sport movement will be responsible for delivering the Games.”

It’s easy enough here to knock the newspapers. Due diligence, please.

Beyond which, it’s the job of journalists to hold people in positions of authority accountable.

In that spirit, Mr. Estanguet’s remarks are good for a laugh.

It’s all well and good to say the “sport movement will be responsible for delivering the Games.”

Except for the basic fact that in France the sport movement is the government.

Even the bid itself is, you know, a government project.

If Mr. Estanguet is trying to draw a distinction — oh, look, the badminton team and his beloved canoers will be responsible for delivering the Olympic village — that would just be silly.

Indeed, as even the bid book points out, if Paris were to prevail there would be a delivery authority. It would be called SOLIDEO.

From the second of three books in the Paris 2024 candidature file:

“The delivery of the venues and other infrastructure projects needed to stage the Games will be the responsibility of an Olympic and Paralympic Delivery Authority (SOLIDEO). The SOLIDEO will also plan for the legacy of infrastructure investments. It will take the form of a public entity, reflecting the role of public authorities in funding and underwriting Games capital investments.”

Wow — a public entity. Not “the sport movement.”

All these things, and what’s really amiss in these stories is that while they may scratch a seeming mainstream media itch — oh, look, LA and Paris are involved in a bid race, and there’s that news hook in the May 7 French presidential race and the IOC visit in mid-May to both cities — these stories do little to no journalistic service whatsoever.

Because the news that matters in Olympic bidding circles is not whether Marine le Pen wins in France. The days of the head of state carrying an International Olympic Committee election — Putin in Guatemala in 2007, Tony Blair in Singapore in 2005 — are seemingly long gone.

The issue on the table now is not who is head of state of country X or Y. Instead:

It’s whether the IOC wants to keep going back to government-run bids that inevitably 1) produce cost overruns and 2) bad press for seven years, which then 3) further erodes taxpayer and official trust in the IOC and the broader movement, 4) which leads to the spectacle of cities dropping out repeatedly, 5) just like they have done over the past few years for the 2022 and 2024 bid cycles, 6) just like Stockholm did last week for 2026.

But, again, even that’s not the most pressing news.

For sure the bid process is broken and needs to be fixed. At issue is whether the IOC is going to do it — indeed, address all its business — in a calm fashion or amid crisis.

The signs increasingly point to crisis.

Over the weekend, stories flashed around the world suggesting that the influential IOC member Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait is co-conspirator No. 2 in the criminal case of United States v. Richard Lai. The matter is in the Brooklyn federal courts.

The sheikh says he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

The Lai case directly relates to FIFA. Co-conspirator No. 1, as described in the court document, would appear to be Mohammed Bin Hammam, a Qatari billionaire who ran for the FIFA presidency in 2011.

The document describes co-conspirator No. 2 as a “high-ranking official of FIFA.” Since the document has become public, Sheikh Ahmad has resigned his FIFA posts.

According to the court document, co-conspirator No. 2 was also a high-ranking official of the Olympic Council of Asia. The sheikh heads OCA.

The sheikh is also president of the Assn. of the National Olympic Committees. Through that role, he oversees the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in what are called Olympic Solidarity funds — that is, monies that go from IOC headquarters to developing nations.

The sheikh travels within a closely held circle of trust. The court document describes co-conspirator No. 3 as a “high-ranking official of the OCA” as well as an official of the Kuwaiti soccer association.

Co-conspirator No. 4 was an OCA employee and No. 3’s assistant, the court document says.

The court document describes the transfers of a lot of money. Intriguingly, paragraph 31 describes wire transfers from accounts in Kuwait controlled by co-conspirator No. 3 or his assistants at the OCA.

A few things are clear:

— Prosecutors now hold the cards in dealing with Mr. Lai.

— The court file is mysteriously thin for a case that has come to resolution with a guilty plea. Mr. Lai has yet to be sentenced. He clearly has a significant incentive to tell what he knows.

— The obvious question: what does he know, and in particular about co-conspirators No. 2 and 3?

In Olympic circles, the sheikh is believed to have played a key role in helping to orchestrate the triple play that marked the 2013 IOC assembly in Buenos Aires — the elections of Thomas Bach as president and Tokyo as 2020 site plus the return of wrestling to the Olympic program.

In the American courts, the FIFA matter has for months now been that — a FIFA matter. Now it threatens to slide into the Olympic space, and in a powerful way.

The FIFA inquiries, it is important to note, were launched during the Obama years. The Brooklyn office used to be headed by Loretta Lynch. Ms. Lynch went on to be the attorney general. It’s fascinating that this matter has not drawn the significant attention of the Trump people in their first 100 days, and worth asking if it will now — or anytime soon, because if it the status remains quo prosecutors in Brooklyn will likely just keep keeping on.

At any rate:

Already in recent weeks, the IOC member Frankie Fredericks has been connected to the inquiry being led by the authorities in France tied to Lamine Diack, the former head of the international head of the international track and field federation.

Diack and Bach were also allies of longstanding.

Diack was known to have remarked before the assembly in Buenos Aires that the triple play was going to happen just as it did — Bach, Tokyo, wrestling.

It is believed in Olympic circles that the French authorities know more, and about more IOC members. Unclear is whether whatever they know will become public in the weeks ahead.

Uncertain, too, is what is known at the Chateau de Vidy, the IOC’s lakeside headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, about the scope and nature of the inquiries in France and Brooklyn and how, if at all, the two mesh. The Fredericks matter suggests that the Americans and French are sharing, at the least, wire transfer records.

To be obvious:

The Salt Lake City scandal of the late 1990s came about because IOC members could literally get their hands on what we in the journalism business called “inducements” — that is, anything and everything from college scholarships for their kids to parts for cars to cash and much, much more.

The investigations in France and Brooklyn threaten the IOC, and far more insidiously. As the Lai case underscores, a forensic accountant and a wire transfer record make for black-and-white reading.

In this context, yet again, it is worth recalling what the then-president of the organization, Marius Vizer, said at the 2015 SportAccord conference in Sochi:

"History demonstrated that all the empires who reached the highest peaks of development never reformed on time and they are all headed for destruction. The IOC system today is expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent."

The first person to lead the charge against Vizer then was — Diack.

It is worth emphasizing that co-conspirators No. 2, 3 and 4 in the Lai matter have not been charged with anything, and that in the American system the vigorous presumption of innocence prevails.

It is also worth emphasizing that optics matter, particularly in the Olympic space, which is why the likes of Stockholm are out for 2026, because the IOC has over the past several years considerably forfeited the trust of taxpayers and officials.

Here is where the reasonable person asks the reasonable question:

Why would that be?

An idea not completely baked: medals for coaches

This summer’s world track and field championships in London is due to see coaches get medals along with athletes.

The intention here — it comes from the local organizers — is to do right by those doing well.

But this idea is going to come back, and sooner than later, to bite even well-meaning people in the backside.

Unfortunately, the world of sports is awash in stories of doping as well as improper sexual or other abusive relationships. All it’s going to take is one such story — or more, and there are inevitably going to be such stories — and this well-intentioned idea is going to explode.

It’s just not clear that all the angles have been thought out.

Or, for that matter, the wide array of cultural differences explored.

Starting place: what we seemingly have here is a cultural dissonance, a British sensibility of how things are and maybe even ought to be.

Reality: that’s not the way they are everywhere in our big world.

Here is a sample paragraph from a USA Track & Field news release from last weekend’s IAAF World Relays in the Bahamas:

“In a race of attrition, the United States emerged as the fastest and most successful of a harrowing men’s 4x100. In the final race of the night, Leshon Collins (Houston, Texas) got out well in lane 5 and Mike Rodgers (Round Rock, Texas) opened a bit of a lead. Ronnie Baker (Ft. Worth, Texas) cruised around the curve and gave Justin Gatlin (Clermont, Florida) the baton in the lead.”

Here is the way UK Athletics did it — same meet, different race:

“The women’s 4x400m selections continued with the team wide philosophy of trying out new combinations ahead of the London 2017 World Championships, with Emily Diamond (Jared Deacon) moving from third leg in the heats to starter in the final and Laviai Nielsen (Frank Adams) making her senior relay team debut on leg two.  Eilidh Doyle (Malcolm Arnold) moved from leg one to leg three and Olympic gold medallist Christine Ohuruogu came in to anchor the team home.”

In the American explication, the parentheses get the athlete's hometowns. The British style tells you who the athlete’s coach is. The big-picture point: the British tend to think of athletic success as a group project. UK Athletics makes up the local organizing committee for the 2017 worlds in London. There's the logic circle, such as it is.

Mr. Arnold, for those who don’t follow track and field religiously, is -- among other things -- widely regarded as one of the finest hurdles coaches, ever. He has been in the game for so many years that he coached Uganda's John Akii-Bua to gold in the 400-meter hurdles in 1972 in the Munich Olympics.  

This underscores the kind of thing the London 2017 organizers are trying to do.

The problem is this: not everyone is perhaps as highly regarded as Mr. Arnold. And not everything is so sunny as gold medals.

When you're in the event business and you're thinking gestures, it's common-sense obvious that you have to ask, just like you have to in almost every walk of life -- what could go wrong?

This is where the entourage problem comes in. Coaches are often if not typically at the heart of the entourage. Even the International Olympic Committee recognizes there’s an entourage problem. The IOC athletes’ entourage commission is headed by none other than Sergey Bubka, who is also a vice president of track’s international governing body, the IAAF.

The Olympic world is awash, nearly daily, with stories of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs.

Where do you think those athletes learn about, or even get, or get directed to particular substances? Friends? Teammates? The internet? Doctors? Coaches?

Just to grab from the headlines: why do you think the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency or other interested authorities are perhaps so intrigued?

Beyond drugs, there is the issue of abuse.

Physical, mental, emotional and sexual.

When it works, the coach-athlete relationship can be extraordinary. When the relationship is sour or toxic, and let’s not pretend or be naive, venerating coaches would be the last thing a reasonable person would want to do.

To be clear, this is a London 2017 organizing committee initiative.

But if — when — things went bad, fingers would be pointed at the IAAF as well. Because that’s the way things inevitably go.

To its credit, it is encouraging that officials at the IAAF would not themselves introduce such a proposal without far-reaching debate and discussion. There, such a notion would go, for instance, to its coaches commission — and the prediction here is that those coaches would hate this proposal. What if, for instance, an athlete gets tagged for doping and a coach genuinely knew nothing about it?

The IAAF has already had a rough couple years grappling with allegations of corruption tied to its former president, Lamine Diack, connected to accusations of widespread doping in Russia.

Further to its credit, the IAAF has taken significant reform steps.

The IAAF is to be praised for launching a portal — six languages — for the reporting of doping.

It is to be praised for launching an integrity unit. That unit is charged with dealing with, among other issues, anti-doping, bribery and corruption, age manipulation, betting, competition results and transfers of allegiance.

It is to be praised for a newly launched “integrity code of conduct.” That code directs that “applicable persons” …  “safeguard the dignity of individuals” and not “engage” in “any form of harassment, whether physical, verbal, mental, sexual or otherwise.”

It is otherwise silent on matters of safe sport, which have been a considerable focus in recent years in the United States. The IAAF, like a great many international federations, has been slow to recognize the many issues around safe sport, much less take action. Perhaps this world championships medals proposal can help serve as a jump-start to proactive consideration before a crisis dumps the IAAF into reactive mode.

In the meantime, and to reiterate: the owners of the idea to recognize coaches at the London 2017 world championships are London 2017 organizers.

Maybe before it sees the light of day this August those London 2017 organizers ought to do just a little bit more background work. There’s a big world out there beyond London, and a lot of issues to consider.

Stockholm for 2026: IOC, go freeze yourself

If you are hung up on figure skating, OK, but maybe get with the program: the Olympic Winter Games has indisputably become a ski and snowboard festival.

Next February in South Korea, there will be 102 medal events. If you don’t count biathlon, 50 will be on skis or snowboards. Add in the biathlon ski-and-shooting combo, and you’re up to 61.

All of this is hugely interesting when considering Stockholm’s announcement Wednesday that, in considering the 2026 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee can go freeze itself. Stockholm is out before it ever got in. Just like 2022. It’s out.

Our European friends keep telling the IOC versions of this. They’re out.

"Why,” the IOC vice president Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. was quoted as saying about a month ago by the Spanish news agency EFE, “is it so difficult for us to get the message out that the Games are something positive?”

The answer is simple: taxpayers don’t believe it.

More to the point: they don’t believe the IOC.

Even more bluntly: to a great extent, they just don’t trust the IOC.

If they did, cities and nations would be lining up for the chance to stage the Games. Instead, they’re dropping like flies — dropping out midway through the campaigns, like candidates have done through the 2024 Summer and 2022 Winter Games derbies, or bowing out now, as Stockholm did Wednesday for 2026.

It’s ugly and painful and awful for the IOC.

It’a also reality, and the sooner the IOC admits this reality, acknowledges beyond just words that it has a problem, the sooner it can confront it and take up the change that, whether it likes it or not, must be implemented.

Stockholm’s decision came just a day after IOC president Thomas Bach, speaking at a meeting in Uruguay of the Pan American Sports Organization, pointedly noted that the IOC has fat sponsor deals that run into the 2020s and 2030s even as he said the IOC “cannot ignore that we have an issue with the candidature process.”

He added a moment later:

“… The good old times are over with regard to [the] candidature procedure.

"Today hardly any mayor or political authority can go to their population and say, 'Let's try again, and maybe we will win,’ after spending millions on an unsuccessful bid.

"Maybe it will change back in five or 10 years. But it is not possible today."

There is a remedy, which involves coming to the United States, and Los Angeles, for 2024. If only the IOC will listen.

It’s not clear that it will, LA and Paris the only two cities in the 2024 race, purportedly to be decided later this summer.

This is a logic problem, and it is easy to solve, because the IOC — more than anything right now — needs seven years of peace amid every red warning sign taxpayers in western democracies, particularly in Europe, the IOC’s traditional base, keep handing up.

Like the one Wednesday in Sweden.

From several insider accounts, though, the IOC is apparently having a very difficult time grasping the logic of the logic.

Why?

Because IOC leadership, members and staff tend far too often to live in a bubble in which the change they need to effect — and that change manifestly is unequivocally necessary — gets wrought amid crisis instead of the way it should come about, through best practice while its key franchise, the Summer Games, sits in calm, solid hands.

As it would be in a privately run LA 24 — away from the government-financed, cost overrun-plagued editions in recent years that have gotten the IOC in the existential moment it faces now (Sochi 2014 at a purported $51 billion the loss leader).

Speaking of crisis:

Now that the first round of the French presidential elections is over, would the authorities there  investigating the former president of the international track and field federation, Lamine Diack, have renewed interest — or not — in making public what they have learned over these past several months?

If gossip is to be believed and the names of this important IOC member from country x or that influential one from country y are ever leaked to the French press, what then?

What if the French authorities, knowing what is believed they know, sit on that information until after the September 13 vote for 2024? What then?

You want more credibility problems? You want yet more crisis?

To be clear:

The Olympic movement inevitably carries with it any number of problems. Any enterprise its scale and scope does. But right now, it is confronting a grave threat to its credibility if not its very existence.

In general, this space is not — repeat, not — anti-France or anti-Paris. Just the opposite. I lived in Paris in 1984; I was not even in Los Angeles during those Summer Games but, yes, in Paris. Above my desk in suburban Los Angeles is a picture of Mont Blanc, commemorating the IOC evaluation visit there in February 2011 for the 2018 Winter Games; I look at it each and every day.

Again, I love Paris and I love France. But 2024 is not the time for the IOC to go there. And as our friends in Sweden made plain, 2026 is not the time for them, either.

At issue is the ongoing relevance and vitality of the Olympic enterprise. Our broken world is so much better with the Olympics in it, even if the Games and the movement are — of course they are — flawed.

All of that has its roots in the bid system. Because it produces the cities, and the cities are the stage upon which the athletes star. Those athletes inspire kids all over our world to dream big dreams.

To that end, the IOC has got to fix — that is, scrap and start all over with — its bid process. That process used to work. It does not now.

And the signals have been there for years.

For 2024, Budapest, Rome and Hamburg have all dropped out.

In the 2015 race for the 2022 Games, five European cities pulled out along the way: Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz, Oslo, Munich and Krakow. Taxpayers or officials would have nothing to do with it.

For 2022, voters in Davos/St. Moritz said no via referendum by 53 percent.

This winter, asked about 2026, voters in Davos/St. Moritz said no via referendum by 60 percent.

That’s a bad trend line.

If you are the IOC, here is the really discouraging part: that 2026 vote in Davos/St. Moritz came as the 2017 world championships in alpine skiing were going on there.

So everything was set up for success: the ski world championships — again, the sport that is now the core of the Winter Games — were a party, the après-ski was all the more so and … voters said no, in a blowout.

Stockholm? Same kinda deal. Except for maybe the après-ski.

Are, Sweden, is the site of the 2019 alpine world championships. In any Stockholm Winter Games bid, Are would figure to play a major role.

Here’s the thing that underscores in no uncertain terms the IOC’s credibility challenge:

For Sochi, the IOC announced, and many times, it would give local organizers $800 million. In fact, it ended up giving the organizing committee $883 million. The Sochi operating budget, to be clear, is a fraction of the $51 billion commonly associated with the Games.

The IOC has failed miserably at communicating that basic fact.

It also has failed abjectly at communicating the fact that it currently gives organizers of a Winter Games somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 to $900 million — once more, for clarity, toward operating budgets typically in the $2 to $4 billion range.

Indeed, for the PyeongChang 2018 Games, though the exact number will remain uncertain, the working figure is $850 million.

For the 2022 Beijing Games, the IOC’s announced figure is $880 million.

For all that, the mayor of Stockholm, Karin Wänngard, who also oversees municipal finances, said Wednesday the city had no choice but to back out of 2026 because the IOC is not able to immediately say how big the financial contribution to the host city will be, according to an Associated Press report.

She said the figures “will arrive at the earliest in November,” adding, “This means that time will be too short to get enough analysis for the issues raised by several actors.”

One, if Stockholm wanted to get in, it surely could, because November 2017 is a long way from 2026.

Two, even a sports writer can figure this out. If it was $800 million in 2014, $850 million in 2018 and $880 million in 2022, odds are pretty good you’re looking at, hmm, $900 or maybe $920 million for 2026.

What, you need it down to the penny? Ballpark me for now — let’s say $900 million, cool — and get back to me by November.

But no. Freeze off, IOC.

Why?

In Europe, the evidence is clear: the IOC has significantly forfeited that level of trust with officials and the taxpayers those officials represent.

So the mayor of Stockholm used the “we don’t know how much money we might get” dodge to tell the IOC that in Sweden there isn’t enough interest or political capital to risk Olympic business.

Don’t kid yourself and think that the situation is, would be, will be or ought to be different in France. The Budapest situation — killed in just weeks by a referendum driven by social media, even though every level of government backed the bid — ought to serve as a major warning to the IOC.

In that same speech Wednesday in Uruguay, Bach also said:

“What we have seen is a change in the decision-making procedures in different countries, particularly in Europe but also elsewhere.

“I do not need to go into detail about how the Olympic Games is used for political purposes by groups in some countries.

“We have to understand that our candidature procedure is giving arguments for this, as it is too expensive and too complicated …”

This, then, is the hole the IOC has dug itself.

To reiterate: LA24 is different. It is privately funded. There’s no agitation to get agitated about when it comes to government funding.

That’s why LA offers the IOC, right now, the one calm, rational pathway: peace for seven years — stability and time to bring in the world’s best minds to think about how to fix a broken bid process.

Alternatively, there’s the other path for the IOC.

It’s called crisis.

Who should light an LA 2024 cauldron? Serena? Venus? Both?

There can be little doubt that Serena Williams is the best women’s tennis player of this and maybe any era.  

There could be no finer choice than Serena Williams to light the cauldron at the opening ceremony if Los Angeles wins the 2024 Summer Games. Now the dilemma. By herself? Because maybe there could be an even better choice: with sister Venus, too?

Both are Olympic champions. More, both have shown not just great but unwavering commitment to the Olympic movement and, indeed, the Olympic spirit. Most important: the Williams sisters are proof positive that you can dream and big dreams can take you anywhere and everywhere. Isn't that what the Olympics are about?

Serena Williams confirmed Wednesday she is 20 weeks pregnant. That means she was already close to two months pregnant when she won her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, the Australian Open on January 28.

Understandably, the cauldron suggestion is maybe getting just a little ahead of things, because the International Olympic Committee won’t select the site of the 2024 Summer Games until September 13, Los Angeles and Paris the two contestants, and it’s hardly an overhead slam that LA will prevail.

But if LA wins:

The opening ceremony would be July 19, 2024. That's a Friday if you're, you know, a planner.

It would begin with a torch relay down the row of columns of the LA Memorial Coliseum, which played host to the 1932 and 1984 Games. About 70,000 people would likely be in the Coliseum for a Hollywood-style spectacle and virtual reality experience of what’s to come next.

Which is:

The relay would pass landmarks on the streets of LA until it reaches the new NFL stadium, which would hold 100,000 people.

Who, at the end, would light the cauldron?

Surely there are many — for emphasis, many — luminaries deserving of consideration.

Just for starters: Magic Johnson. Allyson Felix. Kerri Walsh. Michael Phelps. Ashton Eaton. Katie Ledecky. Mia Hamm. Abby Wambach. Apolo Ohno.

Serena and Venus Williams grew up Compton, California. The LA84 Foundation — the legacy initiative from the 1984 Games, which funds youth sports in Southern California — has underwritten the exact kinds of programs that helped give the Williams sisters their start.

Playing doubles together, Venus and Serena Williams won gold at the 2000, 2008 and 2012 Games.

Anyone who saw Serena Williams power to gold in the Olympic women’s singles tournament at Wimbledon in 2012 will tell you: it was a virtuoso performance.

In the final, Serena Williams thrashed — just crushed — Maria Sharapova, 6-0, 6-1.

The London 2012 victory made Serena Williams only the second woman to achieve a Golden Slam. Steffi Graf won at the Olympics in 1988 after sweeping all four major titles.

Remember the dance Serena Williams danced at that medal ceremony after she put on her Team USA jacket?

"I don't think I've ever danced like that," she said then. "I don't even know where the dance came from."

Remember last year in Rio? When a number of the world’s top golfers were, like, nah, don’t want to go? Serena Williams battled injuries throughout 2016. Where were the Williams sisters during the Rio Games? In red, white and blue, in Brazil, representing the United States. Where, it should be noted, Venus Williams won a silver in mixed doubles with Rajeev Ram, her fifth Olympic medal. Venus Williams is the Sydney 2000 women’s Olympic singles winner.

Serena alone at the cauldron? Serena and Venus together?

Both are great, and deserving, champions.

Both have answered the call for their country.

If this moment goes from possibility to reality, and again the disclaimer, it's right now just an if -- it would be a great call for their country, in service to the Olympic dreams of little girls and boys everywhere, to do the right thing on that Friday night seven years from now in July.

Enough already with the many bid hypocrisies

Let’s have fun with French. You don’t even need to speak French — much — to play along.

I will play the part of a voyeur, someone who has spent nearly 20 years reporting, writing and observing about the Olympic movement, in particular the bid process for the Games. You can be the public. In French, that translates into the word “audience.” Even when it seems all by itself like an English word.

Those wacky French — they have a different word for everything.

Well, kinda. In that spirit:

In English, we say hypocrisy.

In French, hypocrisie.

In the Olympic world, there are many varieties of hypocrisie worth examination.

Here, as in the brilliant John Oliver takedown of the forthcoming French presidential elections, let us light a Gauloise (hey, no smoking in California!), pour a lovely red and consider:

Is the International Olympic Committee spitballing — or more — a double-double that would send the 2024 Games to Paris and 2028 to Los Angeles?

Is that already a fait accompli? Is that (oops, a little Latin here but credit, please, for sticking with the European thing) IOC president Thomas Bach’s modus operandi?

If it’s a done deal, why go through with the charade (oh, hey, same word!) of a bid race?  If it’s signed, sealed and delivered and it's only April, what precisely would be an LA24 raison d’etre?

Why go through an expensive campaign just to get to September and have the IOC announce, oh, toutes nos félicitations — or, you know, congrats, we’ve got this covered!

Maybe nothing is really done until the IOC, like everyone, sees in May the results of the French presidential race, in particular whether Marine le Pen prevails.

For 2024, this space has made the point repeatedly that the IOC cannot afford — literally, figuratively, PR-wise and social media-wise — to rely on yet another government-backed bid that brings the unwarranted risk of huge infrastructure projects. Particularly in Europe. European taxpayers have made plain they don't want that right now. Besides, the future of the European Union is perhaps, to be gentle, wobbly. Why place a multibillion-dollar bet in 2017 on the stability -- financial, political, security-wise -- of France in 2024?

If there is to be a two-fer: LA for 24, then if Paris wants it for 28, sure, that's a discussion for another day.

Since the essence of any Olympic competition is supposed to be fair play:

The U.S. Olympic Committee has gotten itself bashed, justifiably and relentlessly, both by the press and, more importantly, inside the Olympic movement, and at the highest levels, for the role it played — a poor partner, it was said, not nearly as supportive as it could be, it was alleged — in the New York 2005 for 2012 and Chicago 2009 for 2016 campaigns.

Since the Chicago debacle in Copenhagen in October 2009, USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun and chairman Larry Probst have re-dedicated themselves to the cause. They have traveled the world in humble and gracious support of and service to the movement. Four years ago, the USOC did not even put up a candidate for 2020, on the grounds that fence-mending and relationship-building was more of a priority.

Why?

Because, one, it was the right thing to do and, two, it was what the right people in the right places at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, were telling Blackmun and Probst was the right thing to do.

Maintenant, let’s have a look at the situation in France.

In particular, let's compare the USOC with the French national Olympic committee, which goes by the acronym CNOSF, and especially the way the two committees have responded since both came up short in 2005, the USOC with New York, CNOSF with Paris, for the Summer Games in 2012.

A newsletter published in Germany, called Sport Intern, remains mandatory reading within the Olympic scene. Wednesday’s editions contains a column written by a veteran French writer, Yannick Cochennec.

That piece, for those not up to speed on the potential impact of the French presidential elections on a Paris bid, asks this question: will a sports ministry at full capacity survive?

Understand that in France the state is part of sport in a way that Americans would find almost incomprehensible. It's not just a Games that would be a state project. The national federations are, for the most part, a state project as well.

As Cochennec notes, both of le Pen’s presumed major rivals, Emmanuel Macron and François Fillon, keep saying that if they win on May 7, they will form a smaller government. When you have security to enforce and trains to run, where is money for sport?

The current CNOSF president, Denis Masseglia, says not to worry, telling the daily Le Parisien two weeks ago, “If we get the Games, it will be easier to sell, to the political class, the idea that sport needs to be a social issue.”

Masseglia is one of three candidates in a contentious CNOSF presidential derby. That contest is to be decided four days after the French presidential elections, three days before the IOC “evaluation” visit to Paris.

The others: Isabelle Lamour, from the French fencing federation, and two-time Olympic judo champion and former French sports minister David Douillet.

Last week brought this tweet featuring Paris bid leader Tony Estanguet:

https://twitter.com/Paris2024/status/851826182475710464

Back to 2005, and that Paris bid for 2012. Also in the race: New York, Madrid and Moscow. In the final round, Paris lost by just four votes to London.

Per Cochennec, referring to CNOSF:

"Its lack of independence from the French political power -- whatever the color of the government --  is still problematic in the homeland of [modern Olympics founder] Pierre de Coubertin and the institution has not evolved significantly since 2005 and the failure of the 2012 Paris bid in Singapore. For example, almost no diversity at the top of the 36 [French] Olympic federations: only one woman — Isabelle Lamour — as president in the company of 35 men.” Lamour is not the only female president but, as well, the only female candidate from among all 36 federations in their 2016-17 elections, Cochennec notes.

France stands for égalité, or equality. Purportedly. So does the IOC. Twelve is a lot of years to make substantial progress in leadership positions. The United States is admittedly far from perfect. At the same time, two American women, Anita DeFrantz and Angela Ruggiero, sit on the IOC’s 15-member policy-making executive board.

Yet — Paris for 2024?

Cochennec notes France has had no one — not one member — on the EB since Jean de Beaumont in 1980. That’s 37 years. If that was the case for the United States, the protests would be incroyable -- imagine how everyone would be screaming that the Americans, across the two big oceans, were insular and uncaring.

Yet — Paris for 2024?

Further, this:

Imagine, just imagine, if the USOC were the invisible presence in the 2024 bid race that CNOSF has proven to date as a “partner” with Paris. Again, per Cochennec, quoting from the insightful French analyst Armand de Rendinger ’s 2014 book, “La tentation olympic française” (“The French Olympic temptation”):

“Without a powerful CNOSF, embodied by a president valued by his peers and the French community, it is hard to succeed in the competition played by different countries to get the Games.”

None of those conditions are evident.

Even so: a distant national Olympic committee, not close to the bid, is a decided negative for Chicago but not for Paris?

Yet, somehow, still, Paris for 2024?

Excusez-moi?

In English, we have a saying: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

In French: ce qui est bon pour l’un est bon pour l’autre.

Let’s play fair, IOC. What’s right is right. This sort of thing went on during the New York bid years. It went on during Chicago’s time, too.

Enough.

If you want to bang on the Americans, that’s cool. Just — let’s hold everyone to the same standards.

Because otherwise what we have here is a word that everyone understands. It’s called a façade.

Voilà, dudes.