World Relays: at an inflection point

World Relays: at an inflection point

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Journalism is storytelling, and storytelling necessarily involves tension, and from the get-go an irreconcilable tension dictated the way local organizers and track and field’s international governing body approached this fourth edition of the IAAF World Relays.

The Japanese hosts necessarily and understandably viewed these Relays at 72,327-seat International Stadium — site of the 2002 World Cup soccer final that saw Brazil defeat Germany, 2-0 — as a test event for next summer’s Tokyo Olympics. Tokyo is maybe 35 minutes away. At a Friday news conference, Hiroshi Yokokawa, president of the Japanese track and field federation and member of the IAAF council, said, “The road [on which] we are now standing is heading straight to the Tokyo 2020 Games.” Koji Murofushi, the 2004 Athens hammer throw gold medalist who is the Tokyo 2020 sports director, called the Relays a “milestone for the Tokyo 2020 Games.” Even the athletes understood the direction, Ryota Yamagata, who ran on the Japanese men’s silver-medal 4x100 relay at the 2016 Rio Games, declaring at that same briefing, “We want to have a good start to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and 37[-plus] seconds is a good benchmark.”

Compare to the words of IAAF president Seb Coe.

The Relays, Coe said at that very same news conference, make for a “suffusion of fun and innovation.”

In the matter of '46 XY DSD' cases: the IAAF is right

In the matter of '46 XY DSD' cases: the IAAF is right

In the complex, emotionally charged matter of 46 XY DSD cases: the IAAF is right.

There. I said it.

If you already feel like sending hate mail, roger. But, and for emphasis: the IAAF is right.

Let’s be straight-up: Caster Semenya’s many vocal supporters have sought to focus the story on Semenya alone. That’s not right or fair. There are others similarly situated, including for instance — as was recently acknowledged — the Rio 2016 800-meter runner-up Francine Niyonsaba. So the IAAF is hardly targeting Caster Semenya. 

What seeking to make this matter all about Caster Semenya does, however, is what a great deal if not almost all of the reportage about this matter has done: cast Semenya as the sympathetic if not profoundly empathetic protagonist in a classic narrative thread, the individual against the institution. 

What’s often missing completely from that storytelling — or buried way, way down at the bottom, because in today’s overheated social media-driven cauldron of outrage, very few want to speak up — are other voices, those who have their own dreams, too, literally millions of girls and women around the world, and here is where the IAAF is 100 percent dead-on right to go to court to ask, what about them?

The real story: a billion-dollar surplus

The real story: a billion-dollar surplus

he Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee on Tuesday released an inflation-adjusted budget, and in the rush to pounce on the new number, $6.9 billion, every single outlet missed the story.

The story is this, and it’s all there in black and white, though my colleagues in the press either don’t want to embrace it or simply can’t believe it, almost surely because they have been so thoroughly accustomed to Olympic finance horror stories: the fundamental truth is that Los Angeles and California are different, and so in 2028, as in 1984, LA will be the Games changer, meaning absent an act of God like an earthquake that turns abruptly turns Las Vegas into beachfront resort, LA28 is going to clear an absurd amount of money.

Like, an anticipated surplus of a billion dollars. 

On a budget of $6.9 billion. 

There is a place for caution and tempered expectation and all of that.

There is also reality. 

Yang Ho Cho, 1949-2019 : an appreciation

Yang Ho Cho, 1949-2019 : an appreciation

Death is part of life. We all know. 

Still, when it comes so unexpectedly, it’s a shock.

All the more so in the case of a genuinely good person, a fundamentally decent human being who cared about things that matter and sought to make — in his years, too short — our broken world better. 

This was Yang Ho Cho. He died in Los Angeles a few days ago. He was 70.

There's only one story here and it's not a horse race

There's only one story here and it's not a horse race

Absent some freaky event between now and then, in late June, at its annual assembly the International Olympic Committee almost surely will award Stockholm the 2026 Winter Olympics. There’s a joke for this 2026 race that’s apropos. In the aftermath of this week’s news of government support in Sweden for the project, there now seems little sense in waiting more than two months to tell it.

So here goes: who does the IOC want to win for 2026?

1. Stockholm

2. Anyplace not named Milan

3. Milan

The problem with pretty much all the journalism on the 2026 Winter Games race is that it totally has missed the blindingly obvious point. Which is — see above. 

Cue the Vangelis: cross-country for Paris 2024

Cue the Vangelis: cross-country for Paris 2024

Yes, yes, yes, Chariots of Fire, the 1981 movie that won four Oscars in telling the story of track and field at the 1924 Paris Olympics, is all about the sprints, not cross-country. 

OK, OK, OK, Chariots of Fire is about the Olympics but something bigger. It’s a story about British athletes at those 1924 Paris Olympics, one who is a devout Scottish Christian running for the glory of God, the other an English Jew and what it takes to overcome prejudice.

People, we need not quibble here with details. 

When people think about Paris and the 1924 Olympics, what do they think of? The iconic beach running scenes from the movie, right? The sunlight! The sand! The sea foam! Especially since Mr. Bean — Rowan Atkinson — had great fun with the whole thing during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games.

Those beach scenes are, more or less, kinda-sorta, cross-country running. Good enough, anyway. At least for this point: 

The 2024 Games will be 100 years since the Games were last in Paris. As things happen, those 1924 Games were also the last time cross-county was on the Olympic program.

Paris 2024 organizers want cross-country back. So does track and field’s world governing body, the IAAF. 

Out of the game -- because, again, it seems too much to get in to the United States

Out of the game -- because, again, it seems too much to get in to the United States

The United States Olympic Committee has been all but consumed for months by the fallout from Larry Nassar’s crimes. 

Virtually every single person in the Colorado Springs leadership team is new. The focus has seemed to be primarily if not entirely on gymnastics and on other domestic matters.

Now comes a reminder that a significant part of the USOC’s work is outward-facing, too. And here it has a huge mountain to climb, complicated by factors both of its own doing and by those beyond its control — in particular to policy and perceptions attributable to the 45th president of the United States.

Indeed, huge might be an understatement. 

In the aftermath of last week’s World Youth Weightlifting Championships in Las Vegas, shadowed by visa issues that complicated entry into the United States for some and in other cases all but made entry impractical or impossible, USA Weightlifting has announced it is — at least for the near future — out of the bid game for high-level championships.

At the Olympics: no more guns

At the Olympics: no more guns

When the Olympic Games are on, Summer or Winter, it’s easy to declare that they are not just relevant but material — that is, they matter, and a lot. 

The challenge for everyone involved with the Olympic movement around the world is when the Games are not on, and that challenge is elemental: being relevant, especially to young people, and making a difference in their lives. 

When a teen activist from Swedish can inspire far-reaching school climate strikes — and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination — is it really too much to ask the International Olympic Committee as well to seek to make a difference, a really big difference, in our broken world?

Coming together in peace and unity — that is the entire point of a Games’ opening ceremony. It’s why it is the highlight of any Olympics, the world’s athletes gathering in what is both an expression of hope and a longing for peace — that maybe, just maybe, as the inadvertent soul poet Rodney King once put it, we can all get along.

The Games and the values for which the Olympics purport to be about — excellence, friendship, respect and, by extension, tolerance — are the very thing that stand in marked contrast to an abhorrent shooting spree like the one that ripped Thursday across two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The death toll now stands at 50.

Thus, this call for change:

At the Olympics, the guns have to go — that is, be gone.

What IOC should do: Salt Lake City for 2034, not 2030

What IOC should do: Salt Lake City for 2034, not 2030

In September 2016, this column was first in the world to declare that the International Olympic Committee ought to declare a historic two-fer and allocate the 2024 and 2028 Summer Games at a single stroke. 

The IOC did just that in 2017, though it reversed the order of the suggestion first made here — LA for 2024, Paris for 2028, instead awarding 2024 to Paris, 2028 to LA, the IOC’s Eurocentric sensibilities coming once more to the fore after a three-Games Asian swing (2018 South Korea, 2020 Tokyo, 2022 Beijing) even though LA is and will be all the more ready. In exchange for waiting for ’28, LA struck a killer financial deal.

Now the IOC’s so-called evaluation commission is on the ground this week in Sweden, the first of the two remaining candidates for the 2026 Winter Games — Milan is yet to come — and thus it is time for this column, taking stock of what is going on in Stockholm and beyond, and more generally in the Olympic bid process, to yet again be first-in-the-world with another so-clearly-obvious take of what-should-be:

Salt Lake City for 2034.

Not — repeat, not — 2030.

This after the IOC picks Stockholm for 2026.

And with Sapporo poised to emerge as front-runner for 2030.

Budapest rocks: its big win for the World Urban Games

Budapest rocks: its big win for the World Urban Games

Roughly 18 months ago the International Olympic Committee made a historical double allocation for the Summer Games, Paris for 2024, Los Angeles getting 2028. 

LA and Paris were the last two left in what had originally been a race only for 2024. Budapest withdrew earlier in 2017 amid local political complexities, clearing the way for the IOC’s 2024/2028 double-double, and ever since those in the know have wondered, because Budapest rocks: what if? 

On Monday, it was announced that the 2019 World Urban Games, which last fall were said to be going to Los Angeles, would instead be held in — Budapest. When? September 13-15. GAISF, the umbrella organization that represents international sports federations, said Budapest had also been offered the 2021 edition of the Urban Games, touting “both the city’s enthusiasm and its readiness and capability.”  

The project is likely to feature 3x3 basketball and BMX freestyle, both of which will be on the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games program, as well as breakdancing, the hit of the 2018 Youth Games in Buenos Aires that probably will be featured at Paris 2024, along with a full program of music, art and street-inspired culture.

Monday’s announcement resolves a drama that for months has been playing out behind the scenes. Big picture, first and foremost, it must be understood for what it is, a huge victory — another, that is — for Budapest, for Hungary and for Balázs Fürjes, state secretary for the development of Budapest and major sports events. He resolutely continued to press the case on behalf of his city and nation. Now all three — him, city, country — are big winners. OK, for emphasis, because it’s appropriate: really big winners.