July 23, 2021: known knowns and unknown unknowns

July 23, 2021: known knowns and unknown unknowns

In American football, why do most coaches kick on 4th and 2 even if they’re on, say, the other team’s 45-yard line? It’s only two yards! So why punt? Without getting too deep into the football canon, the answer is easy: it offers stability and certainty.

Why do most lawsuits settle instead of going to trial? Because a jury trial is risky. Settlement offers a known deal: stability and certainty.

What is one of the most famous aphorisms that as children we all come to know and understand? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or, as Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, has famously put it, “In German, now it is better to have a small bird in your hand than a big bird on the roof.”

This is why the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games have been rescheduled to a date certain, the opening ceremony now set for July 23, 2021. The Paralympics will be Aug. 24-Sept. 5.

The challenge is real. Asking Congress for $200 million is no answer

The challenge is real. Asking Congress for $200 million is no answer

Real life is always better than fiction. You can’t make stuff up that’s better than what happens for real.

Example: the Netflix series Tiger King. Come on now. Just — wow. As an aside, if Carole Baskin doesn’t already have the best legal representation, someone ought to be advising her that, maybe, just maybe, this series might well bring the federal authorities around to look into her many and varied business and personal affairs.

Example: the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, asking Congress for $200 million, per reports in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Come on now. Just — what in the world can the USOPC be thinking?

Now the postponement. Bring on the reckoning

Now the postponement. Bring on the reckoning

Think about some of the iconic moments in recent Olympic ceremony history.

The bang of 2,008 drums at precisely 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008 in Beijing, for instance.

The queen of England ‘jumping’ out of the helicopter with 007 in London 2012.

Brazilian Gisele Bundchen’s catwalk down the runway at Rio 2016.

There will be no such iconic moment this July 24. There will be no moment whatsoever. For the first time in nearly 70-plus years, since the resumption of the Games after world war in the 1940s, the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics will not take place according to its every-four-years rhythm.

Instead, in a recognition of the reality of a world confronting the coronavirus pandemic, Olympic and Japanese government authorities, in a statement announced Tuesday, “concluded” that the Tokyo Games must be postponed to sometime in 2021, no later than summer of next year.

Smart money: IOC makes postpone decision by end of week

Smart money: IOC makes postpone decision by end of week

The International Olympic hoped to buy time by declaring a four-week window to decide whether to go forward with the scheduled July 24 start date of the Tokyo Summer Games or switch to a backup plan.

Instead, it got mutiny.

Now it needs to keep on the move or face the certainty it will be left behind by the pull of events.

What does this mean?

This: four weeks is too long. Smart money says that by the end of this week, almost surely, the IOC will announce the 2020 Games will be postponed, and most likely to 2021.

In which World Athletics makes clear the postpone train has left the station

In which World Athletics makes clear the postpone train has left the station

The news Sunday about what is really what did not come from Lausanne, where the International Olympic Committee said there is now a four-week window to decide whether the Tokyo Olympic Games would start as scheduled on July 24 (in our world all things are possible until they are not) or things will instead shift to some sort of a Plan B (hello).

The hard news instead came from Monaco, and World Athletics.

In two pieces, World Athletics, formerly the IAAF, made it crystal clear that, barring a miracle in public health circles, the figurative train has already left the station, and the only question about Plan B is — when?

Getting to Plan B — and with kinder, gentler messaging for a world that needs it

Getting to Plan B — and with kinder, gentler messaging for a world that needs it

When I was a boy growing up in the cornfields of Ohio, my younger brother and I thought one of the greatest days imaginable was riding our bikes the several miles to the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store, there to peruse the comic books, to see what might have come in since our last check-in.

The summer before I turned 11, drama! DC Comics created Earth-Two, a parallel world. This allowed them to publish Superman stories without regard for the line of Superman tales that had developed over decades.

A fresh start, if you will.

Imagine if in our Earth-Two the International Olympic Committee had 1/ a more nimble communications department and 2/ could thus tell the story it should be telling in a world in crisis because of the coronavirus.

IOC: 100 percent right to keep pressing forward

IOC: 100 percent right to keep pressing forward

The International Olympic Committee put out a self-styled “communique” Tuesday that was really long but can be reduced to the three main points in one essential paragraph.

One, the IOC “remains fully committed” to Tokyo 2020. The Games are due to begin July 24.

Two, because there remain four months to go, there is “no need for any drastic decisions at this stage.”

Three, “any speculation at this moment would be counterproductive.”

Sun Yang gets busted. Sure. But eight years?

Sun Yang gets busted. Sure. But eight years?

Sun Yang, the Chinese swim star and three-time Olympic gold medalist, earned himself an eight-year ban Friday in a case in which the verdict itself was always a no-brainer.

Why?

You don’t get to take the law into your hands, figuratively and literally.

Or, put another way, even in the Far East, it’s not the Old West out there.

Or, if you prefer, vigilante justice is no justice at all.

From 13 days in a boat to winning at a Grand Slam

From 13 days in a boat to winning at a Grand Slam

DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Latakia is Syria’s principal port, on the country’s western shoreline. Turkey is just to the north.

The war in Syria has been going on for nearly nine years already. Three years into the violence, in 2014, in Latakia, Tareq Jamal and his cousin, Najib, decided to risk it all. They made their way up the shoreline to Turkey, and from there into a wooden boat packed with people.

It took 13 days, across the Mediterranean Sea, to reach Italy. “BIg waves,” he recalled. “Women were crying.” He paused in telling the story. “We were almost to die.”

On Saturday, Tareq Jamal, representing what was called the International Refugee Team, not only competed at the Düsseldorf Grand Slam, he won a match. Ranked 429th in the world in the men’s 73-kilo category — to repeat, No. 429 — he defeated a competitor ranked No. 69 and made a solid case to go to the Olympic Games this summer in Tokyo.