Reality, perceptions, relationships: will AIBA get time, and a chance?

Reality, perceptions, relationships: will AIBA get time, and a chance?

Zeina Nassar is a German boxer and national champion. She is a trailblazer. Two years ago, at her urging, AIBA, the international boxing federation, changed its rules to allow female fighters to box wearing the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.

“We are all responsible,” Nassar said Monday at a wide-ranging news conference organized Monday by AIBA in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Olympic capital, “for a change.”

The changes at issue Monday were those AIBA has furiously been implementing for the past months under Russia’s Umar Kremlev, elected president last December. The aim: being back as the sport’s governing body for the Paris Games in 2024. An IOC task force overseen by gymnastics president Morinari Watanabe will run the boxing tournament at the Tokyo Olympics.

Kremlev has been outspoken about instilling an AIBA culture rooted in transparency and in globally recognized best practices of good governance; putting the federation on solid financial ground; identifying past and current instances of corruption in and out of the ring, in particular in AIBA financial dealings; and, as if all that wasn’t enough, fixing the seemingly eternal problem of badly judged or officiated— the skeptic would say fixed — fights.

It’s little wonder boxing’s place on the Olympic program is threatened.

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

EUGENE, Ore. — Maybe you are one of those people who believes that Paul McCartney has been, you know, dead for all these years.

Maybe you believe that Britney Spears has thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the 13 years under the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money.

Maybe you believe that the Houston Astros were just learning new syncopation skills when they were beating on garbage cans.

If you are one of these people, or maybe you just belong to the Cult of Running and don’t want to listen to logic and facts, then maybe you believe the new Hayward Field here in Eugene is the lynchpin to a revival of U.S. track and field. And you likely believe, too, that this week’s U.S. Trials, which are essentially a dry-run for the stadium, are a precursor to next year’s track and field world championships that will change everything for the sport in this country.

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

EUGENE, Ore. — If, like most of America, you watched the women’s 400 here at the U.S. track and field Trials a few days ago, and your takeaway was Allyson Felix and her cute daughter, Cammy, and Quanera Hayes and her cute son, Demetrius, and the way the new moms celebrated finishing 1-2 with their kids on the track, Wadeline Jonathas would like you to know that she finished third and she matters just as much, and, for real no knock on anyone else, but if you could tear yourself over this way, you would see the very essence of what it means, really, to be an American, to make it in this country, to represent the United States, red, white and blue, all of that, in the 21st century.

Wadeline Jonathas — Wadie, please — is an immigrant from Haiti. She came to the United States when she was 11. Became an American citizen when she was 17. She didn’t even start running track until she was 16. Didn’t take up the 400 until she was 18. She’s now 23 and going to the Olympics.

Everyone has a story. This is the lesson of Wadeline Jonathas. In her case, it borders on the is-this-for-real? Answer: it’s 100 percent real because there’s so much more to it. At 15, she was homeless. They should make a movie out of The Wadeline Jonathas Story. “One day,” she said with a laugh.

At FINA, generational change -- even (wow), it's 2021, personal emails!

At FINA, generational change -- even (wow), it's 2021, personal emails!

Since this is 2021, you probably have an email address. That email address is almost surely your name @ gmail or Yahoo or Outlook. Or it’s some super-cute thing, or it’s a combo of your name and numbers, like MP8for8Beijing or Usain958yams, again at gmail or Yahoo or Outlook. Like that. Right?

Not to say that things were maybe in need of an update at FINA, the international sports federation that oversees swimming and five other water-related disciplines, four of them Olympic sports (water polo, diving, artistic swimming and open water — the federation is pushing hard for the fifth, high dive), but literally no one at FINA had her or his own individual email. No one.

For years and years, emails went to departments. Not to people. That’s — how it was.

So, back to the 2021 thing. FINA now has, after 35 years, a new executive director, Brent Nowicki, an American lawyer, who succeeds Cornel Marculescu.

One of the first — of many — changes: FINA staff will get their own email addresses.

It’s no small thing.

The Trials, and the change all around us

The Trials, and the change all around us

EUGENE, Ore. — Change is a, perhaps the, only constant in the short time we have to draw breath on Planet Earth.

A day like Monday served as a reminder of how each and all of us is living through a powerful current of change, amplified and accelerated by the pandemic. There is no going back to the way things were.

And that’s OK.

Because it’s OK to consider, for instance, a new way, or ways, of things. In particular, ways sport can help us see differently.

Sport is a prism through which we often can find constructive dialogue about things that sometimes can prove too fraught otherwise. These possibilities drew Monday into sharp relief, underscored not only by racing at the U.S. track and field Trials here at Hayward Field in Eugene but by events in Washington and across the world.

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

EUGENE, Ore. — That didn’t take long. All too predictably.

Not even 24 hours after Sha’Carri Richardson sped to victory in the women’s 100 meters here Sunday night at the U.S. Olympic Trials, a British journalist posted to Twitter a note about Richardson’s coach, Dennis Mitchell.

In this tweet, this correspondent pointed out that it had been he in 1998 who had “exclusively” reported that Mitchell had been “let off a doping charge for excessive testosterone, which he claimed was down to drinking beer and having sex four times a day with his wife. ‘It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.’“

This note underscores the racial — if not racist — reckoning that track and field must confront. In the year after the murder of George Floyd, this tweet spotlights the undercurrents of the very thing that the British sprint champion Dina Asher-Smith so eloquently wrote about in a briliiant column published last summer in The Telegraph — the “layers and layers of ‘unconscious’ bias at best, and hate at worst, that affect [her] life on a day-to-day basis.”

Ryan Lochte deserves better

Ryan Lochte deserves better

OMAHA, Neb. — Talk about kicking a guy at a down moment. And why?

You want to know why so many people hate so many journalists? Why Donald Trump was on to something, and in a big way? Because of the way Ryan Lochte’s final Olympic Trials swim Friday was reported in the mainstream press.

Lochte finished seventh Friday in the men’s 200-meter individual medley, failing to qualify for the Tokyo Games, what would have been his fifth Olympic Games. He would have been the oldest U.S. male swimmer in history. The 200 IM was his last chance to qualify. Michael Andrew won the race; Chase Kalisz took second.

There’s a disturbing groupthink tendency among my friends and colleagues in the press to report the same story. A particular narrative takes hold, come hell or high water, as if everyone has been drinking from the same Kool-Aid jug, which is not surprising because it’s not a big secret that reporters are insecure and at big events especially talk among themselves to make sure they’re not missing anything their friends at other outlets might have. Even when the race is right in front of everyone’s eyes. A typical convo might be, so the story today is Lochte, right?

After four editions of the swim Trials: a love letter to Omaha

After four editions of the swim Trials: a love letter to Omaha

OMAHA, Neb. — It was 106 degrees here Thursday. Not the kind of day that makes you long for Omaha.

But I’m gonna miss it here.

Rumor is, and only rumor, that this may well be the final time the U.S. swim Trials are held in Omaha. They’ve been here four times in a row: 2008, 2012, 2016 and now 2021. Indianapolis wants 2024 and, to be honest, it kind of feels like a change of pace might well be in order, that the big field house that is Lucas Oil Stadium might well be next.

If that is the case, Omaha has had a great run -- inside the basketball arena, now called CHI Health Center, just up the street from the baseball field, TDAmeritrade Park, home of the NCAA men’s College World Series, which this year gets underway Saturday.

Critics of USATF again belie their racial if not racist animus. Enough

For more than nine years, since Max Siegel became chief executive of USA Track & Field, this space has pleaded for civility, dignity and respect in the way people in and around the sport talk to and with each other.

Too often — far too often — the rhetoric is otherwise. It has proven not just unconstructive but inflammatory.

Siegel, along with chief operating officer Renee Washington, are the only two Black executives in the U.S. Olympic landscape.

After all these years, it’s difficult if not impossible to believe there is not a racial — if not racist — undertone to the criticism. Because the substance if not the tone almost immediately turns angry and destructive, as it has in the latest crisis to beset American track and field, the doping ban handed U.S. middle-distance standout Shelby Houlihan, adjudged liable by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport after testing positive for impermissible levels of the anabolic steroid nandrolone.