IOC

Ten weeks to go, and are even Hello Kitty and Super Mario wondering: really?

Ten weeks to go, and are even Hello Kitty and Super Mario wondering: really?

Every day, those of us whose lives are in some way shaped by the Olympics get asked the same question — is Tokyo going to happen?

Let’s be clear. despite any fantasy to the contrary, I am in no way, shape or form an Olympic athlete. I could blame the two shoulder surgeries in the past seven months but, nah. Not even a working left shoulder would make me world-class in anything except maybe this — typing and thinking and, believe me, many of my critics and detractors would say I am farthest thing from, and thanks as always for your thoughts and prayers.

So with admiration for the thousands of athletes whose hopes and dreams have been on hold for the past year — absent something freaky, between now and July 23, freaky in this context meaning apocalyptic, there will be Games in Tokyo.

As IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Wednesday in a video press briefing, “We are confident we can deliver good Games and we will continue working toward that.”

Epic, colossal, like -- what? IOC's latest esports misstep

Epic, colossal, like -- what? IOC's latest esports misstep

Let’s imagine the college-age version of me. I maybe thought i was something special. This was testosterone talking. The mirror said something different. So did my college friends.

Let’s imagine further that we walked into an establishment. Incredibly, at the bar was sitting the one and only Christie Brinkley.

What to say? What to do? Hey, I’m something special! “Uh, hello? What are you doing here?”

Weak, right? Smacks of desperation? Despair?

Something like what the International Olympic Committee put out a few days ago when it announced it was hurriedly getting into the esports business with a series before Tokyo 2020 — a weak, ill-thought-out, ill-conceived, desperate, dumb approach. Like, what are you doing here?

How to put sport at the service of humankind

How to put sport at the service of humankind

The key purpose of the Olympic movement is not to make money. It is “to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind.”

Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, has many times said the Tokyo Olympics can — should — serve as a “beacon of hope to the world during these troubled times.”

This week, the IOC is due to reveal what it is calling the Playbook, the layers of protocols and policies it has for months been developing in a bid to pull off the Tokyo Games, Olympic and Paralympic, amid the global coronavirus pandemic. The Olympics are due to open July 23. The Paralympics are scheduled to open Aug. 24.

The Playbook, the IOC has made clear, is about trying to create safe bubbles in Tokyo. It will be revised — and revised again — as July 23 draws near.

The Playbook is essential. But there needs to be more.

Bach's legacy is upon him: the world needs not just leadership but his humanity

Bach's legacy is upon him: the world needs not just leadership but his humanity

The International Olympic Committee is due this week to hold its policy-making executive board meeting. it comes more or less with six months to go until July 23, when the Tokyo Olympics are due to commence. To make those six months feel all the more real: that’s 26 Fridays.

In March, the IOC president, Thomas Bach, is going to be re-elected to a four-year term. He has served eight already, once again more or less. These last four will be his last in the office.

Starting with this board meeting, Bach has a unique opportunity. These first eight years have been marked by a succession of crises, some unforeseeable — the Russian doping scandal, the organizational disaster that was Rio 2016, the almost-didn’t-happen PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games.

This space has many times been critical of Bach. His Agenda 2020, for instance? Not much there there. All the same, throughout these first eight years, and this is difficult indeed for Bach’s many critics — some voluble indeed — to comprehend, he has shown genuine leadership. Now he must do more. His legacy is at stake. He has the chance, starting now, to define that legacy rather than let others define it for him.

Does anyone at the USOPC realize there's a world out there beyond the 50 states?

Does anyone at the USOPC realize there's a world out there beyond the 50 states?

Does anyone at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee really think through some of the things they announce? Do they understand there is a world out there beyond the 50 states?

Do they care? Do they understand this is why the rest of the world often — and for good reason — thinks the Americans are self-righteous, self-centered and deserving of approbation and scorn?

The rest of the world hates it when we imperiously and sanctimoniously climb up and seize what we believe is the moral high ground and tell all the little people — indeed, lecture them — about what to do.

When are we ever going to stop? Ever?

IOC must 'urgently' re-do esports strategy, this time for real

IOC must 'urgently' re-do esports strategy, this time for real

Six months ago, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach published a remarkable white paper about the state of Olympics, as he saw it, amid the pandemic. More remarkably, it drew — and yet more remarkably still, over the months since has drawn — comparatively little media attention. Like almost zero.

The think piece was called — you’ve got to love this title — “Olympism and Corona.”

If Roger Goodell wrote such a piece about the state of the NFL, or Adam Silver about the NBA, odds are it would be the stuff of hot takes on sports radio and cable TV, and for weeks. Here was Bach thoughtfully trying to sort out the new realities of the most complex puzzle the world knows, the Olympic Games, in reaction to the shifting realities of a global pandemic. Reaction: mostly crickets.

He deserved better, particularly because in the fourth copy block, entitled “Social Impact,” third paragraph, the IOC president signaled to the entire world — if, like, anyone was paying attention, which obviously they were not — that esports ought to be taken seriously. He used the word “urgently.” The IOC almost never uses the word “urgently.” This time, though, it did.

This year of living dangerously, and surely the Olympics can and should be reimagined

This year of living dangerously, and surely the Olympics can and should be reimagined

For the past six weeks, this space has been dark. For the past six weeks, per doctor’s orders, the mandate has been to do nothing — or, to be practical, as little as possible. Thus, for six weeks, instead of writing, the mission has been to read and read and read, and in particular everything about the state of the Olympic movement.

You know what? I have been reporting, writing and observing the Olympic movement since late 1998, since the break of the Salt Lake corruption scandal. That’s 22 years, with 10 editions of the Games. Fair question now, after taking in everything over these past six weeks: when has the Olympic landscape ever been in a more precarious position?

Answer: in my experience, this is the worst.

Without hyperbole: the situation now bears echoes of the movement’s darkest days from the 1970s.

The pandemic brings IOC to a moment consequential if not existential

The pandemic brings IOC to a moment consequential if not existential

Greetings anew from Manhattan Beach, California. And how are things? Thanks for asking! People are sick and dying because of the coronavirus. Also, a chunk of the state — bigger than Rhode Island — is ablaze after a siege of spectacular lightning strikes, some 12,000 over the past week, 100 on Friday; on the ground, the destruction is already savage; the air smoky and unhealthy; beyond, it’s only August and fire season has weeks to go. Meanwhile, the utilities are ordering rolling electricity blackouts. School started again but, you know, not in person so no one is happy about that.

Then there’s the political angst, President Obama finally going off on his successor. Here’s a fact: the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s running mate makes her the first person in the history of the Democratic Party to be nominated — as president or vice-president — as a representative of a state west of the Rocky Mountains.

We are living in weird times. In all of this, there seems to be an element of the apocalyptic. Even the setting sun is not yellow but an iridescent red. Thus the mind quite naturally goes, especially as the red sun sinks into the Pacific, to matters existential or, at the least, consequential.

Being, staying relevant in an 'ever more fragile world in deep crisis'

Being, staying relevant in an 'ever more fragile world in deep crisis'

Welcome to Day 3,042 in Coronaville. It’s back to Lockdown 2.0 here in Manhattan Beach, California, where nobody can even get a haircut and as of Saturday you are liable to get a fine of up to $350 if seen in public without a mask and, to quote Alice Cooper, school’s out not for just summer but for a long time to come.

Looking out across the top of that mask, the United States on Thursday reported 75,600 new coronavirus cases, a single-day record. The situation is so bad across the 50 states — Thursday was the 11th time that the past month the single-day record had been broken — that, for now, Americans are not welcome in the European Union.

India, the New York Times also reported, hit a million cases in a surge that has forced a return to lockdowns there. India ranks third in the world in both total cases and new ones, the Times further said, adding that its rate of new infections is on track to overtake Brazil’s.

And what’s this?

The International Olympic Committee, capping a series of meetings with its first-ever virtual assembly on Friday, remained resolute in its determination to stage the Summer Olympics next summer in Tokyo.

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.