Less violence all around -- starting with our words

Less violence all around -- starting with our words

BEIJING — Absent a dramatic and unforeseeable event, the 2022 Winter Olympics, like the 2008 Summer Games, will be a huge success. They will happen. Two years into our global pandemic, that is no small thing. It is, in fact, a very big deal.

When these Games are done, the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the American government and the pack journalism of far too much of the U.S. media that for weeks if not months has been banging on about how bad China is — both really ought to be in for serious examination.

Does China have serious issues? Of course. But it’s incredible to witness how we go on and on about, say, human rights while simultaneously delusionally adrift with an incredible case of bizarro collective amnesia, one that apparently sparks some entitlement to superior moral standing — as if waterboarding never happened, as if Guantanamo is not still in operation. These are matters, to be clear, involving the apparatus of the American state.

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine.

This week, the lead-up to the 114th edition of the Millrose Games in New York, arguably the world’s most prestigious indoor track and field meet, marked what would have been Prefontaine’s 71st birthday.

Yet again, social media lit up with gushing tributes and grainy videos of Prefontaine races.

Track and field’s problem is, to be blunt, with the ongoing fetishizing of the Prefontaine legacy.

Straight talk: Michael Payne's 'Toon In!' is required reading

Straight talk: Michael Payne's 'Toon In!' is required reading

Michael Payne, the International Olympic Committee’s former marketing director, and I like to use the same phrase for the chicken-little hysteria that besets far too much of the reporting, particularly in the western media, and especially the American press, in the days and weeks immediately preceding an edition of a Games.

It’s ‘FUD’ — fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Part of this is because the International Olympic Committee does such a tremendously poor job of telling its story — which ought to the easiest story in the world to tell, of the celebration of humanity — and, as a corollary, the story of its history.

Every institution has ups and downs. Olympic history, for sure. When the IOC makes itself as easy to beat as a piñata, of course people are going to take aim.

For all the countless words devoted over more than a century to Olympic history, perhaps no volume better tells the story of what truly is, and has been, what’s what about the Games and the IOC than Payne’s take, Toon In!, a collection of incredible editorial cartoons accompanied by his insightful and often first-hand analysis.

François Carrard was a giant -- and other thoughts

François Carrard was a giant -- and other thoughts

François Carrard has died, and the world of international and Olympic sport has lost a giant. He was 83.

Carrard knew seemingly everyone and everything. Perhaps most important, he frequently knew how to find and reach consensus in a world too often marked by polarizing disagreement.

Beyond, he was a renaissance man, learned in letters and music, especially jazz. He was unafraid to speak his mind. And he could be wickedly funny.

A small note about which some but not many people knew. When he was young, Carrard spent a year as an exchange student in the States, in Pasadena, California. There he was not “François” but “Frank.”

The 2022 'boycott' -- d-u-m-b spells U-S-A

The 2022 'boycott' -- d-u-m-b spells U-S-A

We are so dumb here in the United States when it comes to the Olympics.

More precisely, perhaps, reactive instead of proactive.

And heavy-handed and myopic.

Or maybe, really, just dumb.

President Biden’s so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games marks yet the latest example. In this instance, the president is focused on the approval of a domestic audience and certain Anglo allies. He has been egged on by the dual echo chambers of a political class and a pliant media, both based on the East Coast, that know next to nothing about the Olympics.

In all, he is playing it, in a word, dumb.

Not to mention: being hypocritical to the max.

Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Again with the pre-Games FUD? Everyone deserves better. Especially the Chinese

Here we go with the déjà vû all over again, only this time it’s China.

Right on schedule, it’s time for Olympic-style FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Stories about how big, bad and awful it’s all going to be at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games — especially for the dogs and mongrels of the working press — are going to be the norm from here until the opening ceremony on February 4.

Didn’t we just go through this? In Tokyo and the Summer Olympics? Where the hue and cry was that the Games were going to infect the city (didn’t happen) and that the Japanese people were against the Games (they just re-elected, comfortably, the very same majority political party to office).

Now Beijing, and the Winter Games.

The closed loop! The bubble! A “level of control never before seen at the Games,” a New York Times headline decried in a late-September story in a deliberate attempt to set the tone for Beijing 2022 coverage.

Let’s be blunt: this narrative is absurd and more. It not only shapes perceptions but feeds malicious preconceptions. And that’s inappropriate.

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Two things ought to happen now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has issued a technically detailed but, in the end, common-sense ruling in the matter of Shelby Houlihan, the American distance runner, banning her for four years for nandrolone — through January 2025 — while thoroughly rejecting the ridiculous burrito defense.

One, Houlihan ought to come clean.

Two, all the journalistic sheep who wanted to believe, who maybe still want to believe despite the overwhelming evidence against Houlihan, that there was no way, just no way, a white American distance runner affiliated with the Bowerman Track Club could test positive — all these people, and the readers they misled, ought to take a crash course in Doping 101 and the things people will say and do, meaning anything and everything, to avoid getting busted.

Jacques Rogge, a figure of humanity and stability

Jacques Rogge, a figure of humanity and stability

Jacques Rogge, the eighth president of the International Olympic Committee, has died, the International Olympic Committee announced Sunday, and now closes a chapter in Olympic history.

He was 79.

The fullness of time, as it always does, will tell all.

For now, it is enough to say that Rogge was a bridge — a figure of humanity and stability — between arguably the most important of the IOC presidents, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and the ninth and current president, Thomas Bach, who against considerable currents is vigorously trying to institute a series of reforms aimed at pulling the original 19th century construct that is the IOC into the 21st century.

First, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

First, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

First and foremost, let us pay tribute to Elaine Thompson-Herah, winner Saturday of the women’s 100 at the Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. This summer, Thompson-Herah has cemented her status as one of the finest female sprinters of all time, if not the best.

In Tokyo, Thompson-Herah completed the two-time Olympic double-double, winning — again — the women’s 100 and 200, just as she did in Rio. Then, on Saturday in Eugene, she ran 10.54 to win the 100.

10.54.

This is the second-fastest 100 ever, behind only Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.49 in Indianapolis in 1988. It’s a bunch of other stuff, too — personal best (obviously); world lead (ditto); national, Diamond League and meet record (same) — but the important thing is that it’s only five-hundredths back of FloJo, and ETH, as she is known in track speak, is hot, and there are meets coming up, including in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, where she is already due to race, and it’s clear she wants 10.48 or lower.

That is one story. To be blunt, Elaine Thompson-Herah deserves far more credit than she is getting from the pack of journalistic sheep covering track and field. Way, way, way more.

Gunnar Bentz quietly gets to put Rio, and all that, behind him

Gunnar Bentz quietly gets to put Rio, and all that, behind him

TOKYO — If redemption is the most American of stories, then Gunnar Bentz — five years later — gets his chance here at the Tokyo 2020 Games.

It was nearly five years ago that Bentz and three other U.S. swimmers were involved in what came to be widely known as Lochtegate, the infamous episode at the gas station at the Rio 2016 Olympics.

None of the other three are on the Tokyo team.