The Valieva matter: taking a chill pill, and asking, what is 'fairness'?

BEIJING — Five, going on six, years ago, in the weeks before the 2016 Rio Games, an 18-year-old American rhythmic gymnast, Kristen Shaldybin, tested positive for a very low level of a banned diuretic called hydrochlorothiazide, or HCTZ.

The positive test, it was asserted, was due to the levels of HCTZ in the tap water she was drinking straight out of the faucet.

In the years leading up to Rio, Shaldybin was living on Chicago’s upscale North Shore,. Indeed, she is now a graduate of one of Highland Park High, one of the leading schools in the area.

Did the U.S. authorities assert then — as they did this week, amid the furor over 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva — that the credibility of the entire anti-doping system was at issue?

Everything in the Valieva case turns on this: she is 15

Everything in the Valieva case turns on this: she is 15

BEIJING — As close readers of the World Anti-Doping Code (hello!) would know, the right to appeal a provisional suspension is new to the 2021 version.

So.

Here at these 2022 Winter Olympics, amid the latest seemingly explosive crisis involving the Russians, and in this instance the 15-year-old skating sensation Kamila Valieva, we have about the most fascinating test case imaginable.

Mikaela Shiffrin: the No. 1 athlete role model ever, in defeat

Mikaela Shiffrin: the No. 1 athlete role model ever, in defeat

BEIJING — Athletes are assuredly role models. Mikaela Shiffrin was the No. 1 role model ever Wednesday. In defeat.

Understand: the reason you go to the Olympic Games is to win. Especially when you are arguably the best female alpine skier ever.

But when you crash out of your first race after just a few gates, the one where you are the defending Olympic champion, and then in your second race, the one in which you have won literally dozens of times on the World Cup tour, you ski out again, once more literally just seconds into the race, what then?

What then is the profile in vulnerability and, yes, courage that Shiffrin delivered Wednesday — though it may not feel like it to her just now, and may not perhaps for a very long time.

Eileen Gu: like Kobe Bryant, a generation's personification of the Olympic ideal

Eileen Gu: like Kobe Bryant, a generation's personification of the Olympic ideal

BEIJING — Standing atop the big air ramp here at Shougang before her third and final run, 18-year-old Eileen Gu rocked to her left one, two, three, several times. She blew a kiss.

Then she turned, pointed her skis at the ramp and threw down.

The Winter Olympics will never be the same. Winter sport in this country of 1.4 billion people will never be the same. In a Games marked by Covid and so much more, here was — joy. Here was the arrival of a personality the likes of which the Olympics, indeed worldwide sport, has not seen since perhaps Kobe Bryant, an international figure able to transcend boundaries. And, moreover — a young woman. The future.

Unsolicited therapy talk with Mikaela Shiffrin

Unsolicited therapy talk with Mikaela Shiffrin

BEIJING — Mikaela Shiffrin and I have very little in common. She is a she. I am not. She is blonde. I am not. She is in her 20s. I’m — uh, not. Further, to be exceptionally obvious, she is a very, very good skier. I am not. Frankly, I am quite terrible on skis, and it’s something of a joke in our house that if I never, ever go on skis ever again that would be super OK. Why do you think I moved from Chicago to California?

You don’t, however, have to be a very good skier to appreciate very good skiing. Shiffrin is, without question, and with all respect to Lindsey Vonn — whom I have known for nearly 15 years — the greatest female skier in the history of Planet Earth. Not hyperbole. Even Bode Miller says so. “I’m a huge fan,” he told Ski Racing. “She’s the best racer that I’ve ever seen, male or female.”

One of the things you learn after writing for these many years about what separates the best from the rest, what makes someone an Olympic champion, is that at this level everyone has physical ability. The difference-maker is mental. One, the best hate to lose even more than they want to win. Two, they have an almost preternatural ability at go-time to be calm, almost zen. That is the being-in-the-zone thing.

China gets it started by making it so obvious: 2022 is not 2008 anymore

China gets it started by making it so obvious: 2022 is not 2008 anymore

BEIJING — How to top what happened here on a steamy summer night 13, going on 14, years ago?

Remember: precisely at the stroke of 8:08 p.m. on the evening of August 8, 2008, 2,008 drums sounded out the powerful beat of China rising. The drums carried an unmistakable message. We, more than 1 billion people with a great and glorious history, have arrived, to stake our claim among the great powers of the world, now, at the dawn of the 21st century. Take notice, those drums made crystal clear.

On Friday night, back at the Bird’s Nest, the iconic stadium where in 2008 Usain Bolt would go on to light up the track, across Olympic Park from the cube where Michael Phelps would go 8-for-8, Beijing formally became the first city in Olympic history to become host of both the Summer and Winter Games, athletes Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang lighting the cauldron — a torch placed in a latticed snowflake-style sculpture (cue: environmental sensibilities).

Xi, Bach and history in the making in Beijing

Xi, Bach and history in the making in Beijing

BEIJING — Its many critics, particularly in the West, presumably do not want to hear or are not willing to listen to anything that might suggest these Beijing 2022 Games might carry salvation of any sort. Indeed, the numbers show a mighty few people from literally around the world tuned in to the 139th International Olympic Committee’s session, its general assembly.

They missed history in the making.

The president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping. In a brief video message, outlined the importance of the Olympic movement to the People’s Republic, and vice-versa. Beijing is the first city in Olympic history to stage the Games in both Summer and Winter. Because of Beijing 2022, some 300 million Chinese have taken up winter sports — nearly the population of the entire United States, a number that figures to change the economies of winter sports in our 21st century. The Chinese, Xi said, pursue the “Olympic ideal with concrete actions.” This begs the question: around the world, who else?

After Xi came Thomas Bach, the IOC president. Bach is into his ninth year as president; Beijing will be his fifth Games leading the organization. He is a gold medalist from Montreal in 1976 and was himself denied the opportunity to compete in Moscow because of the U.S.-led boycott in 1980. On Thursday, he spelled out, eloquently, the mission of the Games, what they can and cannot do — to “get all humanity together in all our diversity,” but only if they “stand beyond all differences and political disputes.”

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.