Category Archives: olympics

Horns of a dilemma

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There is nothing wrong with the acronym G.O.A.T.—a label being thrown around incessantly by commentators, sportswriters and athletes themselves—except that it’s pretentious, grandiose, sanctimonious. And a cliché.

It stands for Greatest of All Time, an assertion that can’t possibly be substantiated. How is it reasonable to compare a 21st Century performer to someone from, say, 1921, who functioned in an era of prehistoric nutrition, training methods and equipment?

There certainly are great modern-day champions, folks of unprecedented accomplishment, running around loose these days. And it is simple enough to quantify their specific successes. But this braying of singular majesty, often self-congratulatory and regularly perpetuated by the subject of the claim, not only invites the wrath of vicious social-media trolls on the rare occasions of a stumble, but also recalls an earlier sportsworld term that meant just the opposite.

For decades, the “goat” was the player who goofed up—spectacularly—by dropping the potential winning pass, running the wrong way, surrendering the decisive home run, failing to touch base, calling a timeout that didn’t exist, signing an inaccurate scorecard. The last thing any jock wanted to be called was a goat.

But here we are. Tom Brady has been declared the G.O.A.T. And Michael Jordan. LeBron James. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. But if one of them is indeed the Greatest of All Time—by definition, unequalled by any other from the past, present or future—how can there be so many of them?

This isn’t just about the extraordinary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and her agonizing realization that she couldn’t continue at the Tokyo Games while “fighting with [my] own head.” But the question has been raised in some precincts whether the relentless promotion of Biles as the G.O.A.T of these Olympics—the one-to-watch among 11,000 athletes—likely contributed to wearing her down.

She in fact has cited the weight of expectations.

To Slate.com’s Justin Peters, NBC especially “turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games…It is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance.”

Plenty of reports from former sports journalism colleagues likewise hung Biles out there as something of a G.O.A.T. pinata, a challenge to be knocked off, accentuating her skills with prose filled with twists and rolls and handsprings and somersaults and roundouts.

Biles herself had begun showing up two years ago in a competition leotard with the sequined outline of a goat’s head, just as G.O.A.T. tattoos have been sported by several athletes of recent vintage. This week Robert Andrews, a sports performance consultant who counseled Biles before the 2016 Olympics, told Yahoo Life, “I don’t like it. I think it’s misplaced. I think it’s misused and I think it puts a big target on athletes’ backs.”

There’s this hyperbole: While Biles has dominated her sport for most of the past decade and set new standards in the sport—and has won more world gymnastic championship gold medals (19) than anyone in history—she is not the most celebrated Olympian in her sport.

Now in her second Olympics, Biles so far has collected six medals—four gold, a silver and a bronze. Brilliant work. But Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union, remains the all-time leader in that department—18 medals (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) over three Olympics from the mid-1950s to mid-‘60s. (Plus 14 world championship medals.) Old tapes verify that Latynina’s skills were pedestrian compared to the airborne gyrations all elite gymnasts can do now, but that’s not the point.

In her day, Latynina was the best. Since the early 2010s, Biles has been the best. And a head-to-head challenge might not be fair. Biles is struggling with her confidence. But Latynina is 86 years old.

Carry on?

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As a journalist, my job is to be skeptical but not cynical. As something of an Olympic patriot, furthermore, I don’t want to be too judgmental about whether the Tokyo Games should be carrying on as the pandemic surges again; whether the absence of spectators renders the event nothing more than a studio TV show; whether NBC, corporate sponsors and the International Olympic Committee have prioritized financial gain over the health of athletes and the Japanese public; whether it is time to consider doing away with the Olympics altogether.

But it was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I believe, who said the responsibility of a journalist is to wonder and worry and poke and prod. So, here goes.

Even amid the usual athletic drama and skill playing out—compelling attractions, for sure—it is not possible to ignore so many of the Olympics’ 21st Century ills currently on display, beginning with the organizers’ deaf ear to overwhelming public sentiment against soldiering on.

Virus positives (predictably) had eliminated two dozen Olympians, including teenaged tennis star Coco Gauff, days before the Games started. With fans (wisely) barred, the all-too-common post-Olympic uselessness of excessively expensive arenas, White Elephantism, already has set in. The Atlantic described the Opening Ceremonies, typically an uplifting kickoff to the quadrennial 17-day international festival, as a “mournful mishmash…that only emphasized its dark context.”

There is a stark reminder of doping issues as Russia has fielded more than 300 competitors who somehow managed to dodge an international sports ban on that nation for systemized drug use in recent years. A judo player from Algeria has been dismissed for refusing to compete against an Israeli, and a second one from the Sudan sent himself home for the same reason.

Having covered 11 Olympics, I long ago came to the conclusion that the Games are too big, too expensive, too political, too corporate, too prone to cheating and insider deals among IOC officials and authoritarian leaders. But, too, I came to accept what John MacAloon, Chicago philosophy professor and Olympic historian, articulated two decades ago: “We can’t eliminate all the problems. That’s why the Games are interesting. They’re life itself. If the Games were more pure and perfect, they’d be less appealing. They mirror not just a dream version of life; they also mirror the things we struggle with as ordinary human beings. None of us lives a dream. We live messy, ordinary lives.”

Skeptically but not cynically speaking, then, the argument that the Olympics—now 2,813 years since the first Ancient Games—is worth keeping is the (not always realized) ideal of seeking global understanding. Sort of the United Nations in sneakers. MacAloon again: “Sports in service of intercultural communication and a better world.” Not the worst ongoing experiment.

During the 2000 Sydney Games, Australian psychologist Amanda Gordon offered her sense that having the Olympics in town was “a way for people around the world to learn about each other. You see these athletes do something terrific and you say, ‘Where’s Bulgaria? Let’s have a look on the map. What do they like to do? What do they like to eat?’ From that point of view, the Olympics is extremely important. It says, ‘Let’s get together.’”

The great Norwegian speedskater of the 1990s, Johann Olav Koss, argued that the Olympics is “for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world to understand how to win, but also how to lose and how to respect everyone.”

A major problem with the Tokyo Games, of course, is that while roughly 11,000 athletes from 200-plus countries are on site, Covid protocols have dictated that there is no world there. There is no international crowd, stoking the fire. Performances feel forced—barely more than practice sessions.

Perhaps my most memorable evening of Olympic coverage came in Sydney, when the raucous involvement of 112,000 shrieking spectators was as much a part of the show as a handful of excruciatingly tense track and field finals. Australia’s Cathy Freeman stood her nation on its head with a come-from-behind 400-meter victory; American Michael Johnson won a second consecutive Olympic men’s 400; American Stacy Dragila outdueled Aussie Tatiana Grigorieva in the first Olympic women’s pole vault; Romanian Gabriela Szabo edged Ireland’s Sonia O’Sullivan in an exhausting 5,000, after which neither woman could summon the strength to raise her arm to acknowledge the cheering; Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie won the 10,000—6.2 miles—of step-for-step dueling with Kenya’s Paul Tergatby by less than one second.

In each case, who was carrying whom—the athletes straining with the weight of expectation on their backs or the fans desperately, vicariously trying to lift them—wasn’t clear, but it was incredibly noisy business. The athletes, winners and non-winners, later remarked on the “energy in the stadium;” how “you can’t find words to describe this crowd;” how “the adrenaline in the place was amazing.”

So television now can show the world’s best athletes running, jumping, throwing, swimming, kicking, skateboarding, surfing and so on. But a viewer can’t feel the Olympics without an in-person audience. Television can’t conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement.

Stripped of that mix—no fault of Tokyo’s organizers—this Olympic recess (however brief) from the world’s troubles is left feeling too close to the 11 o’clock news. Overwhelmed with reports on all that’s wrong with the Modern Games.

Should that mean that Tokyo ought to be the last Olympics? Especially since a major focus on the upcoming Winter Games, to be hosted by Beijing in 2022, so far has been on China’s human-rights violations and its anti-democratic bent—and whether Western nations therefore should consider boycotting?

No clear answers will be forthcoming here. It’s important to acknowledge that, despite plenty of journalistic skepticism, I’ve found covering the Olympics to be culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff.

Really?

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A good Latin phrase always is handy for extraordinary Olympic moments. (The Games official motto is in Latin: citius, altius, fortius—faster, higher, stronger.) So, in regard to the Florida official who has volunteered his state as alternative host of this summer’s coronavirus-threatened Tokyo Games, I suggest non compos mentis.

The translation is “Not in control of the mind” or, less formally, “insane; mentally incompetent.” Though etymologists aren’t in full agreement about the exact origin, one theory is that non compos mentis evolved into “nincompoop.”

That seems about right for the classically blockheaded offer, sent to the International Olympic Committee in a letter by Jimmy Patronis, who is Florida’s chief financial officer. In what must be described as nothing more than a publicity stunt, Patronis announced that, since Tokyo’s nabobs appear to be hesitating about going ahead with the Olympics in the face of the pandemic, the Sunshine State is ready to step in.

The headlines produced by that cockeyed suggestion, Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff wrote in The Nation, “looked like something out of The Onion.”

Patronis, oblivious to reality on several levels, argued that, while Tokyo organizers had chosen to postpone last summer’s originally scheduled Games for one year, Florida went about staging the NBA playoffs in the Disney World Covid-19 bubble. And Tampa is about to pull off the pandemic Super Bowl. And there have been several Jacksonville-based UFC events during the plague. (UFC events!)

Patronis is a finance guy; I got a C in my college economics course, so what do I know? Except that, in the process of covering 11 Olympics, I became aware that the Summer Games consist of 33 sports, requiring such diverse facilities as a swimming hall, track and field stadium, equestrian venue, cycling velodrome, rowing site, shooting and archery ranges, multiple soccer fields, separate arenas for fencing, gymnastics and badminton. And much more.

There are 206 Olympic nations eligible to compete in the Games; compare that to the measly 193 countries in the United Nations. Roughly 11,000 athletes—as well as coaches, game officials and physicians—must be fed and housed and transported to both competition and training locations during the Games. Logistics and details are such that cities are designated Olympic hosts seven full years in advance of the 2 ½-week international festival. One decision-maker at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics said the task amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 days.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

Another minor detail, spelled out in the Olympic Charter, is that the IOC “shall have no financial responsibility in respect to the organization, financing and staging of the Olympic Games other than the contribution determined in the Olympic Host Contract, unless otherwise agreed in writing.”

So, while recent polls have found that 80 percent of Japan’s population favors cancelling the Games altogether, Tokyo has sunk about $25 billion into its operation, a major factor in opting to (fingers crossed) soldier on. That Florida would have the resources, the time or the ability to waltz in as Olympic savior—let alone to get the IOC’s backing—is “bonkers,” Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist told the Huffington Post. “This is an idiotic, delusional, uninformed, ignorant Florida politician trying to put his name out there. It’s got no chance. It’s just stupid.”

Humor columnist Dave Barry’s sly take in the Miami Herald was that “chief financial officer Jimmy has already done the hard part, writing the letter. All we need now is a detailed plan and thousands of workers and $25 billion.”

Money issues and crushing deadlines aside—July 23 is designated as the Games’ opening day—there remains the primary problem of the still-spreading, mutating virus. Patronis portrayed Disney World as “an incredible model for how to run a complex organization in the midst of Covid-19.” (Hmmm: A Mickey Mouse Olympics?) He apparently is ignoring the fact that Florida has had more virus cases (1.7 million to 99,000) and deaths (26,000 to 880) than Tokyo.

Daytona Beach News-Journal columnist Mark Lane dismissed Patronis’ Fantasy Land proposal as  a “cheesy bit of hype” that “also demonstrates a more depressing truth—that the state continues to do everything in its power to minimize the seriousness of [the deadly] illness…”

The Patronis angle does sound familiar, in a way. Quid me anxius sum?

Which is Latin for “What, me worry?”

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.

R.I.P.: New York City’s Olympian

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In a half century as a sports journalist, I came across countless practitioners of performance dexterity. Jocks who could roll with the punches, professionals capable of conjuring last-minute heroics, coaches and trainers who could mold champions. Jay Kriegel was their equal, a bespectacled gent with an impressive gray mane who was the epitome of a shaker and mover.

When I got to know him a bit, Kriegel was in his mid-60s. I was reporting on New York City’s bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games and Kriegel was executive director of the group pursuing that event as part of what he called his “love affair” with the city of his birth.

It didn’t work out. For reasons forever obscure—political or financial or even pragmatic—those Games were awarded to London by the International Olympic Committee poohbahs. But not because Kriegel, who died in December at 79, had not been on top of his game.

The appropriate sports cliché for him would be The Go-To Guy. He seemed to know every person—and every building—in Big Town. His resume was all benign power in the worlds of politics, real estate, broadcasting. He had been a wunderkind assistant to John Lindsay, both during Lindsay’s time as a Congressman and later as mayor.

Under Lindsay, Kriegel helped draft sections of what became the voting rights act of 1965. He co-founded the American Lawyer magazine, was a CBS-TV vice president.

So when Dan Doctoroff, then an equity investment manager, got the notion in the late ‘90s that New York City embodied everything about the Olympics—skyscraper dreams, subway-sharpened elbows, United Nations diversity—he sought out Kriegel to head his NYC2012 team.

“I wanted somebody who was passionate about New York,” Doctoroff said then, “who knew more people in New York than I did, with government and media experience, and was indefatigable.”

One of Kriegel’s previous roles was as part of CBS’ proposal to air the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, so he knew that territory as well. Still, when Doctoroff contacted him about the Olympic vision, Kriegel’s first reaction was, “Crazy idea. Strange idea.”

“But I liked Dan,” Kriegel later related. “He was intelligent, thoughtful. The thing is, I had never thought of the city in that way. For a New Yorker, this got you to think about the city differently.”

Specifically, he considered “how the city had come through this astonishing renaissance in the ‘80s and ‘90s. You wouldn’t have thought the same way in the ‘80s. But there was this incredible vitality, the conviction that the city runs well and can run well. People have come to appreciate this as a great stage.

“And looking at the plan, there was this appreciation of what’s here that we all take for granted every day. This incredible infrastructure and capacity to absorb large events.”

Shortly after announcing his intention to seek the Olympics, Doctoroff was named deputy to mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, so he had government backing. He sought out former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke for his diplomatic connections; former U.S. Olympic Committee fund-raiser John Krimsky for his corporate relationships; former gymnast Wendy Hilliard for her deep ties to Olympic sports bodies; and urban planner Alex Garvin to design a Games blueprint.

It was Kriegel who employed the gears and levers of power to facilitate multiple development initiatives not only meant to execute the Olympics but also to improve the city. Sure enough, a study by New York University’s transportation policy center—completed six years after New York lost the vote to host the Games—concluded that “contrary to popular belief, the New York City Olympic Plan has largely been implemented even though the Games [were] held in London.”

The study cited the bid group’s initiative to re-zone the West Side Hudson Yards, extension of the No. 7 subway line, transformation of the High Line and Brooklyn Waterfront and realization of an expansive ferry service. Even the last-minute rejection of NYC2012’s proposed West Side Stadium, the NYU report said, had pushed the city toward quick agreements to construct new stadiums by both the Yankees and Mets.

“Right down that list, pretty damn good,” Kriegel said just days before the 2012 Olympics opened. In London. “The principle we stated was to have a bid to benefit the city, win or lose.”

Now, the only loss is Kriegel.

Real person. Real sport.

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Frank Carroll is retiring at 80. He coached figure skating for 58 years, most widely known as the mentor of five-time world champion Michelle Kwan and five other Olympic medalists, including 2010 Olympic winner Evan Lysacek.

In a half-century of covering sports, I can’t say I crossed paths with too many characters more memorable than Carroll. All those heroes and villains in what my sportswriting brethren typically considered real sports—football, baseball, basketball—all those physically gifted protagonists, psychologically vulnerable troupers, philosophically aware artistes and occasionally fanatical wingnuts, yet one of the really fascinating humans was encountered in…skating. Go figure.

(I must acknowledge that in reporting on five Winter Olympics, I long ago was disabused of any notion that, a) figure skating lacked arresting personalities and b) that it was not a sport. An early lesson came from 1992 U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski, a 31-year-old once-divorced, remarried former waitress who partnered on the ice with Rocky Marval, the 26-year-old owner of a small trucking company. The Waitress and the Truck Driver. “To say this isn’t a sport, just because we wear fancy outfits,” Urbanski lectured, “I’d like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eight-inch blade. And then tell me it’s not a sport.”)

Not that there isn’t a theatrical aspect to the endeavor. And Carroll—who spun humorous, involved tales that he illustrated with hand gestures and dramatic expressions—was an ideal example. For a brief time in his youth, after all, he had been an actor. Sort of.

“There were these bad beach party movies that I was in, in the mid-‘60s,” he said. “I was a body. I’m Irish. I’m like Casper the Ghost with this skin, but I had blond hair then and I was the perfect beach bum/surfer. They would spray me tan!”

He is the only son of a teacher who grew up in Worcester, Mass., with a pond near his home that lured him into skating. Take a breath, and listen….

“I used to go to the movies and see those old Movietone newsreels that had pictures of [1948 Olympic gold medalist] Barbara Ann Scott and Dick Button [the 1952 and ’56 Olympic champ]. Then they built an indoor rink in Worcester, across the street from my house.

“I was 12. I was the second person on the ice when it opened. [The owner] was the first. He gave me a key and said, ‘Frankie, if this rink isn’t being used for hockey or lessons, it’s yours.’ I was a very good skater very early because I’d practice at home on the floor. I’d put a dishrag down on the linoleum floor and skate around on that.”

He enrolled at Holy Cross and, based on his regional skating title, was given a partial athletic scholarship and awarded a varsity letter for skating, “even though they didn’t have a skating team,” he said.

“I’d practice early in the morning before the Holy Cross hockey team got on the ice, and they’d line up along the boards, waiting with their hockey sticks. If I missed one thing in my routine, they’d take their sticks and bang on the boards and boo me.

“But if I skated well, they’d all cheer.

“When I finished school, well, you know, you go on with your life. My father thought skating was frivolous or stupid, but I was 21 years old and I signed for more money in a week with the Ice Follies than my dad ever made in a year in his entire life: $250 a week.”

He wound up going to Hollywood at the invitation of friends and found his way, temporarily, into bit parts of those beach movies. “I didn’t know I wanted to coach at all. I’d go to the beach, go to the gym to work out. But there was this little rink in Van Nuys where I gave skating lessons to beginners, and these kids began to improve and I got in demand. So I eventually gave up the cattle call at the studio.”

Just as elaborately—with asides and not-especially pertinent detail—Carroll told of how his accidental discovery of music for a Kwan skating program resembled finding a winning lottery ticket in the street; of how his coaching theory lacked talk of winning because that was “destructive language; it doesn’t make any sense to be promising and building hopes up in the sky”); yet how, before Kwan’s 1998 Olympic final in Nagano, Japan, he “prayed a lot. I went to the Catholic church here because that’s my church, and then I went to the [Buddhist] temple, just to cover my bases.”

Kwan, though the favorite, was beaten by Tara Lipinski that year, and retired with a silver and bronze in two Games. But Carroll—voted into a handful of skating halls of fame—long ago was safely inside the velvet ropes, and got his Olympic coaching gold with Lysacek eight years ago.

He covered his bases. He left his mark. He made things interesting. In a real sport.

Meeting Mandela

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This was in 1992, on the morning of the Opening Ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics. Apartheid officially had ended in South Africa, allowing that nation’s athletes to be welcomed back into the Olympic family after 32 years of isolation, so a colleague and I took the crosstown subway ride to the seaside Olympic Village to seek South African athletes’ thoughts on the tangle of sports and politics.

As we were leaving, Nelson Mandela suddenly appeared, trailed by no more than a half-dozen reporters and a TV camera. We had stumbled into an ad hoc news briefing and, given the accidental opportunity, tossed a couple of questions Mandela’s way.

It is not every day that one blunders into meeting and addressing a person who truly was changing the world. Mandela, who would have turned 100 today, July 18—he died in 2013—was then two years past his 27 years of imprisonment for having agitated for blacks’ rights, still two years from being voted in as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

A month earlier, with riots in the black townships threatening to slow the process of integration, he had suggested that South African athletes stay away from the Barcelona Games. There were only eight blacks in South Africa’s 95-person Olympic delegation. But as he would do in embracing the mostly white national rugby team during the 1995 World Cup as a unifying force in South Africa’s transition away from racist minority rule, Mandela reversed field, choosing a “one-team, one-nation” strategy, another of his many signals for harmony.

“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” he said that morning in 1992. “Let’s concern ourselves with our presence here. I urge you to come along with me, to forget the past and get on with the future.”

He posed for cameras in the village with a handful of green-and-yellow-clad athletes—black and white—and expressed the often-empty Olympic hope that united sport somehow can lead a splintered world in the right direction.

“It’s important for our young people to participate,” said Mandela, who lit up to recall his youthful days as a boxer and track athlete when asked about his own sporting inclinations.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that this is the correct decision, and I am quite satisfied in the racial breakdown of the team. I would have liked it to be a reflection of our population”—at that point, 26 million of the 32 million South Africans were black—“but there has to be a starting point.”

In South Africa, newspaper editorials had been encouraging Olympic participation as a spur in negotiations between Mandela’s black African National Congress and white South African president F.W. de Klerk, and as an emotional way to appeal to the most radical constituents on both sides.

A white South African equestrian in the Mandela group that day, Peter Gotz, reported that “Olympic fever has been raging in South Africa . . . . It’s been a very nice gesture to have Mr. Mandela here. He told us, as a team, that he was proud of us, and that the whole country is proud of us. I guess I don’t feel so much a part of history as I feel a part of the present and the future.”

That dumb-luck crossing of paths 26 years ago with such a historic figure was exhilarating, and a comfort to be reminded that a long career of covering sports events doesn’t limit one to meaningless frivolity. Among Mandela’s beliefs of reconciliation and hope was the acceptance of how sports could grab headlines and wield surprising power, could even be used to narrow a brutal black-white divide in his country.

A person really can bump into heroes in the sports journalism business.

Catalonia and the reign in Spain

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A Barcelona waiter told me, “To a lot of people here, there is no Spain.”

That was 25 years ago, during the 1992 Olympics. That was a quarter century before the current confrontation between Spain’s central government and separatists in the country’s autonomous region of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital.

At the time, and in the midst of the celebratory Olympic festival, declarations of Catalan identity didn’t sound revolutionary. Rather, they seemed expressions of local pride. We visitors quickly learned that, while Spanish was spoken in that technically Spanish city, the preferred language was Catalan. Residents and businesses displayed the flags of Barcelona and of Catalonia, not Spain.

In Barcelona, there was this hint of Catalan superiority which partly manifested itself in the widespread rejection of bullfighting, a sport the locals considered more appropriate for the barbarians in Spain—that other country. Barcelona saw itself as more European than other cities on the Iberian Peninsula, more wealthy and sophisticated.

Catalans were proud to claim surrealist painter Salvador Dali as one of their own, as well as Art Nouveau architect Antonio Gaudi, whose elaborate, vaguely phantasmagorical designs lend such a unique style to Barcelona’s landscape. The city also took ownership of Picasso, though he was born in southern Spain and a resident of France most of his life, because he spent the productive years of his radical painting in Barcelona.

So the 2017 developments, of Catalan referendums for independence and the backlash of Spanish leaders’ no-negotiation stance against them, feel considerably more serious—and dangerous—than during the ’92 Olympics. Back then, the Catalan-Spanish antagonism didn’t appear more threatening than a sports rivalry, which could be summed up in the way Barcelonans treated two local tennis stars during the Games.

One, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, was cheered because she was born in Barcelona. The other, her brother Emilio, was booed because he was born in Madrid, though he lived most of his life in Barcelona. It was an “us against them” posture, but good-natured enough that the old Saturday Night Live news parody, repeating on a weekly basis that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” applied pretty well.

The iron grip of the dictator Franco over Catalonia, his 40-year smothering of Catalan language and culture, in fact had been loosened. It turns out, though, that too much of Franco’s era still lingered. And that century-old resentments, while mostly just below the surface, weren’t so hard to find.

During the Barcelona Olympics’ opening ceremonies, the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, was greeted with the playing of Els Segadors, the official national anthem of Catalonia, which had been written 352 years earlier to celebrate the Catalan victory over the 17th-Century Spanish king Philip IV. And Catalans still celebrate National Day on Sept. 11, recalling Catalonia’s loss of independence to Spain in 1714.

To prepare for covering the ’92 Olympics, I had read George Orwell’s 1938 book, “Homage to Catalonia,” a personal account of Orwell’s experiences and observations during the Spanish Civil War. (When, by the way, Els Segadors surged in popularity among Catalans.) Franco, of course, rose to power at the conclusion of that war.

Now I read that, to many in Catalonia, the crackdown by Spain’s central government evokes memories of the dark days of post-civil war dictatorship. As if Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still not dead.

Olympic Tomorrowland

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Coming (not so) soon: The Los Angeles Olympics.

In 2028!

There could be a robot uprising against humans by then, according to flamboyant inventor Elon Musk. There could be people settling a colony on Mars. There could be genetic doping in elite sports, Six Million Dollar Man stuff. A book and movie predict curtains for the whole world in 2028.

The time gap is so disorienting—the first Games to be awarded to a host city more than seven years in advance—that the typically sluggish buildup in Olympic interest is even more conspicuous, with an occasional drift into fantasy.

The New York Times reacted to the news by having its Los Angeles-based reporters imagine new Olympic events tailored to La-La Land culture, and came up with “most rides on ‘It’s a Small World’ without a nervous breakdown,” “least original movie idea” and “fastest out of Dodger Stadium to beat the crowds (and traffic),” among other snarky proposals.

Me? I think of a more logical L.A. cliché which has been around since the first Games in that city in 1932: Let the auditions begin for another Hollywood cattle call.

Tarzan movies long ago fell out of favor, but a 2030s action-film star very well could emerge from among the ’28 Games’ competitors, discovered by the people in dark glasses and canvas chairs. With all those hunks on the Olympic playing fields, ready to make a muscle; all those female gymnasts flying around in leotards like Superwoman, someone is bound to catch the eye of movie talent scouts.

Such gold medal-to-silver screen possibilities certainly were a topic of discussion going into the most recent Los Angeles Olympics, in 1984, when American boxer Tyrell Biggs predicted he would win the super heavyweight gold medal (he did), “and they’ll cut to my commercial right after the National Anthem….that’s good American stuff.”

It had happened something like that in 1932 to one Clarence Linden Crabbe, whose gold medal in the 400-meter swimming freestyle served as a screen test, leading Crabbe to ditch his law studies, change his name to Buster and put on a loin cloth for the cameras.

Based on that formula, Biggs was asked in ’84 if he could swim. “I can dance,” he assured. And while he never starred in a musical, turning immediately to a 14-year professional boxing career that included three world-title bouts (all losses), Biggs did appear on the small screen in television’s American Gladiator series in the 1990s. And a documentary of his life reportedly is currently in production.

But, back to the future.

By 2028, might the choking traffic on L.A.’s infamous freeways consist entirely of driverless cars? How much sunnier might perpetually sunny Los Angeles be amid advancing climate change? What about the U.S. Geological Survey’s recent study that southern California already is overdue for a major earthquake? (During the ’84 Olympics, there was “earthquake repellent” aerosol spray on sale around L.A. It seemed to work.)

It isn’t clear just how much sweating of the details should be held in abeyance until, say, 2027. It has been duly reported that International Olympic Committee officials chose to nail down a 2028 site so far in advance out of concern that the pool of host cities continues to dry up. (L.A.’s bid technically was for 2024, against favored Paris, but the IOC reasoned that it had better lock up both candidates now, while they were willing.)

Polls repeatedly have indicated Angelenos’ substantial public support for staging the Games, although—in the grand Olympic tradition of NIMBY dissent—there also is a NOlympics group agitating to scuttle the 2028 plans. Given L.A.’s abundance of competition-ready facilities and college dorms available to house the world’s athletes, there is a Bloomberg News suggestion that the IOC should consider placing all future Summer Games in Los Angeles. Or that L.A. at least be incorporated forever in a rotation of three or four permanent Olympic sites.

Such a reasonable approach would be far more cost-effective and rational than the current system, which makes every subsequent Games organizing team a collection of Olympic rookies. But when a similar idea was floated more than 20 years ago for the Winter Olympics, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch dismissed it out of hand, declaring that “the Games belong to the entire world”—and therefore should continue to foster the exorbitant cost, daunting organizational challenges and political trap doors of competitive bidding.

At this point, it’s sounds like we have a winner for that least original idea for a movie.

 

Korean Olympic choreography

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I just read the news today (oh, boy): South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, has publicly proposed forming a unified Olympic team with North Korea for February’s Winter Games in PyeongChang in the South. Even wilder: South Korean Cultural, Sports and Tourism Minister, Do Jong-hwan, has floated the idea of the North co-hosting the Olympics, with a yet-to-be determined number of ski events at the North’s new Masikryong ski resort.

“Pipe dream” is too mild a description. Any heartfelt longing to advance dialogue and reconciliation between the two Koreas, and the idea of doing so through the world’s most visible athletic festival, is certainly welcome. But the Korean War, after 64 years, technically is still on. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1953 but never signed a peace treaty, and just last month, Moon cited the “high possibility” of renewed military conflict over the North’s recent nuclear and missile tests.

The sports reality, furthermore, is that no North Korean athlete has yet qualified to compete in PyeongChang and, beyond that, officials in the North have not stated a willingness to participate in the Games. Choi Moon-soon, governor of PyeongChang’s Gangwon Province, told CNN this week that having the North host events is impossible, while Reuters reported that North Korea’s International Olympic Committee member, Chang Ung, confirmed that assembling a North-South team is unrealistic given the present political climate.

But the shadow boxing goes on—just as it did leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in the South’s capital, Seoul. Back then, North Korea spent more than a year angling for a role as co-host, demanding that it stage eight sports, which was then one-third of the Summer Olympic program. The IOC, keen to be the globe’s fence-mender, bent its charter—which stipulates that the Games are given to a single city—by offering to place three sports in the North.

As the point man in those IOC negotiations, then-IOC vice president Dick Pound experienced “something almost ritualistic” about the North’s bargaining tactics that was unrelated to real possibilities. “The North Koreans never seemed to hear what they were being told,” he said then.

A year before the Seoul Games, Pound reported that, when the IOC declared its final tender was three sports in the North, “North Korea said, ‘The latest offer is very encouraging progress toward putting eight sports in North Korea.’” The IOC nevertheless persisted with the talks because, “if you could get anyone across that border into North Korea to compete, into such an acknowledged trouble spot, it would really be special,” Pound said.

That still applies. But so does this: “South Korea,” he said, “could go up there and win a gold medal. That means that the South Korean flag goes up the pole in North Korea, and the South Korean anthem plays. And that’s unthinkable in the North.”

In 1988 as now, there were pockets of sentiment for North-South rapprochement, especially among student radicals. At the time, that passion manifested itself in regular, orchestrated demonstrations in which some students would hurl bricks and rocks at riot police, who answered with tear-gas guns and parcel-post-like trucks firing volleys of tear gas.

I witnessed one of those set-piece demonstrations on the steps of Yonsei University in Seoul with my friend Jay Weiner, then a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. And, while there was nothing pleasant about being caught in a tear-gas storm, the whole scene—contained within a couple of blocks—produced more a sense of choreographed fervor than of real danger.

A quarter-mile from the most intense action, folks from the neighborhood sat under umbrellas at small sidewalk cafes and drank ginseng tea, and little children bounced on a mattress under a street overpass. Coughing, weeping women streamed out of the university gates, eyeballs and skin burning from the tear gas and their mouths covered with handkerchiefs. But a middle-aged fellow strolling along in his Hawaiian shirt shrugged off the fuss.

“You learn to live with this,” he said. “We Koreans love clashes, although I must say, I don’t think these students understand much.” One student at a neighboring university told us that the “joke on campuses is that these kids don’t want to take tests, so they demonstrate. And the joke off campus is that the radicals are ‘spring mushrooms’ who pop up each year and then get a job working for Hyundai after graduation.”

Those spring mushrooms continue to appear, and the Olympics has been a venue for the hope, however dim, of a reunified Korea. Though the North wound up skipping the ’88 Seoul Games altogether, there subsequently were two occasions at the Summer Olympics, in Sidney in 2000 and Athens in 2004, when teams from the North and South marched together in Opening Ceremonies under a flag with the generic map of the Korean peninsula.

In both cases, though, the North and South competed separately. And to read the news these days (oh, boy) is to be reminded that neither side has won the Korean War.