On the defensive, IOC president plays alternative facts trump card

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On the defensive, IOC president plays alternative facts trump card

Funny what you will find while looking for something else.

I was searching the International Olympic Committee’s web site to check a reported fact about how much the IOC charges cities to bid for the Olympic Games when I came across the headlines pictured above on a story posted the day after the Sept. 15, 2015 deadline for 2024 Summer Games bids to be submitted.

Eighteen months later, that headline looks like an IOC version of something Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway would have explained away as “alternative facts.”

A rejection in a public referendum (Hamburg), fiscal priorities (Rome) and the threat of a referendum (Budapest) have reduced the competition to just two world-class cities (Los Angeles and Paris) and made a mockery of the IOC’s self-congratulatory headlines.

In an interview last week with the German magazine Stuttgarter Nachrichten, IOC President Thomas Bach blamed the dropouts on the “anti-establishment movements we have in many European countries.”

Or, alt facts.

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A tone deaf IOC won't hear what cities do: hosting the Olympics sounds like sour notes

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A tone deaf IOC won't hear what cities do: hosting the Olympics sounds like sour notes

How’s that Olympic Agenda 2020 thing working out, Mr. Bach?

All that hot air about reform and cost-cutting in both bidding for and staging the Games that filled a Monaco conference center in 2020, inflating a balloon of self-congratulations that has been leaking ever since?

“Like most people, I am sick and tired of hearing the mantra of Olympic Agenda 2020,” Canada’s Richard Pound said in an email.

Pound is the senior member of the current 95 in an International Olympic Committee presided over by Mr. Thomas Bach since September 2013.

Agenda 2020 was rushed to a vote in December 2014 after cities in five countries either dropped out of bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics or, in one case, dropped even the idea of a bid after public opposition.  That left just the capitals of two authoritarian nations in a race Beijing won over Almaty, Kazakhstan, despite serious environmental and logistical issues related to having skiing events in a low-snow area miles away from the host city.

And, then Mr. Bach, it was barely six months after your IOC membership rubber-stamped Agenda 2020 that cities in the 2024 Summer Games race began laughing at an emperor who still had no clothes.

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Skating rings around his rivals, Nathan Chen's rise to the sport's elite has been meteoric

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Skating rings around his rivals, Nathan Chen's rise to the sport's elite has been meteoric

Perfect symbolic fit:  Five Olympic rings.  Five Nathan Chen free skate quads.  And Chen doing them on the rink where a year from now he will be a strong contender for an Olympic gold medal.

The improbability that I could now confidently make such a bold statement about Chen is, in keeping with the numerical theme, the first of five takeaways from what he did Friday and Sunday in winning the Four Continents Championships in Gangneung, South Korea.

1.  Few U.S. singles skaters have had as meteoric a rise as Nathan Chen.

Last December 8, a day before the free skate at the Grand Prix Final, the 17-year-old from Salt Lake City was a prodigiously talented young skater with no striking international success at the senior level.

Barely three months later, he has become the most striking figure skater in the world, with a real chance to win the title in his debut at the senior World Championships beginning March 28 in Helsinki, Finland.

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2024 Olympics: Paris looks to build bridges while L.A. has to walk through walls

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2024 Olympics: Paris looks to build bridges while L.A. has to walk through walls

Paris and Los Angeles treated the start of the international campaign to win the 2024 Summer Olympics very differently Friday.

The French held a press opportunity at a glitzy brasserie with a view of the Eiffel Tower as it glowed and glittered in the projected five colors of the Olympic rings, and the new Paris 2024 slogan, “Made For Sharing,” appeared in the projection.

That was “Made For Sharing” in English only, in both the projection and on the Paris 2024 Facebook page, which has caused some consternation among the French, notably the Trumpian “Make France First” politician Marine Le Pen.  More on that later.

At the same time, the two leaders of the Los Angeles bid, chairman Casey Wasserman and CEO Gene Sykes, were doing a conference call with reporters.

The Paris 2024 press conference, which came only a few hours after an apparent terrorist attack at the Louvre, included the country’s prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who pointedly said France wants to “build bridges, not walls.”

The L.A. conference call, which came just hours after reports that Iran was imposing what amounts to a tit-for-tat ban by prohibiting U.S. freestyle wrestlers from entering Iran for a meet, included Wasserman doing his best to do a tap dance worthy of Fred Astaire around the point Cazeneuve was making.

That point, of course, is that president Trump’s immigration and travel ban and his criticisms of Mexico, China, NATO, Australia, the Trans Pacific Partnership and whomever or whatever else Trump’s puppet master, Steve Bannon, wants to attack next are building walls the Los Angeles bid may find difficult to break down or bridge.

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By straddling a line on Trump order, USOC loses its moral balance

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By straddling a line on Trump order, USOC loses its moral balance

It’s nice that the United States Olympic Committee has received assurances from the U.S. government that it will, in the USOC’s words, “work with us to ensure that athletes and officials from all countries will have expedited access to the United States in order to participate in international athletic competitions.”

Note that the USOC statement says nothing about guaranteed access and really contains nothing new.  The State Department always has worked with the USOC, and it always has had the right to deny access to undesirables of any sort, like the Chilean shooter refused a visa for the 1987 Indianapolis Pan American Games because he was accused of human rights violations, including murder, in his homeland.  Some say that justified denial hurt Anchorage's bid for the 1994 Winter Olympics.

But in the big picture, even assuring entry of athletes for international competitions is of little consequence in the face of the Trump administration’s order banning immigration and travel to the United States for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries.  It also would be overly optimistic to think the government is going to expedite access for athletes from those countries – or even grant it - while doing “extreme vetting” at the same time.

According to a person with knowledge of the situation, those assurances came too late to prevent an Iranian-born taekwondo athlete who is a citizen of Iceland from being denied entry to compete at a major event in Las Vegas, a situation first reported by ESPN.  The timing may have been unfortunate, but even that logical explanation will not allay fears of more to come.

That is why the rest of the USOC’s Monday statement on the issue was so disappointingly anodyne, even if that was expected.  It will do anything, as I suggested in a column posted yesterday, to avoid a Trump tantrum against the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Olympics, because lack of national government support would sound a death knell for L.A. 2024.

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