Hanyu, Ledecká rise above it all in a year when world sport needed them - and other athletes - as salvation from scandal and cowardice

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Hanyu, Ledecká rise above it all in a year when world sport needed them - and other athletes - as salvation from scandal and cowardice

In international sports, 2018 was a year of courage and cowardice and common sense in seeing through a con.

And, as usual, it was a year of athletes of all colors, backgrounds, nations, shapes and sizes rising above the inanity, craven callousness and amorality of the old, white men who run global sports.

To which one can only say this:  Thanks, Yuzuru Hanyu and Simone Biles, thanks Ester Ledecká and Chloe Kim, thanks Eliud Kipchoge and Team Shuster. . .thanks to you and more for the achievements and goodwill that made us remember that sport, for all its ugly, scandalous warts, can show humankind at its most attractive.

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Sonia Henie, as controversial as she was legendary

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Sonia Henie, as controversial as she was legendary

I saw a tweet this week from Kiira Korpi, the Finnish figure skater who won medals three times at the European Championships, that referred to the last day of filming skating scenes for a Sonja Henie movie.  You can't find much information online about such a movie, but it is a biopic with the working title, "Queen of Ice."

That suggests it is drawing from a biography, "Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows, the Unsuspected Life of Sonja Henie."  The book, written by a Hollywood screenwriter and Henie's estranged brother, paints a very unflattering portrait of the greatest figure skater in history, seen by many as a Nazi collaborator or sympathizer, criticized by Norwegians for her high life, little esteemed in her own country until the end of her life.

When I went to Norway in 1993 to do reporting for a profile on Henie that appeared in a Sports Illustrated Olympic advertising supplement before the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, I asked Jan Staubo, then his country's International Olympic Committee member, to assess the way Norwegians viewed Henie today.  Staubo, who had been a pilot and German prisoner during World War II, politely but firmly declined to talk about Henie.

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