Centroids: After even more reading about Chicago's loss of the 2016 games some additional observations seem worthwhile. This doesn't have much to do with RC, but is topical enough to merit maybe a little discussion. Besides, at least three of us have Chicago background To continue one line of thought , Brazil's president, Lula, spent the entire week in Denmark , not just a couple of hours, wooing the IOC and all others with a stake in the 2016 games. As part of his pitch to earn the 2012 games, Tony Blair invested 5 days. Similarly for Putin in his successful bid for the Winter Olympics for 2014. Obama essentially gave a cameo appearance with just about no substance. Either it made no difference at all, or a negative difference. Basically, Chicago's marketing for the 2016 games was hugely inadequate. Granted, as some commentators have said, objectively Chicago's "sales pitch" was halfway decent, ie, fairly good, but given the anti-Americanism of a significant number of IOC members, this was a factor that any good marketer should have identified as essential to deal with if the bid was to have any chance of success.
Alas, as other pundits have said in other contexts , the naivete of the Obama team is stunning, based on something approaching pure romantic idealism , or even Political Correctness in its outlook. "Dreams of My Father" makes this clear enough, that is, OHB's "confession" in the book that he went out of his way as a Harvard student to make decisions / choices which would be seen by the cognoscenti in New England as reflecting the "approved" values of the upper crust and of media influentials. Chicago, by one account, spent $ 100 million just to put together a proposal for the Olympics. Losing the games, therefore, means not just a black eye, but a lot of money down the drain. All the more reason, in retrospect, to raise questions about the IOC and exactly how it arrives at the conclusions it does. Thinking about it, 2016 was probably, by most measures, going to be "Rio's year" no matter what any other city put forward. But this hardly says that the IOC is not due for serious and open / public criticism. I think everyone will look forward to the Brazil games with good feelings. If the choice was not Chicago, Rio was my favorite also --as it was with just about all of the 18 votes for Chicago, which switched to Rio on the next ballot. What cannot go unchallenged, however, is how the IOC decides which sports are chosen for inclusion in the games, and which are excluded. Consider these sports, currently part of the Olympics -- trampolining dressage = "dancing horses" women's boxing skateboarding synchronized swimming pistol shooting cloth twirling "gymnastics" There are others that also really seem dubious, like a plethora of water sports like various types of canoe competition, including navigating whitewater rapids . Is that really a sport ? Sure, it takes skill and athleticism, but so does mountain climbing, long distance hiking, and rappelling. These activities deserve admiration and respect, but not as "sports." As for cloth twirling ( whatever it may be called officially ), for cryin' out loud, that is a form of modern dance, . not something else. Why are any of these types of activities in the Olympics ? The one "sport" on the list, women's boxing, is inhumane by any reasonable set of ethical standards. A man can take punches to the chest innumerable times and be no worse for the experience. Punch a women on her chest and her breasts may be injured. If rules prohibit such punches, then the "sport" isn't boxing at all, but ersatz boxing with no serious sporting value. Then as one blogger has written : " I hereby suggest that criteria be as follows: any sport that relies on judges to decide the outcome should be shown the door." Well, this goes too far, but something must be done to make judging as objective as possible rather than sorta objective as it is now, with some decisions in hotly contested events --like gymnastics-- controversial in just about every Olympics, with national favoritisms evident again and again Then there are the excluded sports. No karate ? WTH ? The Olympics has judo, by any logical extension karate belongs in the mix. Rugby, by my lights, is borderline --but only because it isn't universal. And why is Cricket excluded ? It is played worldwide, albeit primarily by nations of the Commonwealth, but including India with its billion people. But the biggest travesty of all is the exclusion of both baseball and softball, sports that are played not only in the USA and Canada, but in Taiwan, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, etc, virtually all Latin American countries, plus a variety of "outremers " like Israel and the Philippines. That Europeans and some others have no interest in baseball only goes to show you that they have had inadequate upbringing. While I concede that soccer ought to be an Olympic sport since many millions of people follow it avidly, it is difficult to think of a more boring game. All games end with scores of 1 - 0 or 2 - 1. Its "much ado about nothing." In comparison baseball is infinitely more interesting and fun to watch. Then there is scoring, that is, awarding of medals. Gimmie a break and give the world a break. Take basketball, or soccer. These are major team sports. It would be hard to exaggerate the fact that veritable "empires" rise and fall depending on basketball or soccer outcomes. Yet someone wins a canoe race or shoots a bullseye in pistol competition or bounces really good on a trampoline and the medal values are the same ? What utter horse puckey. This is worse than unfair, it is completely absurd. The IOC clearly needs to be reconstructed from the ground up and any number of its current membership kicked out of the organization for anti-American bias. And for a lot of pandering to "sports" interests which have no legitimate place in the Olympics. Any comments welcome. Billy ============================================================== (http://www.nytimes.com/) (http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=ea1b50bb/be 59425c&camp=foxsearch2009_emailtools_1011078e_nyt5&ad=amelia_e_120x60&goto=h ttp://www.foxsearchlight.com/amelia) ____________________________________ July 9, 2005 I.O.C. Drops Baseball and Softball in 2012 By _LYNN ZINSER_ (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=LYNN ZINSER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=LYNN ZINSER&inline=nyt-per) The International Olympic Committee voted yesterday in Singapore to drop baseball and softball from the Summer Games starting in 2012 without adding replacements, shrinking the Olympics for the first time since 1936. I.O.C. members were asked to vote up or down on all 28 summer sports in the first such review of the competition. A similar vote is scheduled to occur every four years. After intense lobbying efforts by representatives of all the sports, many I.O.C. members predicted last week that no cuts would be made. But the voting produced several surprises. Not only did baseball and softball fail to make it - they survived a push in 2002 by the I.O.C. president, Dr. Jacques Rogge, to eliminate them - but none of the five sports vying to replace them received enough votes for inclusion. The change takes effect for the 2012 Summer Games in London. "We are now an Olympics of 26 sports," Rogge told reporters after the vote. The move stunned supporters of two sports with American roots that had spread internationally since being included in the 1990's. "It's devastating," said Lisa Fernandez, a pitcher for the United States team that won all three of softball's gold medals since the sport joined the Games in 1996. "We're not like basketball or other sports that have other professional opportunities. We thrive on our place in the Olympics." Baseball, which became a medal sport in 1992, was battling several negative perceptions with the I.O.C. First, because Major League Baseball did not make its players available for the Olympics, the competition never featured the best players in the world. The lingering reluctance of M.L.B. to institute strict drug testing was also a sticking point. Although a stronger testing program is now in place, it falls far short of Olympic standards. "Problems with doping in U.S. baseball probably cost the sport dearly," John Coates, an Australian I.O.C. member, told reporters in Singapore. The impact, however, will be felt more keenly in other countries. Cuba's baseball team is its Olympic pride, winning three of the sport's four gold medals. The United States team won the other, in 2000, in an upset of Cuba. "Those who bear most of the blame are the owners of the professional leagues who refuse to free up their ballplayers to compete," Carlos Rodriguez, president of the Cuban Baseball Federation, told The Associated Press in Havana. Jose Contreras, a pitcher for the _Chicago White Sox_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/chicagowhitesox/index.html?inline= nyt-org) who played for Cuba in the 1996 and 2000 Games, said Cuba had a rich baseball tradition. "The people take great pride in the way their teams have dominated for so long in international play, especially in the Olympics," he said through a translator. Major League Baseball, though, will soon unveil the format for the World Baseball Classic, a 16-team international tournament to be played before its regular season next March that would include the top players from each country. Softball had no such consolation. The sport worked for 30 years to become part of the Olympics. Since 1996, the United States team has produced some of the biggest stars of the Games and helped increase women's participation in the Olympics, also one of the I.O.C.'s goals. The main criticism was that the United States team was so dominant. It went undefeated in the 2004 Games but has received strong competition from Australia and China. "I never heard anything about dropping men's basketball when the U.S. was beating everybody by 40 points in 1992, and look what's happened in 20 years - we finished third," Fernandez said. "Our sport is growing internationally, too." USA Softball had tried to help expand the game, sending equipment to developing countries and welcoming international teams to play in the United States. Ron Radigonda, the executive director of USA Softball, said the number of nations playing softball had jumped to 127, ranking softball 14th on the list of 28 sports. "On our merits, we thought we were O.K.," he said. "We had good attendance, great television viewership. There are a lot of sports that would love to have our numbers." The international federations had asked that the vote totals for existing sports not be released, so the margin of defeat remains a mystery. Just as surprising as the vote to oust two sports yesterday morning was the decision not to replace them in the afternoon. Squash, rugby, golf, karate and roller sports were up for consideration, and squash and karate reached a final round of voting. Rogge had urged the membership to include those two and proposed that they vote the final round by a show of hands. But the members booed him, and he agreed to continue by secret electronic ballot. The members then voted, 63 to 39 against squash and 63 to 38 against karate. "Nobody was happy with the outcome in the morning; nobody was happy with the result of the afternoon," Dick Pound, a senior I.O.C. member from Canada, told reporters. Lee Jenkins contributed reporting from Pittsburgh for this article, and Ira Berkow from Chicago. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- October 3, 2009 Arrogance Dooms Olympic Dream By _Ron Flatter_ (http://www1.realclearsports.com/articles/author/ron_flatter/) COPENHAGEN - There may be 76 reasons why Chicago did not get the 2016 Olympics. One for every vote it did not get from the International Olympic Committee in the one round it bothered to consider America's latest failed bid for the Games. But there is one thing the theories about the reasons have in common. Arrogance. Good ol' American arrogance. Instead of dedicating three days and nights working the IOC members, as we hear Tony Blair did for London in its successful bid for 2012, President Obama figured all he had to do was show up for a few minutes here at Bella Center after an all-night flight on Air Force One. He had normally blasé media types pressing their noses against the windows of this sleek convention center just to get a glimpse of him stepping into his flown-in Cadillac. His very presence shook down the tight schedule the IOC usually likes to keep. His very name peppered the cacophony of unfamiliar languages all over town with little hints of recognition. But Obama was long gone by the time his ripple factor had flattened out. By then, Brazilian President Lula da Silva was wowing the room with his avuncular, rumpled flair. "Among the countries that today compete to host the Games, we are the only one that has never had this honor," Lula reminded the IOC. "For the others, it will be just one more Games." Lula came off more street savvy than his more-scripted comrades in world leadership. Looking like the old-guy version of Raymond Burr as Perry Mason. Sounding like a Portuguese-speaking Dick Vitale. With his nearest spin doctor as far away as the Amazon, Lula made his counterparts - Obama, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatomaya - look like metrosexual façades. And the freshly scrubbed politician just did not resonate the way the guy with a face full of hair did. Maybe this is the latest edition of the new world order. Four years ago it was Blair, slickly going where no politician had gone before. Vladimir Putin was inspired, shortly after. He showed up in Guatemala with a sudden ability to speak English, pushing Sochi, Russia, over the top in the bidding for the 2014 Winter Olympics. By the time Obama made his cameo here in Copenhagen, the IOC had been there and done that. It was not much of an appearance after all. Even the disgraced ex-president Juan Antonio Samaranch - pushed out the door in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal - reached out and grabbed his old IOC friends with his "I know I am near the end of my time, I am 89" speech on behalf of Madrid. Damned if it didn't get them to the final vote. It is safe to say more people will remember Samaranch and Lula from Copenhagen 2009 than they will Obama. Air Force One made a bigger impression. But to say Chicago lost because Obama mailed this one in would be missing the problems churning deeper in the Olympic waters. The IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee have been at odds over money for years. American companies provide the biggest share of sponsorships; American TV networks have kept the cash flow constant. So the USOC commands a great deal of revenue, something that has to rub more than a few IOC members the wrong way. Add the USOC's ill-timed and since-suspended decision this year to poke the sleeping bear and start its own TV network over the IOC's loud objections, and the kindling is there to ignite a firestorm against anything American. The Obama factor was merely an interesting distraction to what was really going on inside the big clubhouse in the middle of this Danish nowhere. So Chicago is summarily dismissed in one vote as New York had been in two votes four years ago in Singapore. So what's next for an American Olympics that will become no less than 16 years on from Salt Lake City 2002 and at least 24 years between Summer Games? As New York went noisily into that good night, expect Chicago to do the same. "It's already in this hemisphere with Rio, and it would not make sense for an American city to try again in 2020," Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley said. "It's in this hemisphere, and they have to move somewhere else." Does that bring us back to Los Angeles - spurned this time around by a USOC convinced Chicago would be the better bidder? And does this mean putting in a call for 2024? Probably. By then, word is Paris will want to celebrate the centennial of its "Chariots of Fire" Olympics. America, this Olympic thing may take a while.checkTextResizerCookie('article_body'); Ron Flatter is an American free-lance journalist based in New York who has covered international sports since 2004 for Radio Sport 927, Melbourne, Australia. He also does sports updates for 1050 ESPN New York and has anchored the news nationally for Fox News Radio. Page Printed from: http://www1.realclearsports.com/articles/2009/10/03/arrogance_dooms_olympic_dream_96494.html at October 03, 2009 - 03:36:18 PM CDT
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