Olympics Letter Update

This is a tale of two swimmers.

Janet Evans (left), America's distance-swimming sweetheart of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean swimming champion who was born and raised there when the place was still called Rhodesia, are directly connected to the 2028 Olympiad and its fate.  Evans is the chief athletic officer of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and Coventry is now the president of the International Olympic Committee.  And this past Labor Day weekend, I got around to writing both of them, as I wanted to, to share my thoughts about the 2028 Olympics.  (I finally found the postal address for the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.)  I told Evans that I wanted to see the Olympics moved to a city outside the United States because of Trump and his fascist regime, and I asked Coventry to make that happen.

In my latter to Janet Evans, I told her how much I revered her and asked her to bear that in mind as I said rather bluntly that I did not want to see the Los Angeles Games take place because of the militarization of Los Angeles earlier this year and how Trump wants to use his power to bring California to heel.  I also mentioned how he might rough up athletes and spectators from other countries at the Games.  At one point, I even deigned to address her by her first name, even though I don't know her from Eve (although I have fantasized about knowing her, and knowing her intimately, but I didn't tell her that!).  This was different from the open letters I wrote to her on this blog, which were mostly my own brand of punditry in the form of letters to a friend.  This was brutal, personal honesty.  No sugar coating whatsoever.  

As for my letter to IOC President Coventry, I repeated the same points I had made in my February 2025 letter to her predecessor, Thomas Bach, that Trump is a threat to world peace and security and a danger to multilateralism, and I also mentioned how a Bach spokesman blew me off in his reply.  But then I made the added points of how Trump has made things worse for America and the world since then.  I especially stressed the recent militarization of Los Angeles and how Trump's immigration policy violates human rights.  (Although I didn't mention it, this might spur Coventry's memories of living in Zimbabwe under the repressive regime of Robert Mugabe.)  

And yes, in both letters, I cited Adolf Hitler and the 1936 Berlin Olympics - like the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, awarded to the city before anyone knew who would be ruling the host city's country.  Coventry, of course, grew up in fascist-racist white-minority-rule Rhodesia, and Evans is a lifelong resident of Orange County, California, and I don't need to say any more about that.  Let's just say I expect both of them to Get It.      

I mailed both letters today.  It will be very interesting to see how both women reply.  Especially Evans, who, as anyone who has read this blog before might know, has always placed herself above politics but has inevitably gotten sucked into them. 

Olympic Response

This is not an April Fool's joke. 

I got a reply from my letter to outgoing International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach asking - more like demanding, really - that the 2024 Olympics be moved out not only out of Los Angeles but out of the United States entirely because of Trump and his crimes against the international community, that pompous euphemism for the world. I got a short but decisive reply from Christian Klaue, the IOC's director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs. the letter read as follows:

Dear Mr. Maginnis:

Thank you very much for letter addressed to the IOC.  We have taken note of your opinion.

The IOC, of course, is respecting the democratic decisions of the citizens of the United States of America.

Uhh . . . yeah.

The International Olympic Committee awarded the 2028 Olympics to Los Angeles back in 2017, when the thinking was that Trump would be long gone by then.  The committee members got exactly the situation they had hoped to avoid.

Respecting the democratic decisions of the voters, eh?  The IOC awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin before the 1932 national elections in Germany and before President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor, By the end of 1935, all opposition parties had been dissolved, the Dachau concentration camp had opened, the Night of the Long Knives had taken place, the Nuremberg Laws were handed down, and President Hindenburg had died, allowing Hitler to combine the duties of the German presidency with the chancellorship and create the office of Führer.  He used the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for National Socialist values, and despite black American track stars Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, Germany won more medals than any other country at Berlin.  Hitler was pleased with the outcome.

I understand that the IOC respected the results of the 1979 Soviet legislative elections and went ahead with the 1980 Olympics, awarded to Moscow in 1974, which was full of cheating by Olympic officials, as well as crippled by the U.S.-led boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  The results of the 1979 elections were decisively in favor of the Communists, which should have been expected, given that the Commies ran unopposed.   

Speaking of boycotts, Canadians and Europeans are boycotting American tourism, mainly because they're afraid of getting picked up by the authorities for saying anything bad about Trump in public and getting arrested by Kash Patel's FBI, the new secret police.  If the IOC won't move the 2028 Games out of America, other major industrialized nations - even the British, who have never boycotted an Olympiad ever - may choose not to send teams to LA.  I'm not going to advocate that, however.  I think it would be inappropriate for me to urge foreign ambassadors to the United States to relay the idea of a 2028 Olympics boycott to their leaders back home.  What to do about sending teams to the U.S. to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics under Trump is a decision only those leaders can make.  Besides, Elon Musk might have me arrested.  

In the meantime, Zimbabwean swimming champion Kirsty Coventry, who is white is and the sports minister of the black-majority government of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), became the first woman, the youngest person (at 41), and the first person from an African nation to be elected IOC president.  I'm not going to write a new letter to Ms. Coventry to repeat the same request I made of Herr Bach.  But I do want to say something in the open to the new IOC president:  Honey, you're gonna be miserable.