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.

Beijing and All That

And so, my friends, we've come to the end of the worst Winter Olympics in my lifetime, and possibly yours.  As I type this, it's after midnight in China, which means the 2022 Beijing Winter Games are over.  Now all that's left over are . . . the leftovers, the tape-delayed final events that NBC hasn't aired yet.

While NBC gets a wag of the finger for its coverage and the Russian figure skating coaches get the same for the way they treated that poor girl Kamila Valieva, the hosts - the Chinese Communist Party - get slaps in their faces for infecting the Olympic spirit with severe acute China syndrome.  

China, you're in distress.

It's not just for COVID.  Its for the suppression and the monitoring of activity among not just its citizens but among its guests, the Olympic athletes, and for pretending to let the members of the International Olympic Committee think they were running the show.

And also, a slap in the face for the International Olympic Committee.  Being duped by Commies doesn't make you a martyr; it just means you're as incompetent at running the Olympic movement as Xi Jinping is ruthless at running China.

No doubt about it, this Winter Olympiad was the Sgt. Pepper movie of sporting events - elaborately staged and very expensive but just as pointless and, well, stupid-looking.

Go ask Alice. 

 

Why am I bringing up that 1978 cinematic disaster here?  Watch this space!

All right, on to Cortina d'Ampezzo and Milan for 2026.

The Olympics. Meh.

Don't except much of the usual acerbic or insightful commentary on the Olympics from me this time like you're accustomed to.  I'm going to keep the commentary I make low-key, and I probably won't comment about the Games all that much.  The biggest reason is obvious: COVID, COVID, COVID, as the guy living in the White House this time last year liked to say. And the specter of the virus is casting a long shadow over these Tokyo Games.

Of course, there are a whole lot of other reasons not to care about the Olympics so much this time, and Bret Stephens of the New York Times summed them up very nicely yesterday in his weekly column with Gail Collins: "Too many doping scandals and questionable medals, too much corruption at the International Olympic Committee, too many top athletes pulling away, too much unconscionable abuse of young athletes, too much self-serving nationalism. Maybe someone could restore the original high-minded spirit of the games, but I really struggle to see the point of them today, especially in an era where there’s no shortage of venues for high-level international sports."

Much of that is the fuel for my zingers, of course, but zingers seem mostly inappropriate right now.   Oh, there may be some zingers from me in the next two weeks - there's enough tomfoolery at the Games that even a pandemic doesn't excuse - but any withering witticisms this time (and likely during the Beijing Winter Olympics in February) are likely to be more in sorrow than in any other mood.

Besides, I'm going through an extraordinarily tough time right now and I'm not in the spirit to crack jokes about the Olympics.  A year an a half ago, before COVID hit, I had high expectations for teh immediate future, but no I have absolutely no expectations for anything.  I've been struggling with problems too personal to mention here, and every day seems as bad as the day before.  A lot of the satire I point at the Olympics is in good fun, but these Olympics are bond to be neither good nor fun.  In fact, I still think it: These Games will be the worst Games in a hundred years.  If, at the closing ceremony, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach calls the Tokyo Olympics the greatest Games ever, that could be the moment my old satirical sprit comes back.     

Because I don't see how he or anyone else will be able to say such a thing with a straight face.

Yet Another Open Letter to Janet Evans About the 2024 (and 2028) Olympics

The latest news about where the next two - yes, the next two - summer Olympiads are being held requires me to once again write an open letter to Olympic swimming champion Janet Evans, in her capacity as Vice Chair of the Athletes Commission for Los Angeles' bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, as I now have reason to assume that she is in line for a major role in an official 2028 Olympic organizing committee.

Dear Janet:

Okay, I was wrong.  No sense in trying to approach this evasively, but yes, I'm coming out and saying it - I was wrong; Los Angeles is getting the Olympics.  But in 2028, not 2024, as the decision has been made to award the Summer Games after Tokyo to Paris, and then the Olympiad after that to LA.  But I still say that you and your fellow southern Californians have to wait four years longer than you wanted to in large part because no one wanted to take the chance of Donald Trump somehow getting re-elected President in 2020 (which could still happen) and officiating at the Olympics in the last year of a second term.  I guess Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's efforts to honor the Paris Agreement - the agreement about climate change, which Trump won't support, not the one about the Olympics, which lets Paris go first - got LA some brownie points after all.

So, congratulations.  But bear in mind, Janet, that the bid committee you have proudly served will have to re-adjust the costs for Los Angeles to host the Games, because, as the New York Times reported, the original cost estimates were based on a seven-year, not an eleven-year, forecast, and that the time difference will render the cost projections becoming exponentially higher even by conservative budgeting.  Also, Rick Burton, a former chief marketing officer for the United States Olympic Committee, admitted that some LA sports venues may need to be upgraded with new technology, and that new venues may be needed altogether if more events are added.  And I think he said something about the possibility of a severe natural disaster like an earthquake, which is always impossible to predict.

But then, New York bid for the Olympics once, and Hurricane Sandy proved that natural disasters could affect a hypothetical Olympiad in the Northeast.  And you, Janet, like most southern Californians, know how to deal with an earthquake.  We in the Northeast still haven't completely recovered from Sandy.  I just hope you don't get another drought a decade and change from now.

But you guys did get a sweetheart deal for the Games, didn't you, Janet? The International Olympic Committee has promised to grant $1.8 billion - billion, with a b - to the Los Angeles organizing committee and $180 million in advance payments for the extra four years to prepare for 2028 - and even some money for youth sports programs now instead of later!  How did you swing that?  I'll bet you yourself had something to do with the negotiations, huh, Janet?  Because you can charm anyone with that chipper Southern California accent of yours!  You could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo!  (Not that you would sell ice cubes to Eskimos . . . )

What surprises me, apart from this deal that leaves Paris and Los Angeles both big winners, is that this wasn't - and isn't - going to be official before the meeting of the International Committee (IOC) on September 13, and IOC president Thomas Bach just couldn't wait that long to announce it.  When he stood with Eric Garcetti and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to make the announcement, he looked like he owned the earth.  Well, he does, at least the part of the earth where international sports are played.  And the Los Angeles City Council and the United States Olympic Committee still have to approve this, I understand, but, don't worry, Janet, I'm sure they will.

Having said all that, Janet, my criticisms about Los Angeles from my open letter to you in July 2016 still stand.  Los Angeles has already hosted the Games twice.  Also, it's more of a suburban-sprawl settlement than a city,  it doesn't have a vibrant cultural life, and it's too dependent on car travel (however, I award LA points for trying to expand its rapid transit service). It's nothing personal, it's just that I'm from the Northeast, and we roll differently out here.  Besides, as Will Smith once observed, you can't even get a decent Philly-style steak sandwich in LA.  And of course, I, like Will Smith, I'm sure, would have loved to see the Games in Philadelphia.  Oh, well, maybe Philly will get the Pan American Games one day.  And if the City of Brotherly Love ever does bid for the Pan Ams, I hope you will be supportive.  And I highly recommend that you visit Philadelphia one day if you haven't already.

I recommend Pat's Steaks for a good steak sandwich. Cheese is optional, but onions are de rigeur.  Just be careful with the grease - you hold that sandwich the wrong way and it will slide right out of your hands.  And if you get any grease on your sundress, well, I'm sorry, Janet, there's no detergent strong enough to get it out.  It might even eat a hole into the fabric.

Sincerely,

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  As always, you know I still love you, right?  I must, since I gave you fair warning about Philly steak sandwiches. :-D 

Another Open Letter to Janet Evans About the 2024 Olympics

Four months ago today, I wrote an open letter to Olympic swimming champion Janet Evans, in her capacity as Vice Chair of the Athletes Commission for Los Angeles' bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, explaining why I thought that such a bid was a spectacularly bad idea.  Now that we've had an election with an outcome  just as spectacularly bad, I now go back, Jack, and do it again.

Dear Janet:

Yes, it's me again.  You might remember that back in July I told you that getting the Olympic Games awarded to Los Angeles for 2024 was a lousy idea, right?  And you're probably still optimistic that you and your fellow denizens of metropolitan LA can bring the Games to the City of Angels.  Well, in light of the fact that Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States . . . sorry, Janet, it's not going to happen.  No one on the International Olympic Committee, I'm certain, wants to award the Games to a city in a nation that just chose a racist, immigrant-bashing carnival barker as its leader.

Yes, Janet, I know there's no precedent for such a rejection of an Olympic bid.  I am aware that New York's unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics had nothing to do with George Walker Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq,  and that it was over a revenue-sharing dispute with the United States Olympic Committee, and that Chicago lost its 2016 Olympics bid for that reason also.  But this is different, Janet.  Donald Trump is an arrogant xenophobe and a pig-ignorant B.S. artist.  You know how Democrats in Washington are wary of working with Trump because they don't want to "normalize" his Presidency?  Well, how many people in the Olympic movement would normalize him as a leader by letting an American city host the Games?  By September 2017, which  is when the 2024 Games will be awarded to a city, Trump may very well have started a war in the Middle East, rejected the Paris agreement on climate change, caused an international crisis over trade, and possibly destabilized the Baltic States.  Okay, he may not end up doing a deed as extreme as any of those, but he's going to do something to tick the world off.  He already has, in fact; he won the election.  Janet, don't you think that the International Olympic Committee would like to punish the United States for letting a Trump Presidency happen?  

Yes, Janet, I know Hillary Clinton carried your home state of California, and that she probably won Los Angeles itself by a wide margin.  I am aware also that she even carried Orange County, where you were born and raised and still reside, even though Orange County is known for its right-wing nut-jobs.  And yes, I know Hillary won the popular vote nationwide.  But none of that matters, because Donald Trump is still going to be President.  To the world, he is America now.  The Olympics are all about fostering peace and brotherhood in the world and rising above nationalism.  Trump is not about to do either of those things, and so awarding the Olympics to an American city in this negative shadow that Trump is casting would seem like kind of a crazy idea to the potentates who run the Olympic movement.

And yes, Janet, I know that the 2024 Olympiad is so far off that Trump may not be a factor, because it's likely that Trump will only be a one-term President and be gone by January 2021.  But we don't really know that, do we?  He could very well win a second term. Why would the International Olympic Committee want to take a chance of giving LA the Games with the possibility - nay, the specter - of Trump being around as President in 2024 to officially declare the Los Angeles Games open?  Oh, it will be a disaster if that happens.  He'll make vulgar comments about the synchronized swimmers.  He'll make sexist comments about the participants in women's track and field.  And do you think any foreign Olympic teams will feel welcome, or even safe, in an America run by Donald Trump - even if he's in his last year of office?  Though I'm sure he'd be very welcoming to the Russian team, despite their steroid-use history, when they're coming into Los Angeles.  (And he wouldn't let Mr. Customs Man touch their bags, either.)                

Oh yeah, one other thing: Trump just said something that may have doomed LA's Olympic bid.  He says he backs it. 

Well, Janet, I've made my case, but I'm not about to tell you to abandon what I feel is a quixotic exercise in bringing the Games back to the States for 2024.  All I'm saying is that you shouldn't expect LA to win the bid, and that you're going to be very disappointed.  In fact, I'm willing to bet that, after Trump won, you knew that LA's chances for the 2024 Olympics went down the tubes.  But I'm sure you'll take the loss like the champion you are.  Win a few, lose a few, they always say.

You know I still love you, right?

Sincerely,

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  I noted with some levity your comment that you hid a Wheaties box with your picture on it to keep your son from eating the cereal inside.  Given the recent discovery of remnants of glyphosate - a carcinogenic herbicide - in cereals like Wheaties, which contains 31.2 parts per billion of the stuff, that was a very wise decision.   

International Olympic Corruption

A friend of mine from my writers' group alerted me to a report on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that appeared on "Real Sports," the HBO Sports show hosted by Bryant Gumbel.  The report depicted how the IOC has an unsavory interrelationship between itself and countries that bid for the Olympics.  See, the countries (cities, not countries, are supposed to vie for the Games, but we all know that's a lie) bend over backwards to satisfy IOC members and their greed.  They don't so much bribe members of the committee as they are blackmailed by them.

The problem turns out to have be much worse than the nasty wheeling and dealing that brought the Summer Games to Atlanta in 1996 (how else could the Olympics have been been held in a city more defined by the 285 beltway than by anything resembling a downtown?) and the Winter Olympics to Nagano, Japan in 1998 (no skiing facilities, no sledding amenities, just craggy mountains that even the local monkeys wouldn't roam across).  IOC potentates are expected to be wined and dined at considerable expense and receive all sorts of favors, causing bidders to spend a lot of time, money and energy on the Games.  This was supposed to be cleaned up after all of the bribery that plagued the organizing committee for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics (and was rectified by Mitt Romney when he took it over), but no, it still goes on.  The money spent on the facilities for the Games comes out of public amenities for the poor and the middle class.  That's why Sochi was still a mess after the 2014 Winter Olympics and why Rio de Janeiro has become even more uninhabitable for the locals.  

Maybe Bill Kristol was right back in 2009 when he said Chicago didn't need the 2016 Olympics.  Lord knows Chicago needs a whole lot of other things.  Like a mayor who's not in the pocket of big business.    

And who makes most of the money for the Games themselves?  I'll give you a hint; it's not the host cities.  The host cities, in fact, are left holding the bag for maintenance costs for those same facilities.  The IOC gets walks away with most of the profits.

International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach (below), who was a gold-medal fencer for West Germany at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, was supposed to do something about all this, and given that he is a former athlete himself, the athletes were expected, so I have been led to understand, to benefit from his presidency.

Yeah, well, without the athletes, there's no Olympic movement.  It's supposed to be all about the athletes, because it's the athletes who compete, it's the athletes who break world records and all that, and it's the athletes we all revere, not the IOC members . . . and it's the athletes we all develop silly celebrity crushes on; I wonder if you all know who I'm talking about? ;-)  Ha ha, I have a ladyfriend who loves to check out Ryan Lochte, and not necessarily when he's swimming.

So I hope Bach gets all that and pursues some real reform in the IOC.  Because it is indeed all about the athletes.  After all, despite the fact that Bach was an Olympian himself, no one tuned into the opening ceremony at Rio to check out Bach's sexy bod. :-p       

And if Los Angeles does lose its bid for the 2024 Games, that will mean that Angelenos didn't compromise their integrity - or, at least they didn't compromise it as much as the residents of the city with the winning bid.

Nolympic Update

I've joked that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sees Americans as too arrogant and too vulgar to be trusted with hosting the Olympic Games (like when it comes to opening ceremonies) as a reason for Chicago not getting the 2016 Olympics, but even though I was only joking, my dears, I'm not exactly that far off.

The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) has been at odds with the IOC over revenue sharing of American broadcasts of the Olympics. Peter Ueberroth, when he was the USOC's chairman, had blocked a negotiation with the IOC on the issue. The USOC has also been accused of wanting to monopolize revenues collected from an American Olympiad and thinking they can offer superior facilities for such an event without playing well with the international body. NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol put it this way after Chicago lost its bid for the 2016 Games: "This was the IOC membership saying to the USOC there will be no more domestic Olympics until you join the Olympic movement."

Not going to happen. Americans are legendary for refusing to join the rest of the world.

William Kristol, the conservative journalist, said after the rejected Chicago bid that Americans don't need the Olympics and all of the logistical nightmares that apply and therefore should just shrug them off. What he was really saying was that Americans don't need the rest of the world telling us what to do.

Oh yes, we do. We haven't demonstrated much of an ability to act intelligently on the world stage. Many is the time we should have listened to the rest of the world and avoided getting ourselves into trouble.

I hope you didn't take my earlier jokes seriously. But then, I never said this blog was a legitimate news source. :-p