Category Archives: olympics

Give ’em a break

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Here’s a workable definition of Olympic sports: Activities that are (usually) interesting to watch but virtually impossible to perform by the ordinary citizen. Ever try pole vaulting? Fencing? Marathoning? Weightlifting?

The fast-approaching 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will provide a new example: Breakdancing. Let’s see what you have to offer in that discipline before dismissing it as not being a real sport.

Wikipedia—not that you want to put all your faith in that ubiquitous online site—declares that Olympic entry is limited to sports “based on athleticism or physical dexterity.” Which certainly would qualify breakdancing, though it should be noted that chess and bridge are among the organizations that have petitioned for Olympic recognition.

As a veteran sports journalist who has covered 11 Olympic Games, I am accustomed to—and fascinated by—the ongoing arguments and maneuvering over which endeavors deserve Olympic inclusion.

In his enlightening Sports Illustrated report on the 1972 Olympic Marathon, in which he finished fourth, Kenny Moore noted that even some athletes sometimes questioned the comparative validity of fellow participants. Moore quoted an American rower contending he found it “hard to call people in yachting, equestrian and maybe shooting real Olympians. In my mind an Olympian is an individual who approaches the limits of human performance. That entails enduring a kind of pain that you don’t get riding in a sailboat.”

There have been arguments that Olympic poohbahs ought to raise the drawbridge and refuse to let in any more events. And, indeed, the Games have been struggling with the problem of gigantism for some time—how to organize and fund a 17-day festival which, in its Summer iteration, must accommodate in excess of 11,000 participants, with all the attendant issues of facilities, housing, transportation and so on.

Opposition exists to welcoming perceived “trash sports”—except: who defines what is a trash sport? Might that be any exhibition staged solely for the purpose of being televised, featuring participants whose only qualification is being celebrities? It must be acknowledged that there is no doubt the Olympics is bullish on getting more eyeballs, reaching new fans and thereby banking more TV money.

There have been efforts, for a long time, to get ballroom dancing into the Games—an activity which, frankly, doesn’t seem to be as physically demanding as breakdancing, since ballroom dancers never spin on their heads or strike one-arm handstands. And what about bocce? Bowling? Aerobics? All of them are interested in inclusion.

If sport climbing, rugby and surfing—all new Olympic sports—were lumped under one umbrella of competition, along with the proposed acceptance of cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, they could fit the generic description once suggested by a fellow Olympic reporter: Horsing Around.

Times change. Croquet was in the 1900 Paris Games. (And featured the first appearance of women in the modern Olympics.) Golf showed up in 1900 and ’04, then disappeared until 2016. Jeu de Paume, forerunner to modern tennis, was in the 1908 London Games. Motor boating was included in 1904 and ’08. Polo from 1900 through 1936, when the gold-medal final drew 45,000 spectators. Tug of War—now, that entails more pain than riding in a sailboat—was contested from 1900 through 1920.

It could be argued that opposition to some sports is a function of close-minded, provincial judgement that fails to take in different regional tastes and cultural influences. Table tennis? Big in Korea, as is badminton in China, field hockey in the Netherlands and Germany, volleyball in Brazil. Taekwondo, introduced at the ’88 Seoul Games, is widely followed in Korea. Cricket, returning to the Games in 2028 after a 128-year absence, originally was spread by the world-conquering British empire and now has a rabid following throughout South Asia; any India vs. Pakistan cricket match is of Super Bowl importance to citizens of those nations. The only sport more popular in more countries than cricket is soccer.

And the major reason that American football never has been part of the Olympic show is because only one nation embraces it as its No. 1 sport. So it’s not as if there is no reason or rhyme to Olympic acceptance of sports.

Back to Wikipedia, which considers sport to be “any form of physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, that aims to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators.”

So bring on breakdancing, which originated in the Black and Puerto Rican communities of New York City and has expanded globally, promoted by the World Dance Sport Federation. It is road tested, with an array of organizations and competitors “from Switzerland to Kazakhstan” at a recent international competition, according to ESPN.

No need to be fully conversant in breakdancing lingo—toprocks, downrocks, freezes and so on. If you must, think of it as another elite form of horsing around. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

Miraculous staying power

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Do you believe in nostalgia?

Visit Lake Placid, N.Y., and you will be immersed in countless references, souvenirs and images recalling the moment in sports history when sportscaster Al Michaels hyperbolically asked 34 million American viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”

It’s a central feature in the village’s international claim to fame as Winter Olympic host. It was a long time ago—43 years—before more than half of the world population was born. But, still: Approaching upstate Lake Placid now from the main road off the New York Thruway, one can’t avoid the various 1980 Olympic sites—the Mount Van Hoevenberg complex with its bobsled and luge run, the biathlon venue, the Olympic ski jump.

At the village’s southern edge, there are the flying flags from the 1980 participating Olympic nations, as if those Games still were going on, just outside the speed skating oval where American Eric Heiden won five gold medals, and adjacent to the imposing Olympic Center that includes two hockey arenas—from the two Lake Placid Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980—situated, naturally, at “Miracle Plaza.”

It has been more than a decade since the New York Times noted how Lake Placid “can feel cryogenically frozen in time—1980 to be exact, which was when this secluded pocket of the Adirondacks hosted its second Winter Olympics” yet continued to “look much as it did when Jimmy Carter was in office.”

And still: Forty-three years on, around town there are pictograms of the various Winter Olympic sports displayed on buildings; an old bobsled perched on a sidewalk; 1980 Olympic jerseys, signed by members of that winter’s U.S. team, hung in hotel lobbies; rows of shops with sweatshirts and caps adorned with 1980 logos; the local newspaper’s masthead proclaiming Lake Placid “host of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games;” books and memorabilia chronicling the so-called 1980 “Miracle on Ice.”

On Labor Day weekend—this Labor Day, 2023—the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News both ran reports on New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s recent visit to Lake Placid and her specific recollections of that “miracle” 1980 semifinal ice hockey victory by the underdog Americans over the Soviets. Gillibrand even noted that her parents had attended the game. Which apparently prompted current Olympic Regional Development Authority board president Joe Martens’ aside that “It’s kind of a running joke in Lake Placid—there were 8,500 people in here for the game but 30,000 people say they were here.”

It was just a hockey game. But it featured a shocking upset by a rag-tag team of American amateurs over the four-time reigning gold medalists from the old Soviet Union. And amid Cold War tensions, the Yanks’ thoroughly unlikely upset of the so-called Evil Empire was widely cast as a victory for righteousness, somehow evidence of Americans’ morality, and as the game’s final seconds ticked away, Michaels laid it on pretty thick with his “miracles” question.

Forty-three years ago. Sooo yesterday, no? Yet the Lake Placid of 2023 hardly has a Paleolithic feel; rather, it is a thoroughly up-to-date, scenic burg, alive with flora and fauna, centered by serene Mirror Lake with the Adirondack Mountains as a picturesque backdrop.

It teems with energy—joggers, swimmers, dog walkers, baby strollers, kayakers and cyclists—and with community affairs such as the I Love BBQ and Music Festival Weekend surrounding Labor Day, and a state golf championship for seniors and “superseniors” (65-plus).

It’s just that village leaders know how their bread is buttered. So, along with the ongoing Olympic reminiscence is the continued outreach for similar—if less famous—international winter competitions such as last February’s World University Winter Games and next month’s World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships, in which competitors form artistic squiggles on black ice.

The local population is not quite 2,500 but there are year-round crowds of tourists, many speaking in foreign tongues, lured by the village’s international renown and resort status.

“If the town were not smothered in Olympic logos,” the long-ago Times travel piece reported, “visitors might forget about its Olympic connections and think they had wandered into an idyllic Swiss hamlet.

Not likely, that. The miracle has been held over by popular demand.

Once teammates

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Try finding the land of The Unified Team on an old map, circa 1992. Or the Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s a challenge that relates to the sudden discovery by many people of just where Ukraine is.

Here’s a big hint: Thirty years ago, the UT and the CIS represented an ad-hoc “nation” that had just evolved from what Ronald Reagan previously labeled “the evil empire” and that the soulless despot Vladimir Putin now wants to revive—the Soviet Union.

As the USSR fell apart in the early ‘90s, though, there came to be an apparently benign one-for-all and all-for-one arrangement, with all former Soviets staying temporarily on the same team. Just the opposite of how Putin is acting on his claim that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” by having his Russian military murder Ukrainians.

This is a sports story, of sorts. But one which reminds how sports—like the arts and business worlds—are tangled up in government actions. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor already has gotten athletes from Russia (and Belarus, because of that nation’s aid in the Russian attack) banned from the Paralympic Games, the upcoming World Games and events in international figure skating, ice hockey, swimming, skiing, badminton, canoeing, equestrian, gymnastics, rowing, rugby, shooting—even chess. Russia has been thrown out of soccer’s World Cup qualifying tournament while tennis has declared that Russian and Belarussian athletes only are welcome as “neutral” participants, minus their national affiliations.

But about the comparison from three decades ago. Following closely on the declaration of independence by the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuanian—the USSR’s dissolution in late 1991 meant that the globe’s biggest sports stage, the Olympics, was scrambling to accommodate Russia and 12 former Soviet republics for the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.

The solution was to have athletes from those republics continue to participate on the Russian side (which didn’t stray far from an old and widespread assumption that all Soviets were Russian). Thus the one-time-only Olympic squad known as The Unified Team, representing the Commonwealth of Independent States. (Some of us wise-guy Westerners, having come from the other side in the Cold War, referred to them in shorthand as “The Commies.”)

The revealing aspect was how non-Russian Unified Teamers expressed a feeling of lost identity. All marched and received medals under the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem, and among the gold medalists who found the situation wanting was pairs skating champion Natalia Mishkutienok, a Belarussian who teamed with Ukrainian Artur Dmitriev.

The situation was “not good,” she said. “I like the Russian anthem and I like the Russian flag.” (Of course she meant the Soviet song and the red hammer-and-sickle USSR flag.) Viktor Petrenko, a Ukrainian who won the ’92 men’s skating title, said after his victory ceremony, “I want to see some flag. The Ukraine flag or Russian flag, that would be better.”

There were bad jokes about The Unidentified Team and how it had no fight song, no team pennant.

Petrenko wore warmups emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic abbreviation for USSR. His official Olympic “identity record” listed his age as 22, his birth date as 6/17/69, his town of birth as “Odessa,” his country of birth as “Unified Team” and his nationality as “Unified Team.”

“We are still a team,” Petrenko said then. “We are still teammates. Everything’s the same like that. We just represent different republics. I really don’t know what’s going on in my country. But we’re still a team.”

All Unified Teamers had held aloft tiny flags representing their respective republics in the Opening Ceremonies and wore their individual country’s flag patches during the Games. Outside the Olympic skating hall, a sign soon appeared offering “for sale: Soviet training suits. All stock must go.” CCCP warmups were selling for $150 apiece.

Some Unifieds meanwhile found humor in the no-longer applicable words to the Soviet anthem…

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics

Great Russia has welded forever to stand.

Created in struggle by will of the people.

United and mighty, our Soviet land!

The “unbreakable union” was broken. And Putin’s attempts to put it back together by force after 30 years don’t appear to be going so well, in the one-team sense. A recent report noted that, among the Ukrainian citizens trapped in their native land by the Russian bombardment is Viktor Petrenko, the old skating champion from The Unified Team.

He was said to be in Kyiv, the capital. It’s on the map. And it was Mark Twain’s unsettling observation that “God created war so Americans would learn geography.”

 

Torched!

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As an Olympic postscript, consider IOC president Thomas Bach’s wacky offer of holdover gifts for victims of the fathomless ruling that allowed Russian teenager Kamila Valieva’s continued eligibility despite a failed drug test.

Bach wound up acknowledging the dystopian conclusion to the figure-skating circus after Valieva fell apart, was berated by her coach and left one of her medal-winning teammates enraged and the other virtually ignored. That the heavily favored Valieva crashed to fourth place in the individual final at least spared Bach’s IOC the embarrassment of having to cancel that discipline’s awards ceremony.

But an official verdict—and the inevitable appeals—on the legitimacy of Russia’s earlier Valieva-led first place in team skating could take months. And with all medals in that team event meanwhile held in escrow, Bach suggested giving each athlete for second-place U.S. and third-place Japan an Olympic torch.

Goofy, no? There was no word regarding torches for the Canadians, who were fourth but, if the Russians ultimately are disqualified, would become bronze medalists, with the Japanese upgraded to silver and the Americans to gold. (There was confirmation that the U.S. skaters’ request for the temporary possession of silver medals was denied.)

Of course, no Russians should have been on the scene in the first place. The IOC’s clumsy wrist slap for Russia’s state-sponsored doping program in the 2014 Sochi Games somehow has resulted only in a ban of Russia’s flag and anthem in the four subsequent Olympics. Yet Russian athletes again were everywhere in Beijing, totaling the second-highest accumulation of hardware.

And most visible was Valieva, with a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel making matters worse by illogically reasoning that “irreparable harm” would be done to her if she couldn’t proceed in the free skate. That led to Valieva’s messy, distracted routine and the shunning by her entourage, which Slate’s Chris Schleicher wrote was “not only irreparable harm to Valieva but also to the sport of figure skating.” And, by extension, to the Olympics, since women’s figure skating is the Winter Games’ biggest show.

She’s only 15. There’s a good chance Valieva’s handlers had responsibility in the scandal, though there also was her weird claim of having been contaminated unintentionally by her grandfather’s heart medicine.

Whatever. Former anti-doping expert Don Catlin used to note that a positive drug test doesn’t profess to determine culpability—“We can’t know what’s in athletes’ heart or mind, only what’s in their bodies.” A failed test is a failed test and, according to the rules, requires a suspension.

But about those torches. Bach was referring to the cone-shaped objects, designed and produced each Olympic cycle, in which the Olympic flame is ceremoniously carried by thousands of runners from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece, to the host city. Typically, the torch relay covers more than 100 days through multiple nations leading up to the competition; it took 138 days for Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games. But, this year, because of the pandemic, a late decision drastically restricted the relay to just three days, confined to the Beijing area.

That means there probably are a lot of torches just lying around unused. (For the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, 26,440 torches were produced; there is no information on the total this time.) And that tends to reduce torch ownership to something akin to a widely-available souvenir—on the order of Olympic trading pins.

Even I have an Olympic torch. (I was among the handful of foreign journalists asked to run in the 1988 Seoul Olympics torch relay, when organizers wanted a mix of international participants and media folks could be counted on to be in the country before the Games.) Somehow, it’s hard to image that trinket as a replacement for an Olympic medal.

Thomas Bach is himself the possessor of an Olympic medal for being part on a winning team—West Germany’s fencers in the foil discipline—at the 1976 Montreal Games. Surely he knows what that prize is worth to an athlete. Maybe he ought to agitate for hanging a badge of guilt around the necks of all scoundrels involved in Russia’s state-run doping system. To keep them—not just their flags and anthems—outside the Olympic gates.

Olympic busking

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Sure, they’re Dylan and Springsteen. That they recently were paid multiple millions for their music catalogs, well, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe. Those are songwriting giants, and you can’t start a fire without a spark.

But I’m thinking—humbly yet just out of curiosity now that the Winter Olympics again are upon us—whether the ditties I have written on Olympic topics might be worth something. To somebody.

Surely originality could get some play. The Boss, after all, never touched on the subject of ski-jumping, as I have…

On the wings of a pair of skis/These jocks show no weak knees.

They fly off with ease/On a couple of skis.

Yodel-ay-ee-hee

Yodel

Ay

Ee

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Or here’s a big-picture look at the Winter Games…

Icy rinks/Ice hills

I see some/Icy spills.

Icy nerves/Icy wills

I see great/Icy skills.

Snowy mounts/Snowy streets

‘s no easy/Snowy feats.

 Snowy skies/Snowy ground

Snowy crash/Comin’ down.

Admittedly, with these ballads, I’ve never gotten around to the music part. These are only lyrics from a poor-man’s Hammerstein in need of a Rodgers, like Bernie Taupin counting on Elton John to do the composing. But you’re got to start somewhere. I’ve read where Mick Jagger originally stuck to creating the words and letting Keith Richards supply the music.

Also, just as Bob Dylan addressed topical issues, I have dealt with matters of consequence, such as the ongoing deliberations of whether the United States ought to have skipped this year’s Beijing Games in protest of China’s human-rights violations—and the history of such actions:

It sounds like we’re fixin’/To keep right on mixin’

The politics with the sports

 Can’t say I’m surprised/But the previous tries

Left everyone tied up in knots

 Our boycott of Moscow/Wound up a fiasco

‘Cause the Reds did the same thing to us

 Just four years later/East bloc c’llaborators

Thought they’d turn LA to a bust.

A protest song? Sort of. As is this next one, calling to task the skullduggery inside the Olympic halls of power, and specifically the almost routine charges of bribery of IOC members to grant hosting rights:

Bet I can find your kid a job, if you get that guy from Guam

To cast a vote for my hometown. (Don’t say I greased your palm.)

 I hear your wife likes sable coats, and I hear you like to ski.

But I could make y’alls dreams come true. (No need for thankin’ me.)

 Just tell the guys on the I-O-C, I got the best hotels.

Got buds in bidness, gov’ment, TV. Know all the local swells.

 And if you need some surgery done, I’m friendly with the docs;

Cars and women, song and wine. I’ll pull out all the stops.

What triggered this avocation was my assignment by Newsday to cover the 1997 U.S. national figure skating championships, which were staged in Nashville, Tenn.—Music City. The constant auditory sensations there, while casually passing live honky-tonks on the way to the ice rink each day, seemed to demand an attempt at some appropriate verses and choruses. The subject matter already was staring me in the face, since the sport had been shadowed at the previous Olympics by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan contretemps and was in great anticipation of a less dangerous Michelle Kwan-Tara Lipinski Olympic showdown in ‘98.

So my debut went something like this….

I can’t figure skating, And I can’t figure her

Slipping around with guys in sequins, Falling on their wallets with certain Frequen-

Cy

 ‘Course I’ve heard of Tonya. Heard of Nancy, too.

But this ain’t exactly stock-car racing, Ain’t football and ain’t quail-chasing, I

Guarantee.

 (Chorus)

No-knee-capping, no fist-fighting. No bad-mouthing in a bind

She’ll smile right onto that gold-medal stand, if she can just say off her behind.

 (More verses)

Is Tara in the short program? Is Michelle in the long?

Does size have something to do with things? How come there’s music but nobody sings

The songs?

 Some costumes’ll make you cry. Some’ll make you laugh.

Judges just setting there with poker faces, giving life sentences on the basis

Of a four ‘n’ a half.

 (Repeat chorus)

Okay. I am aware how relationships are prevalently featured in song. And how matters of the heart can be dealt with metaphorically. Ready? A-one and a-two…

Schussh, my darlin’, dodgin’ gates like broke promises.

Schussh, my darlin’, Harrys, Dicks, cheatin’ Thomases.

Schussh, my darlin’, love’s somethin’ like a Super G.

Schussh, my darlin’, just stay warm and don’t hit a tree.

Maybe need a little help from some fellow buskers? Take two….

Using the Olympic soapbox

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(A shorter version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Will anybody really notice when President Biden and other high-ranking U.S. officials don’t show up for February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing? The Biden Administration’s declaration of a diplomatic boycott of the Games expressly allows athletes to compete in China, so the quadrennial shushing, sliding and skating among the world’s sportswomen and sportsmen will proceed with great fanfare and with NBC’s typically melodramatic presentation. Curling fans will not be robbed of their exotic brand of entertainment.

So: Does such a high-level snub accomplish anything?

The White House has declared its action as an objection to the Chinese government’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” and other abuses, including a crackdown of freedoms in Hong Kong and Tibet and the recent disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a high-ranking Communist official of sexual assault.

It’s clear that China doesn’t much worry about criticism from the West. And Olympic boycotts historically have not been an effective tool in reforming nefarious behavior. The 1980 U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Games, called by President Jimmy Carter and joined by 64 other nations protesting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outraged the athletes who felt they were pawns, and it had no impact on the Soviet occupation, which lasted another nine years. About all it accomplished was the Soviets’ revenge boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later which again was foisted upon non-voting athletes.

The argument here is that, while the President’s declaration is essentially a symbolic one, it nevertheless is generating an abundance of commentary and likely some discomfort for the corporate giants helping to bolster Beijing and the International Olympic Committee. And, in doing so, it is highlighting the feeble stance on human rights by the International Olympic Committee, which promotes a mission of global goodwill through a sort of United Nations in Sneakers.

The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing, in spite of China being one of the world’s most repressive governments, amid global protests that included pleas at the time for a full boycott. When that threat passed and the competition began, all the focus went to the athletes and China’s spectacularly run events. Then the IOC favored Russia with the 2014 Winter Games in the face of complaints about Moscow’s anti-gay legislation. And Beijing was chosen again for 2022.

Each instance violated language in Provision 6 of the IOC charter requiring Olympic hosts to insure that “rights and freedoms….shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, birth or other status.”

Called out again for ignoring such policies, both Beijing and the IOC predictably are bemoaning the United States’ proposed diplomatic action by invoking the old sports-and-politics-shouldn’t-mix cliché—when, in fact, sports and politics always are mixed. Especially with the Olympics, which has become the world’s biggest soapbox, playing to the grievances of dissidents and the self-interest of image-makers every bit as much as the guardians of carefree sport.

Every Olympics site has served as a political statement by the host, whether it was Nazi Germany’s 1936 Games as propaganda for Hitler’s criminal agenda, Japan’s 1964 Olympics to demonstrate its post-World War II revival, South Korea’s 1988 Games to showcase a turn to democracy, even L.A.’s 1984 celebration of capitalist might. China wants to telegraph its technological and economic power and, not least, an athletic prowess in the familiar, if illogical, assumption that gold medals suggest a nation’s moral superiority.

Naturally, since the core of the Olympics is sport, the athletes prioritize competition but, increasingly, they may not just shut and play. Several U.S. Olympians, including figure skaters Evan Bates and Nathan Chen, have confirmed their participation while condemning China’s human rights violations as “abysmal,” and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee declared last year that it would not punish its jocks for reasonable demonstrations during the Games. (The IOC, citing its old rule limiting “athlete expression,” said it will.)

So neither Biden nor vice president Kamala Harris nor any department secretaries will join the hullabaloo in February. And China won’t change its spots. But we’ve been forced to think about the issue now.

Horns of a dilemma

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There is nothing wrong with the acronym G.O.A.T.—a label being thrown around incessantly by commentators, sportswriters and athletes themselves—except that it’s pretentious, grandiose, sanctimonious. And a cliché.

It stands for Greatest of All Time, an assertion that can’t possibly be substantiated. How is it reasonable to compare a 21st Century performer to someone from, say, 1921, who functioned in an era of prehistoric nutrition, training methods and equipment?

There certainly are great modern-day champions, folks of unprecedented accomplishment, running around loose these days. And it is simple enough to quantify their specific successes. But this braying of singular majesty, often self-congratulatory and regularly perpetuated by the subject of the claim, not only invites the wrath of vicious social-media trolls on the rare occasions of a stumble, but also recalls an earlier sportsworld term that meant just the opposite.

For decades, the “goat” was the player who goofed up—spectacularly—by dropping the potential winning pass, running the wrong way, surrendering the decisive home run, failing to touch base, calling a timeout that didn’t exist, signing an inaccurate scorecard. The last thing any jock wanted to be called was a goat.

But here we are. Tom Brady has been declared the G.O.A.T. And Michael Jordan. LeBron James. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. But if one of them is indeed the Greatest of All Time—by definition, unequalled by any other from the past, present or future—how can there be so many of them?

This isn’t just about the extraordinary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and her agonizing realization that she couldn’t continue at the Tokyo Games while “fighting with [my] own head.” But the question has been raised in some precincts whether the relentless promotion of Biles as the G.O.A.T of these Olympics—the one-to-watch among 11,000 athletes—likely contributed to wearing her down.

She in fact has cited the weight of expectations.

To Slate.com’s Justin Peters, NBC especially “turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games…It is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance.”

Plenty of reports from former sports journalism colleagues likewise hung Biles out there as something of a G.O.A.T. pinata, a challenge to be knocked off, accentuating her skills with prose filled with twists and rolls and handsprings and somersaults and roundouts.

Biles herself had begun showing up two years ago in a competition leotard with the sequined outline of a goat’s head, just as G.O.A.T. tattoos have been sported by several athletes of recent vintage. This week Robert Andrews, a sports performance consultant who counseled Biles before the 2016 Olympics, told Yahoo Life, “I don’t like it. I think it’s misplaced. I think it’s misused and I think it puts a big target on athletes’ backs.”

There’s this hyperbole: While Biles has dominated her sport for most of the past decade and set new standards in the sport—and has won more world gymnastic championship gold medals (19) than anyone in history—she is not the most celebrated Olympian in her sport.

Now in her second Olympics, Biles so far has collected six medals—four gold, a silver and a bronze. Brilliant work. But Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union, remains the all-time leader in that department—18 medals (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) over three Olympics from the mid-1950s to mid-‘60s. (Plus 14 world championship medals.) Old tapes verify that Latynina’s skills were pedestrian compared to the airborne gyrations all elite gymnasts can do now, but that’s not the point.

In her day, Latynina was the best. Since the early 2010s, Biles has been the best. And a head-to-head challenge might not be fair. Biles is struggling with her confidence. But Latynina is 86 years old.

Carry on?

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As a journalist, my job is to be skeptical but not cynical. As something of an Olympic patriot, furthermore, I don’t want to be too judgmental about whether the Tokyo Games should be carrying on as the pandemic surges again; whether the absence of spectators renders the event nothing more than a studio TV show; whether NBC, corporate sponsors and the International Olympic Committee have prioritized financial gain over the health of athletes and the Japanese public; whether it is time to consider doing away with the Olympics altogether.

But it was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I believe, who said the responsibility of a journalist is to wonder and worry and poke and prod. So, here goes.

Even amid the usual athletic drama and skill playing out—compelling attractions, for sure—it is not possible to ignore so many of the Olympics’ 21st Century ills currently on display, beginning with the organizers’ deaf ear to overwhelming public sentiment against soldiering on.

Virus positives (predictably) had eliminated two dozen Olympians, including teenaged tennis star Coco Gauff, days before the Games started. With fans (wisely) barred, the all-too-common post-Olympic uselessness of excessively expensive arenas, White Elephantism, already has set in. The Atlantic described the Opening Ceremonies, typically an uplifting kickoff to the quadrennial 17-day international festival, as a “mournful mishmash…that only emphasized its dark context.”

There is a stark reminder of doping issues as Russia has fielded more than 300 competitors who somehow managed to dodge an international sports ban on that nation for systemized drug use in recent years. A judo player from Algeria has been dismissed for refusing to compete against an Israeli, and a second one from the Sudan sent himself home for the same reason.

Having covered 11 Olympics, I long ago came to the conclusion that the Games are too big, too expensive, too political, too corporate, too prone to cheating and insider deals among IOC officials and authoritarian leaders. But, too, I came to accept what John MacAloon, Chicago philosophy professor and Olympic historian, articulated two decades ago: “We can’t eliminate all the problems. That’s why the Games are interesting. They’re life itself. If the Games were more pure and perfect, they’d be less appealing. They mirror not just a dream version of life; they also mirror the things we struggle with as ordinary human beings. None of us lives a dream. We live messy, ordinary lives.”

Skeptically but not cynically speaking, then, the argument that the Olympics—now 2,813 years since the first Ancient Games—is worth keeping is the (not always realized) ideal of seeking global understanding. Sort of the United Nations in sneakers. MacAloon again: “Sports in service of intercultural communication and a better world.” Not the worst ongoing experiment.

During the 2000 Sydney Games, Australian psychologist Amanda Gordon offered her sense that having the Olympics in town was “a way for people around the world to learn about each other. You see these athletes do something terrific and you say, ‘Where’s Bulgaria? Let’s have a look on the map. What do they like to do? What do they like to eat?’ From that point of view, the Olympics is extremely important. It says, ‘Let’s get together.’”

The great Norwegian speedskater of the 1990s, Johann Olav Koss, argued that the Olympics is “for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world to understand how to win, but also how to lose and how to respect everyone.”

A major problem with the Tokyo Games, of course, is that while roughly 11,000 athletes from 200-plus countries are on site, Covid protocols have dictated that there is no world there. There is no international crowd, stoking the fire. Performances feel forced—barely more than practice sessions.

Perhaps my most memorable evening of Olympic coverage came in Sydney, when the raucous involvement of 112,000 shrieking spectators was as much a part of the show as a handful of excruciatingly tense track and field finals. Australia’s Cathy Freeman stood her nation on its head with a come-from-behind 400-meter victory; American Michael Johnson won a second consecutive Olympic men’s 400; American Stacy Dragila outdueled Aussie Tatiana Grigorieva in the first Olympic women’s pole vault; Romanian Gabriela Szabo edged Ireland’s Sonia O’Sullivan in an exhausting 5,000, after which neither woman could summon the strength to raise her arm to acknowledge the cheering; Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie won the 10,000—6.2 miles—of step-for-step dueling with Kenya’s Paul Tergatby by less than one second.

In each case, who was carrying whom—the athletes straining with the weight of expectation on their backs or the fans desperately, vicariously trying to lift them—wasn’t clear, but it was incredibly noisy business. The athletes, winners and non-winners, later remarked on the “energy in the stadium;” how “you can’t find words to describe this crowd;” how “the adrenaline in the place was amazing.”

So television now can show the world’s best athletes running, jumping, throwing, swimming, kicking, skateboarding, surfing and so on. But a viewer can’t feel the Olympics without an in-person audience. Television can’t conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement.

Stripped of that mix—no fault of Tokyo’s organizers—this Olympic recess (however brief) from the world’s troubles is left feeling too close to the 11 o’clock news. Overwhelmed with reports on all that’s wrong with the Modern Games.

Should that mean that Tokyo ought to be the last Olympics? Especially since a major focus on the upcoming Winter Games, to be hosted by Beijing in 2022, so far has been on China’s human-rights violations and its anti-democratic bent—and whether Western nations therefore should consider boycotting?

No clear answers will be forthcoming here. It’s important to acknowledge that, despite plenty of journalistic skepticism, I’ve found covering the Olympics to be culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff.

Really?

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A good Latin phrase always is handy for extraordinary Olympic moments. (The Games official motto is in Latin: citius, altius, fortius—faster, higher, stronger.) So, in regard to the Florida official who has volunteered his state as alternative host of this summer’s coronavirus-threatened Tokyo Games, I suggest non compos mentis.

The translation is “Not in control of the mind” or, less formally, “insane; mentally incompetent.” Though etymologists aren’t in full agreement about the exact origin, one theory is that non compos mentis evolved into “nincompoop.”

That seems about right for the classically blockheaded offer, sent to the International Olympic Committee in a letter by Jimmy Patronis, who is Florida’s chief financial officer. In what must be described as nothing more than a publicity stunt, Patronis announced that, since Tokyo’s nabobs appear to be hesitating about going ahead with the Olympics in the face of the pandemic, the Sunshine State is ready to step in.

The headlines produced by that cockeyed suggestion, Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff wrote in The Nation, “looked like something out of The Onion.”

Patronis, oblivious to reality on several levels, argued that, while Tokyo organizers had chosen to postpone last summer’s originally scheduled Games for one year, Florida went about staging the NBA playoffs in the Disney World Covid-19 bubble. And Tampa is about to pull off the pandemic Super Bowl. And there have been several Jacksonville-based UFC events during the plague. (UFC events!)

Patronis is a finance guy; I got a C in my college economics course, so what do I know? Except that, in the process of covering 11 Olympics, I became aware that the Summer Games consist of 33 sports, requiring such diverse facilities as a swimming hall, track and field stadium, equestrian venue, cycling velodrome, rowing site, shooting and archery ranges, multiple soccer fields, separate arenas for fencing, gymnastics and badminton. And much more.

There are 206 Olympic nations eligible to compete in the Games; compare that to the measly 193 countries in the United Nations. Roughly 11,000 athletes—as well as coaches, game officials and physicians—must be fed and housed and transported to both competition and training locations during the Games. Logistics and details are such that cities are designated Olympic hosts seven full years in advance of the 2 ½-week international festival. One decision-maker at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics said the task amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 days.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

Another minor detail, spelled out in the Olympic Charter, is that the IOC “shall have no financial responsibility in respect to the organization, financing and staging of the Olympic Games other than the contribution determined in the Olympic Host Contract, unless otherwise agreed in writing.”

So, while recent polls have found that 80 percent of Japan’s population favors cancelling the Games altogether, Tokyo has sunk about $25 billion into its operation, a major factor in opting to (fingers crossed) soldier on. That Florida would have the resources, the time or the ability to waltz in as Olympic savior—let alone to get the IOC’s backing—is “bonkers,” Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist told the Huffington Post. “This is an idiotic, delusional, uninformed, ignorant Florida politician trying to put his name out there. It’s got no chance. It’s just stupid.”

Humor columnist Dave Barry’s sly take in the Miami Herald was that “chief financial officer Jimmy has already done the hard part, writing the letter. All we need now is a detailed plan and thousands of workers and $25 billion.”

Money issues and crushing deadlines aside—July 23 is designated as the Games’ opening day—there remains the primary problem of the still-spreading, mutating virus. Patronis portrayed Disney World as “an incredible model for how to run a complex organization in the midst of Covid-19.” (Hmmm: A Mickey Mouse Olympics?) He apparently is ignoring the fact that Florida has had more virus cases (1.7 million to 99,000) and deaths (26,000 to 880) than Tokyo.

Daytona Beach News-Journal columnist Mark Lane dismissed Patronis’ Fantasy Land proposal as  a “cheesy bit of hype” that “also demonstrates a more depressing truth—that the state continues to do everything in its power to minimize the seriousness of [the deadly] illness…”

The Patronis angle does sound familiar, in a way. Quid me anxius sum?

Which is Latin for “What, me worry?”

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.