Category Archives: olympics

This sounds familiar: Olympic doping and politics

An Olympics without Russians? This feels like where I came in.

In 1984, my first of 11 Olympics, the Russians and their 14 fellow Soviet republics staged an Eastern bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games. That was in retaliation for President Jimmy Carter’s politically motivated snub of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a disorienting back-in-the-U.S., back-in-the-U.S., back-in-the-U.S.S.R. tit-for-tat.

(1980 Moscow Olympics)

(1984 Los Angeles Olympics)

This time, it isn’t Ronald Reagan calling the Olympics’ No. 2 superpower “the evil empire.” Now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has let stand a world track and field federation ruling, Russia’s athletes in that sport face a blanket ban from next month’s Rio de Janeiro Games. Based on the July 18 World Anti-Doping Agency report on state-sponsored cheating, the International Olympic Committee could extend the Rio embargo to Russians in all 28 sports.

The difference in 1984 and 2016 may seem obvious: One nonattendance voluntary, the other imposed. Except, in both cases, it can be argued that two troublesome Olympic staples, politics and drugs, are simultaneously at play.

Take the second instance first: There is documented evidence that almost half of all positive drug tests at the past two Summer Olympics belonged to Russian athletes. (And that was before the former Soviet lab boss blew the whistle on his country’s dastardly operation to manipulate testing at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.) Still, Russian officials have couched the potential banishment from Rio as just one more American attempt to humiliate their nation. So: Politics?

The Russians point to information that other countries—Kenya prominently among them—are guilty either of implementing elite athletes’ drug use, or turning a blind eye toward the practice. Without—so far, anyway—any consequences. (The Russians say that some of their individuals may be guilty of juicing, as athletes are throughout the world, but their leadership does not condone it.)

As for ’84, when the whole idea of the Soviet boycott of L.A. appeared thoroughly political, at least one fellow didn’t think it was that clear-cut.

That spring, Bob Goldman released his book, “Death in the Locker Room/Steroids and Sports.” In a telephone interview discussing his research, Goldman proposed to me that, among the various and complex reasons the Soviets chose to stay away from L.A. was the fact that “those guys have realized they aren’t going to get clean in time. They know they’ll get caught in L.A.” for steroid use. So, then as now: Politics and drugs?!

The previous summer, at the Pan America Games in Caracas, there had been the biggest drug bust in sports history. Nineteen athletes from 10 countries were nailed for failed tests in a makeshift Venezuelan lab, and we reporters found it a bit suspicious that 13 U.S. track athletes immediately boarded flights home on the eve of their competition. (Some returned days later, perhaps having been reassured in private screenings that they were not vulnerable.)

The seismic Caracas event seemed to indicate either a belated push by international sports pooh-bahs to get serious about steroid use, combined with new diagnostic tools to do so, or merely a signal to Eastern bloc players who might be contemplating chemical assistance at the ’84 L.A. Games. Or, more cynically, a public relations move, so there would be no second-guessing of Los Angeles’ ability to catch any bad actors and, therefore, no questioning of test results. Talk about a political move.

Since forever, the Olympics has been a so-called “war without bullets,” a theater for demonstrating national superiority (minus potential bloodshed) that was particularly embraced by Communist nations. Even with the balkanization of the old U.S.S.R., its Olympic team kept emphasizing victory: In 1992, its team comprised of Russia plus most of the recently separated Soviet republics, it piled up medals under the banner of the Commonwealth of Independent States. (We called them the “Commies” for short.) And, after that, even without Lithuanian basketball players and Georgian wrestlers and Ukrainian weightlifters as Olympic mates, the Russians soldiered on quite well.

Have they been winning through the decades because of systematic, government-backed fudging on doping? In “Death in the Locker Room,” Bob Goldman asserted that an American doctor, John Ziegler, had witnessed the Soviets using “straight testosterone” in the 1952 Olympics and felt that U.S. athletes deserved a more level playing field. Ziegler’s answer was to approach a pharmaceutical company to help him develop anabolic steroids and synthetic grown hormone.

Goldman wrote that Ziegler introduced those substances to American athletes “with the best intentions and saw his baby grow into a monster that frightened him.”

Best intentions. So, now that we have fostered our share of dopey dopers, a partisan, holier-than-thou attitude is not helpful. (That’s just more politics.) And the Olympics, while armed with nice ideas, has been proven to have rubber teeth in these matters.

In the case of the former East Germany, for instance, none of its athletes ever tested positive at the Games, but a series of trials and court testimony years after the dissolution of that country revealed an extensive government-mandated steroid operation. (It’s all in Steven Ungerleider’s book, “Faust’s Gold.”)

As an Olympic patriot, a believer in the Olympic ideal of promoting international goodwill through a sort of United Nations in Sneakers, I will miss seeing the Russians in Rio—if it comes to that. But I continue to root for all Olympic efforts striving for fair play in a setting that can be tempting to gold-diggers.

In that Bob Goldman book, he told of how he asked 198 world-class athletes, mostly weightlifters and their weight-throwing counterparts in track and field, “If I had a magic drug that was so fantastic that if you took it once you would win every competition you would enter, from the Olympic decathlon to Mr. Universe for the next five years, but it had one minor drawback—if would kill you five years after you took it—would you still take the drug?

More than half, 103, said yes.

So this feels like where I came in.

Olympic wear and tear

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In cataloguing past Olympic experiences, I am now willing to air my dirty laundry.

I simply ask the reader to concede that circumstances can provoke transgressions. To cover the Games, as I did for Newsday on 11 occasions, requires a stay in the Olympic host city of roughly three weeks while the international pageant plays out. That demands a considerable supply of raiment. Unless, of course, one avails oneself of the resident cleaning service.

Which I decided to do halfway through the 1984 Los Angeles Games, primarily because I was running short on clean undergarments. And here’s the vulgar denouement: The articles of clothing returned to my room a day later clearly were not mine. Wrong size, wrong color and, frankly, not perceptively clean.

Given my low threshold of revulsion, I abandoned the box of skeevy skivvies and settled on recycling what I had. And never again entrusted the locals with any of my wearables. It is the better part of valor to tote an extra suitcase to distant Olympic venues, packing enough clothes to last the duration.

In every sense, the trick to surviving these long-running shows is preparation. Beyond the specifics of the job—being armed with prior reporting to compensate for limited access to the Games’ principals, plotting adjustments to the Globe’s time zones—there is the matter of appropriate attire.

Jere Longman of the New York Times was among the few who used to go about his business at the Winter Olympics (impressively) in suit and tie. But his chores were conducted almost exclusively indoors—figure skating and so on. For those of us who had to mix in a turn on the ski slope, the bobsled run or the opening and closing ceremonies, a less formal—and more reasonable—answer to possible hypothermia necessitated an array of layered paraphernalia. Long johns, jeans, ski pants, sweater, ski jacket, wool hat, gloves.

During the bus ride to one event during the 1994 Lillehammer Games, played out in the snowy, 10-degree elements, I was topping off my bundling exercise by sneaking hand-warmers into my boots and gloves when a native Norwegian, working as an Olympic volunteer, sussed me out as a wimpy foreigner. “That’s cheating,” he said. Not in an unkind way.

The only thing to do is swallow one’s pride and carry on in as much comfort as possible. My friend Jay Weiner, who covered multiple Olympics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, always was a model of sober pragmatism—and to hell with fashion.

For the Winter Games, he had this Elmer Fudd hat, with big flaps to cover the ears. During the typical confusion of bus rides and long days, carting around laptops, reference guides and other necessities, Jay’s hat went missing at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Until he got a call on his cell phone from a Games volunteer: “Mr. Weiner. We have your hat.”

The Japanese were so vigilant to their service culture that there were regular communications to harried, distracted visiting reporters regarding the retrieval of credit cards and other misplaced articles, large and small. In the cafeteria of the main press center, there were little lost-and-found boxes by the cash registers, containing coins as insignificant as one-yen pieces (worth about 8/10^th of an American penny) waiting to be claimed.

A second time, Jay misplaced his hat, and a second time Japanese volunteers rescued it.

Weiner, by the way, was so meticulous in his comprehensive strategizing for international sports competitions that, prior to the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba, he ordered “special tropical shirts” he was convinced would keep him cool in the Caribbean heat of August. L.L. Bean still sells those shirts, claiming they are “top rated for breezy comfort and colorful patterns…in extra-soft and breathable cotton [that] keeps you cool on the hottest days.”

The afternoon of opening ceremonies in Havana, reporters were herded into a large, airless room—stifling hot, with bludgeoning humidity—for the better part of an hour for some sort of security clearance. Eventually all exited, thoroughly soaked in perspiration. Weiner and his tropical shirt included.

Nothing to hyperventilate over, though. There are some Olympic attire anecdotes to lift the spirits, such as during the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, when word spread that visitors could find grand bargains in the city’s Itaewon district, known for tailors producing custom-made suits. One brief fitting session and a return days later for the finished product, and a Mr. Sol had sold me a fine garment for approximately one-third the cost I would have paid at home. That suit lasted 20 years.

But, too, I have a clothes tale hinting at dastardly gamesmanship. During the 2006 Turin Winter Games, I was availed of what trash talk sounds like in the sport of curling, the apparently civilized competition resembling shuffleboard on ice.

American curler Maureen Brunt revealed that a curler might attempt to unsettle an opponent by casting aspersions, sotto voce, during the mostly quiet action. According to Brunt, “You might say, ‘Hey, she has lint on her pants.’ Or, ‘Her mittens are shedding.’ It throws her off from concentrating.”

Now, that is airing dirty laundry.

Golf’s place in the Olympic club

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One truth about the Olympics is that it is not all things to all sports. A walk on the moon to competitors in some disciplines, the Olympics is just another road trip for others. Compare the potential payback for great champions in track and field or swimming—fame and fortune for a Usain Bolt or a Michael Phelps—to that in men’s soccer: Participating in the World Cup is far more prestigious. Or tennis: All four Grand Slam tournaments are significantly larger stages than the Games.

And now, for the first time since 1904, there will be Olympic golf this summer in Rio de Janeiro. Already several of that sport’s most prominent players have announced they will take an Olympic pass, including three ranked in the world’s top 20—Australia’s Adam Scott and South Africans Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel—as well as former No. 1 Vijay Singh of Fiji.

The going explanation for withdrawals is golf’s hectic, globetrotting schedule, which is packing three major championships into a six-week span from mid-June to late July—the U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championships. The Olympic tournament is scheduled in mid-August.

Plus, there is the scarifying Zika virus outbreak in Brazil, specifically the reason cited by Marc Leishman, Australia’s No. 3 player and 35^th in the world, in removing his name from Olympic consideration this week.

No one has yet declined to compete just because the new Rio course is built next to the Jacarepegua Lagoon. Jacare, in Portuguese, means “alligator,” and one of those eponymous reptiles recently was spotted on the links’ edge. There are reports that at least five biologists will be employed to move the imposing critters away from players and spectators during the Games. So that sort of water hazard might deserve consideration.

When the International Olympic Committee voted in 2009 to bring back golf, last contested at the 1904 St. Louis Games, it might have weighed the priorities of modern-era pros already fabulously compensated by—and plenty busy with—their structured leagues and organizations.

Olympic basketball, with NBA players eligible since 1992, has worked pretty well because it is contested in the league’s off-season. Still, some stars—either of their own volition or leaned on by their full-time employers, as Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis was by the Knicks this month—choose to eschew the Games’ potential for injury and fatigue.

Olympic hockey in the Winter Games, in spite of providing splendid TV ratings and magnificent drama since NHL players were welcomed in 1998, nevertheless has no guarantee of continued partnership with league owners. The Olympics interrupts the NHL schedule and, in 2014, ended Islander all-star John Tavares’ season because of a knee injury in Sochi.

Baseball, after five Olympic cycles as a full-medal sport during which it stirred little attention, didn’t last past the 2008 Games because Olympic panjandrums were frustrated by the complete lack of Major League talent and suspicion of the sport’s delayed efforts to fight doping.

Golf? It seemed an all-aboard-the-gravy-train vote for the IOC in 2009, because Tiger Woods was not only the sport’s top player then, but also one of the globe’s most familiar names, and surely a magnet for more TV and advertising revenue. Especially when Woods declared his eagerness to grace the 2016 Games with his presence and the British bookmaker William Hill immediately established him a 6-1 favorite to win the gold.

Alas, Woods’ dominance faded long ago. He hasn’t played at all in six months while recovering from back surgery. At this point, he could not come anywhere near qualifying for Rio, which will have fields of 60 men and 60 women, based on the world rankings in mid-July.

NBC’s Golf Channel has said it will air 300 hours, 130 of them live, of the Olympic tournament, and Olympic executive producer Jim Bell told Reuters that he believes players who skip the Games will soon regret it. But the reality is that no top pro needs the Olympics to be discovered. Or legitimized. Olympic stars are born in women’s gymnastics. Beach volleyball. Diving. Cycling. In the winter, they emerge in skiing and women’s figure skating.

So, with golf shaking off the Olympic cobwebs, 112 years since its last appearance, the more intriguing story (aside from the alligator watch), may be the glimpse of evolution—in both that sport and the Games in general.

In 1904, the Olympics was conducted under strict amateur rules. Its golf champion was 46-year-old Canadian George Lyon, who defeated 23-year-old U.S. amateur title-holder Chandler Egan in a match-play final. Lyon hadn’t taken up golf until he was 38, though his athletic feats included a Canadian record in the pole vault 10 years earlier and stardom in cricket, baseball and tennis.

(George Lyon)

The only other Olympic golf competition was in 1900 in Paris, when there were both men’s and women’s tournaments. American Charles Sands, who also participated in tennis at those Games, won the men’s gold. The women’s champ was Margaret Abbott, a 22-year-old Chicago socialite who died in 1955 unaware that her victory was part of the Olympic program. Ironic, according to David Wallechinskyi’s Complete Book of the Olympics, because Abbott is in the history books as the first U.S. woman ever to win an Olympic gold medal.

(Charles Sands)

In a recent Facebook posting, Rio’s venue manager for the golf competition, Bob Condron, noted that “technology has changed a bit” since the sport’s previous Olympic adventures. “Hickory shafts have given way to graphite and titanium,” he wrote. “Feather-filled balls are now known as Titleist Pro VX and your third-grade nephew could hit one into the Pacific from Colorado. And the way the media works is a tad updated. Carrier pigeons and telegraph has been replaced by methods that get copy to the public faster than the mind works. Photos get to viewers before they happen.”

In those days, golfers hit not with clubs numbered 1 through 9, but with brassies, spoons, cleeks, mashies and niblicks.

Condron, I should note, spent years as the most competent—and witty—publicist for the U.S. Olympic Committee, a man who kept me educated and entertained through 11 Olympics. If anyone can elevate golf’s place in the pecking order of Olympic sports, Condron can.

But I submit that neither golf, nor the Games, gains (or indeed, needs) embellishment from the other. And it’s no surprise to hear some of the sport’s boldface names preemptively issuing a “See you later, alligator” declaration.

Olympic idealism, Olympic optimism

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For the 1988 Seoul Olympics flame relay, the torch-bearer outfit was just a bit dorky, what with the white headband and white gloves. Nevertheless, I highly recommend the occasion for its use.

Likewise, I heartily endorse the relay’s traditional starting point in ancient Olympia, site of the original Olympic competition in 776 B.C. As the relay commenced its latest iteration days ago, leading to the Rio de Janeiro Games in August, it was an agreeable reminder of how reporting assignments for Newsday—and serendipity—afforded me entrée into those rare spaces.

Among the lessons in covering 11 Olympics was how the torch relay, among the semi-religious rituals of the Games, can sometimes seem hopelessly idealistic, almost simple-minded. As sure as there is universal brotherhood and care-free escape from real-world problems, there also is jingoism and political agendas, rampant commercialism and too-frequent doping.

The torch relay, in fact, has its roots in Adolph Hitler’s malicious Aryan supremacy scheme; it was he who cooked up the idea of marching the Olympic fire publicly through other nations toward the 1936 Berlin Games as a propaganda tool. Subsequent Olympic organizers were not above shooing various protesters or the homeless away from the relay’s path for the best possible reflection of themselves. Still, it is difficult to hold a candle to the Olympic flame’s optimism, how it has come to stand for international sport as an instrument of peace and righteousness.

As for the Games’ initial playing field—250 miles from Athens, where a cook named Coroibos raced and won the first Olympic event 2,792 years ago—I discovered during the 2004 Olympics that the place isn’t much more than a clearing surrounded by hills covered with olive, cypress, pine and eucalyptus trees.

The ancient “stadium”—from the Greek “stadion,” which is a “place to stand”—consists simply of a grassy berm around a rectangular, hard-clay field, 210 yards long and roughly 40 yards wide. There is not so much to see there as there is to feel, ghosts and whispers through 85 generations.

There remains a stone arch at the field’s edge, through which the ancient Olympians passed from the Sanctuary of Olympia, location of the Temple of Zeus that was one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. What’s left of the temple resembles picnic grounds at a state park. Except, instead of tables and barbeque pits, there are a few classic ruins.

So it is the whiff of infinity that gives Olympia and the torch relay their weight, and therefore does wonders for cutting through any cynicism. When organizers of the Athens Olympics chose to set the 2004 Games’ shot put competition at Olympia, the clash of the ancient and the modern was obvious enough: While electronic scoreboards, public address announcements, sponsorship signage, concessions and other 21^st Century trappings were kept completely out of sight, there was no avoiding the small crowd of reporters and photographers—myself among them—sitting in shady spots on the berm, working on our laptop computers.

The experience of Being There was as memorable as running a one-kilometer leg (not quite three quarters of a mile) of the 1988 torch relay and feeling a bit like Prometheus, delivering the gift of fire. Or Pheidippides, carrying the news of victory at Marathon.

It was my dumb luck that one of the major international sponsors of those Games employed a New York public relations executive who worked closely with my sports editor, Dick Sandler, and was among the relay planners seeking to include an Everyman or two among the 1,539 Olympic champions and celebrities to bear the torch through South Korea, from the southeastern border city of Pusan to Seoul, over 21 days.

My assigned kilometer, two days before the Opening Ceremonies, was in the western port city of Inchon on Sept. 15—a place and date freighted with relevant history. It was in Inchon, precisely 38 years before, that Gen. Douglas MacArthur led a landing of allied troops that split the invading Communist enemy, considered a crucial turning point in the Korean War.

Photographer Don Norkett, among my Newsday colleagues covering the Seoul Games, had fought in that war and recalled how the Korean peninsula was turned in a moonscape of tree stumps and rubble in the early 1950s—a dramatic contrast to the bustling, giddy days of the 1988 Olympics.

To be a torch runner at those Games was a passport to acceptance by complete strangers, halfway around the world. Awaiting my turn to tote the flame, I had local mothers put their babies in my arms to snap pictures. Older women bowed and said annyong haseyo—hello. City officials in blue business suits appeared with handshakes, while a procession of musicians, banging drums and cymbals and wearing headdresses and robes, offered their nong ak, an ancient music of the rice paddy workers after a long day in the fields. I had learned approximately five phrases in Korean, yet was graciously informed at one point that I had “a good Korean accent.”

(Highly unlikely.) But, wow. Thank you. Gamsahamnida.

The spectators along the torch route formed a corridor of glee, shouting through laughter, waving, holding aloft little Korean flags, apparently unable to stop themselves from ear-to-ear smiling. There also was a handful of crew-cut Anglo-Saxons who, when asked if they were American GIs, replied good naturedly (typically), “Who wants to know?”

I should skip the embarrassing part, of having tripped on one of those small reflectors in the middle of the road during my relay leg. The resulting scuffed knee prompted Time Magazine’s Tom Callahan, in his account of the pre-Olympic celebrations, to slyly note that I finished my run “covered in mercurochrome.”

But the torch was kept aloft as I immediately scrambled to my feet and continued on, handing off to a Mrs. Cho Suk Jae of Inchon for the next kilometer. The flame did not go out.

Since then, as before, the Olympics has experienced its brushes with imperfection, scandal and violence. This summer, for Brazil’s turn hosting the festival, potential trouble already is lurking, given that nation’s economic, health and political crises. Beyond the shrinking Gross National Product and Olympic cost overruns that could reach $17 billion, there is the alarming Zika virus and the impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff.

Given all that, as Callahan wrote at the end of the ’88 Games, “exalting the athletes…is tricky. It requires an ability to squint a little and forget a lot, to gild a lot.”

Nevertheless, I remain loyal to the Olympic model, the possibilities of goodwill through global sport. In the ancient Games, women were not allowed, yet at Olympia in 2004, both the men’s and women’s shot put were contested, and the women went first.

Very first, at the 8:30 a.m. qualifying round that day, was Californian Kristin Heaston. She didn’t do well enough to advance to the afternoon finals. But she said, “I’ll have this forever. It’s pretty cool. Pretty cool.”

Pretty cool, indeed. Pass it on.

Whatever happened to peace and brotherhood?

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I knew Mitt Romney. (Well, a little bit.) And Mitt Romney is no Mitt Romney. At least, he doesn’t seem to be the same guy who, in the wake of a vote-buying bid scandal, deftly marshaled the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics through a minefield of fears about terrorism, potential xenophobia and the usual Olympic headaches.

As organizing chief of those Games, staged just months after 9/11, Romney managed not only to restore global Olympic officials’ faith in American know-how and American humility—after the 1996 Atlanta Olympic poohbahs’ arrogant, slipshod performance—he also struck a blow for international understanding.

Whoever that fellow was who, during a 2012 presidential campaign, belittled 47 percent of the American citizenry and called upon undocumented immigrants to “self-deport,” the Olympic Mitt Romney preached that “we care about what the world thinks of America….It’s important that America not only enforce peace but also demonstrate that.”

At a time when many Olympic visitors worried there would be too much U.S. jingoism in response to the emotional wounds of 9/11, Romney invited Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid South African archbishop, and Polish labor activist Lech Walesa to be among the high-profile characters in Salt Lake’s opening ceremonies.

“Just as you find that you can’t fight terrorism on your own,” Tutu said, “you can’t have the Olympic Games on your own. You need help.”

Walesa admitted “thinking if I should be here, because you remember I was on the other side [in the cold war]. But now we have this new attitude….I hope we will now go to a different world of this good struggle.”

Now we have the disorienting Romney-Donald Trump tete-a-tete, which feels as personal as it does political, and I certainly won’t take sides in that squabble. (Except to say that the really, really little bit that I knew Trump—from a lengthy mid-1980s interview regarding his ownership of a team in the short-lived U.S. Football League—gave a clear glimpse of Trump’s struggle with facts.)

Anyway, leading up to—and during—the 2002 Olympics, the version of Mitt Romney on display was an open-minded, efficient manager with a manageable ego. After two former Salt Lake City Olympic organizing officers had been indicted for paying $1 million in money and gifts to International Olympic Committee members in exchange for votes to host the 2002 Games, Romney was recruited in 1999 by then-Utah governor Mike Leavitt to come to the rescue.

Wealthy enough to turn down $285,000 in annual pay for the gig, Romney saved the community from embarrassment and financial crisis by engineering a $400 million turnaround, slashing $200 million in expenses and raising $200 million from previously reluctant sponsors.

“There is no greater irony,” he said then, “than my being given this Olympic responsibility. I was not a great athlete and I’ve never been in the business of sports.” During his days as an investment banker in Boston, he said, he had become a New England Patriots football fan, but the Olympics generated “special feelings and emotions. I didn’t get teary-eyed when the Patriots won the Super Bowl. I do get teary-eyed when I watch Chris Klug [the snowboarder who won a bronze medal competing with a liver transplant] and watch Sarah Hughes’ performance [to rise from fourth place to win the figure-skating gold].”

Romney seemed genuine enough in that settling (with the possible exception of his black, perfectly groomed hair, though that may be jealousy on my part), and aware of his obligations as a public figure. He appeared to be all-in on the Olympic ideal of international peace and brotherhood. He said he “knew the power of one badly chosen word,” a reference to when his father, George, suddenly disappeared as a Republican presidential candidate in 1968 after saying he had been “brainwashed” on U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Months after the 2002 Olympics, Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts. And won. No surprise. He had spoken publicly of his political aspirations the day after the Games ended, when his name recognition was sky high. Then, out of mothballs to run for president in 2012, he wasn’t quite recognizable. Except for the hair.

Forty-seven percent and self-deportation just don’t jive with the Olympic spirit. Then again, what must Desmond Tutu and Lech Walesa be thinking about Donald Trump?

Leap Day and the Fosbury jump that was no flop

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For Leap Day, let us consider the most revolutionary jump in sports history.

“It all developed under stress,” the jump’s author, Dick Fosbury, told me a few years ago during an endorsement appearance in New York City. He was a high school sophomore in Medford, Ore., in 1963, a high jumper on the track team who had become so depressed over his lack of improvement in the event that he begged his coach’s permission to abandon the traditional foot-first “straddle” style.

During a national high school meet, Fosbury found himself “intuitively” curve his approach to the bar, lead with his head, then “hunch over my shoulder and begin to rotate. I didn’t practice it. In practice, I’d be goofing around on the hurdles or watching the girls work out.”

Anyway, there obviously was no owner’s manual to consult.

“It was all in the meet,” Fosbury said. “I was just trying to lift my butt up and, by the end of the day, I was upside down over the bar.” He finished fourth that day, clearing 5-feet-4, to the best of his recollection. “But I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to compete, to be in the game.”

He had no label for the style. “I was just trying to use the right technical terms,” he said, “so I called it a ‘back layout.’ But there was a photo in the Medford paper with the caption, ‘Fosbury Flops Over the Bar.’ So the next time somebody asked, I said, ‘Back home, they call it the ‘Fosbury Flop.’

“I like the name. I like the irony. The conflict. Is it good or is it bad? It happened because I couldn’t adapt to the old style. I failed. Then I just discovered a new way for me to be competitive.”

What leapfrogged his visually weird technique into international consciousness, while coaches roundly dismissed its possibilities, was Fosbury’s 1968 Olympic victory in Mexico City, when he hushed the crowds each time he Flopped toward the winning height of 7-4 ¼. Naturally, high jumpers around the world quickly began to mimic the Flop, so that within three Olympic cycles, only three of the 16 high jump finalists in the 1980 Moscow Games were not using the style.

Of the 10 men who have held the world record since 1968, nine—including current holder Javier Sotomayor of Cuba at 8 feet-0 ¼ inches—have employed the Flop. The one exception was Vladimir Yaschenko, a Ukrainian who competed for the old Soviet Union and reached his peak—7-8 ¼ —in 1978 with the soon-to-be obsolete straddle method. Even Pat Matzdorf, a straddler who held the world record at 7-6 ¼ shortly after Fosbury’s seismic 1968 Olympic triumph, switched to the Flop after failing to make the 1972 Olympic team.

Fosbury said he “never dreamed about going to the Olympics; that just became a natural event in the course of that year when I was jumping well.” Furthermore, he claimed no intellectual property for devising the Flop. He recalled how he spotted a young Canadian girl, when both were competing in the same all-star track meet after his senior year in high school, who was using essentially the same technique he had chanced upon two years earlier.

Her name was Debbie Brill—she later finished eighth in the ‘72 Olympics—with what briefly was called the Brill Bend. There was no way, Fosbury said, that she could have known beforehand about him or his Flop. And that only convinced him that “biomechanically, it is the most efficient way to jump high. It’s been studied to death and proven to be so.”

The physics of the thing even prompted a short-lived experiment in the early 1970s in the long jump, in which an athlete would do a somersault from the take-off board in search of greater length. That, of course, was christened The Flip, but was a genuine flop. It didn’t even make it to the next Leap Year.

This is one of many reasons I never made it to the Olympic high jump

Olympic reporting: . . . – – – . . . (S.O.S)

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There was a perfectly good reason that an American colleague was unable to make a call from his cell phone during our early morning bus ride to cover the triathlon competition at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The gadget in that fellow’s hand, he realized after several exasperating moments, turned out to be the TV remote from his room in the press village. Where, of course, he had left his cell phone.

(cell phone, circa 2000)

(tv remote)

Such wacky moments routinely are visited upon Olympic journalists, most of them related to confusion—a by-product of information overload and the cycle of too much adrenaline and too little sleep—and the fundamental need for communication.

There is too much going on during the Olympics, at too many sites, to feel in complete control. And it may as well not be happening at all if reporters can’t get the word out to their reading, listening and watching customers.

It is no solace, furthermore, to know of far greater struggles in the pioneer days of sports journalism. There is no comparative happiness to be aware that, in 1847, the New York Herald had to employ pony-express riders to deliver, two days later, Joe Elliott’s story of a major prize fight from Harper’s Ferry, W.Va. Nor that, months after that, the Herald arranged to receive Elliott’s dispatch of a fight in Baltimore via Samuel Morse’s five-year-old telegraph. In 1899, the Herald paid Guglielmo Marconi a whopping $5,000 to transmit results of an America’s Cup yacht race on his new wireless from waters just off the New Jersey shore.

By the 21^st Century, obviously, the existence of mobile phones and laptop computers, plus the dawning of WiFi availability, had made the relaying of information over great distances relatively easy and mighty quick. But the ink-stained wretches among us, advancing toward that scatterbrained not-a-cell-phone moment in Sydney, experienced our share of challenging days when tools of the trade included massive, first-generation portable computers slightly larger—and much heavier—than a newborn baby, and the endless craving for both a power outlet and a telephone land line.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the small press room in nearby Mission Viejo was overwhelmed by newspaper people covering the women’s cycling road race, my colleague Joe Gergen had to go knocking on doors of local residents in quest of an available phone to link with his computer. (He was generously accommodated, evidence of the true Olympic spirit.)

We called one of the earliest of those so-called portable contraptions—the TeleRam Portabubble, circa 1980—a “machine.” As if it were something from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In order to convey a reporter’s well-chosen words via audible beeps of some sort, that appliance required that a telephone receiver be inserted into two holes atop the device. And held snugly in place for agonizing minutes, with the mere hope that the story was being successfully relayed. Among the Portabubble’s shortcomings, of which there were several, was its inability to function properly in a noisy place (such as a packed sports stadium filled with shouting spectators).

So a sentence originally input as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was likely to arrive at an editor’s far-away computer reading something like “Ofy idkem lmo utyew nyhe jhg zoim wla.” This required the already harried on-site journalist to retreat to a trusty portable typewriter—mine was a turquoise Smith-Corona, upon which compositions had been rendered in parking garages, deserted lockerrooms and airport terminals—to reproduce the original yarn, then dictate it by phone to a living person at the home office.

The completion of such dangling-over-the-abyss tasks could be exhilarating, what felt like the sportswriting equivalent of ascending Mount Everest.

At least the Portabubble was a giant leap forward from the first movable computerized writing apparatus I tested—very briefly—during Montreal’s world track championships in 1979. That mechanism had the display screen in the back, which required a small mirror and a vastly uncomfortable sitting position to view one’s own work.

After the Portabubble, the Tandy Radio Shack was smaller, lighter and more reliable, though its attached “acoustic cups” for docking the phone receiver also had issues and there still was no back-up battery power. There were tales of crowded press centers with all those Radio Shacks plugged into power strips in a tangle of wires, when one reporter would accidentally unplug a fellow scribe’s machine, wiping out everything he had written. On deadline. Naughty words ensued.

Anyway, though technology marched on, it was the experience of Olympic (and other international) reporters that it did not do so in a universal way. A pre-Olympic scouting trip to Barcelona, a year before the 1992 Games, revealed that the Spanish phone system was still measuring the length of a call with steady clicks—spaced only seconds apart—and that such clicks immediately shut down computer transmission. (Back to verbal dictation.)

Among Barcelona’s dramatic infrastructure advances, in time for its Olympics, was a state-of-the-art phone system. In fact, the ’92 Games hosts had a far better concept of messaging than did my editor, who issued beepers to staff members during those Olympics. The beepers served no purpose other than to interrupt reporters and send them in frenzied search of nearby phones, scrambling around scenic but steep Montjuic, to check in with that languishing editor, who regularly could be found with his feet up in the press center. “Oh,” he said on one occasion. “I was just testing to see if the beeper works.” After that, mine didn’t. I left it in a drawer.

The telephone situation in Seoul in 1988, equal to several Olympic host nations, was top-notch, but there were other communications hurdles inherent in the Games’ tangles of so many moving parts. The phone assigned to me in the main stadium was two rows away from my designated seat, and for some reason, it took a week to simply allow me to change seats.

In Nagano for the 1998 Winter Games, the big green phone boxes in the press center included a small display screen, on which a little cartoon woman would make a polite bow of thanks—“Arigatou”—as soon as the customer hung up. Sometimes, we bowed in return.

By then, cell phones had become de rigeur for any self-respecting journalist. We were beginning to float in cyberspace, starting to experience the incredible lightness of being able send information instantly, a nirvana of communication. No worries, as the laid-back Aussies constantly said during Sydney’s 2000 Games. Or maybe we were just feeling Olympic giddiness. (Where did I put my phone, anyway?)

Somos el Mundo, an Olympic preliminary

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Call me unworldly. Some years ago, a driver pulled alongside my rented car late one summer evening at a stoplight in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was on the island to cover the 1979 Pan American Games, the so-called Western Hemisphere Olympics, dipping a toe into the international sports waters for the first time.

From that driver, through his open window: “Que hora es?”

From me: A blank stare, and, “Uhhhhh…”

Again, politely: “Que hora es, por favor?”

Again, baffled, and with elaborate, nonsensical hand motions: “Uhhhhh….I’m sorry. I….I don’t understand….”

“Ah,” he said, and rephrased the question in perfect English: “Do you have the time?”

It may be the first lesson of travel beyond these shores that we Yanks, lucky enough to be born in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, are not exceptional in every way. Just days into that Pan Am assignment, I discovered my own linguistic shortcomings in comparison to the natives, as well as American gymnastics officials’ execution of a graceless loophole around failure, and the very embodiment of the Ugly American in U.S. basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Is winning really the only thing? In the case of the gymnasts, U.S. officials purposely sent only four athletes apiece for the women’s and men’s competitions, aware that five were necessary for team scoring. Which meant they would compete without any danger of losing.

U.S. 800-meter runner James Robinson, awaiting a judge’s decision on whether he illegally impeded an opponent, grumbled, “The Americans are always getting screwed. I won’t be surprised if I get screwed out of the gold.” In fact, Robinson was awarded the victory. In fact, many observers—including several from the U.S.—thought Robinson indeed merited a disqualification.

As the Games played out, under the swaying Puerto Rican palms and, in some cases, at competition venues overlooking the blue Atlantic, even a prominent U.S. journalist, aghast at incidents of personal discomfort and imperfection, was guilty of casting aspersions. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell’s sometimes snarky reports—not all based in fact—of administrative and logistical foul-ups, moved Puerto Rican Governor Carlos Romero Marcelo to publicly denounce Boswell’s “racist tone.”

(With U.S. and Canadian colleagues in San Juan)

(Full disclosure: There were some blunders, traffic issues and miscommunications. And thank goodness for the vending machines in the basement of my motel, with heated cans of Chef Boyadee ravioli to provide life-saving 2 a.m. sustenance when nothing else was available. But my own editor, Dick Sandler, wisely cautioned me to consider the bigger picture and keep the less consequential inadequecies in context, and out of the newspaper. Sure enough, significantly larger organizational snafus and official arrogance were yet to come in my international missions—most notably on the home turf of the world’s greatest superpower, during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.)

Particularly ironic, amid all the lowly foreigner allusions tossed around San Juan in ‘79, was an apparent ignorance among U.S. visitors that Puerto Rico is one of us, a U.S. Commonwealth; that, while they have their own culture and language, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. They just happen to have autonomous athletic teams (many stocked with players raised and based somewhere in the States).

There are, of course, knuckleheads extant in every part of this big, round ball upon which we live. But some of them are “us,” as well as a few of “them.” Beginning with that Puerto Rican adventure, and through many subsequent trips for pre-event and competition coverage of 11 Olympics Games as well as a handful of other global sports happenings, I became convinced that assumptions of superiority, simply based on birth in the U.S. of A., can be woefully misguided. (I also came to appreciate the wisdom of at least attempting a few phrases and greetings in the local tongues.)

By the time I had successfully navigated two other non-U.S.-mainland Pan Am Games and right to my last Olympics, the 2006 Turin Winter Games, it was abundantly clear that neither competence nor grace-under-pressure is the province of a singular culture. And that an only-winning-matters temperament is neither attractive nor especially admirable.

Among the embarrassments occasionally generated by U.S. jocks on the international stage was the trashing of two rooms at the 1998 Nagano athletes’ village by members of America’s ice hockey team after their quarterfinal upset loss to the Czechs. That was the first time NHL pros participated in the Olympics and the U.S. team, laboring under the assumption of gold-medal entitlement, miserably failed the red-face test. Keith Tkachuk proclaimed their Olympic participation “a waste of time” and joined teammates in a code of silence, refusing to cooperate with officials investigating the incident.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, U.S. swimmers Troy Dalbey and Douglas Gjertsen, relay gold medalists, somehow escaped criminal charges after stealing an $860 decorative lion’s-head carving from a local hotel and lamely acknowledging nothing more sinister than “boyish exuberance.”

Uhhhhh….I’m sorry. I….I don’t understand….

Happily, it turns out, there is a majority of chivalrous U.S. folks at these global gatherings who are able to grasp the concept of being a good guest. And appreciative of the experience. In San Juan in ’79, that included a 17-year-old boxer from Jackson, Tenn., named Jackie Beard, who proclaimed himself “glad I’ve come. Who from my hometown has ever gotten the chance to come to the Pan Am Games and represent his country, and even had a chance to win the gold medal?”—which he did.

Regrettably, though, the news magnet—the Puerto Rican Games’ headliner—was the pompous, culturally clueless Knight, true to his us-against-them colors and cited in Sports Illustrated’s coverage for “gross incivility.” Knight was ejected from the Americans’ first game of the Pan Am tournament for vehemently arguing calls during a 35-point victory, reprimanded by international basketball officials, arrested and charged in a heated argument with a local policemen, accused of directing demeaning slurs at the women’s team from Brazil and dismissive of Governor Romero when the latter attempted to defuse any thoughts of a home-court conspiracy against the U.S. players. Through it all, Knight took a perverse pride in blustering that he was “not a diplomat,” made it clear he would not speak to Puerto Rican reporters, cursed the locals and belittled them with, “All they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.”

He was off-base there, too; Puerto Rico’s economy for decades had been based on a multi-faceted industry and tourism, and before that, sugar cane and coffee. Yes, they had no bananas.

“You do not deserve respect,” Gerraro Marchand, Puerto Rico’s delegate to the international basketball federation, told Knight at the conclusion of the Games. “You treat us like dirt. You have said nothing but bad things since you got here. You are an embarrassment to America. Our country.”

Even worse, Knight—whose University of Indiana teams were college juggernauts—was elevated to the 1984 Olympic head coaching position by U.S. basketball officials who defended him as “a coach of great renown” in spite of public off-color comments he repeated in paid speeches after his departure from San Juan. “When that plane was taxiing on the runway and taking off,” Knight told attendees at one rubber-chicken appearance, “I stood up, unzipped my pants, lowered my shorts and turned my bare ass to the window of that plane—because that’s the last thing I wanted those people to see of me.”

The best I can surmise, as a patriot of international brotherhood who nevertheless is verbally handicapped, an appropriate response to the dark and whining Knight would be….

Hasta nunca. I hope never to see you again.

Or: Y que no ya no regrese. And don’t come back. (Loosely: Good riddance.)

Discovering the Olympic world

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In 1972 Stan Isaacs, a giant in the sportswriting business who briefly brought his whimsy and intelligence to the role of sports editor at Newsday, assigned me to cover the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Ore. I was no Olympic expert and, furthermore, Stan originally wanted to send one of Newsday’s esteemed baseball writers to the trials as part of an extended West Coast package deal. The Mets and Yankees had scheduled stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim and San Diego right after the 10-day track event.

The baseball guys declined. They had lives. I was still single, so what amounted to three-plus weeks on the road hardly seemed unreasonable. Besides, I had just been promoted from two years of covering high school sports; this would be the Big Time. Furthermore, it could be argued that coverage of a track meet had launched my journalistic career.

I was a freshman at Alemany High School in San Fernando, Calif., and had just signed onto the student paper, the Pow Wow, in the spring of 1962. My brother, Gene, was a varsity hurdler, and it happened that my first by-lined story reported his school record in the 70-yard high hurdlers. (It was a rarely run event, sustaining the record’s longevity and its extended presence on a school plaque, which prompted a friend to declare Gene “a hysterical landmark.”)

(Gene Jeansonne, right)

What I didn’t write about in the Pow Wow, but probably should have, was Gene’s willingness to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship in pursuit of points for the team. He dabbled in the shot put and, on an occasion when Alemany needed a second pole vaulter merely to clear a minimum height to provide the winning margin in a dual meet, Gene volunteered.

This did not seem entirely irrational to me. When we were younger, he would vault into his upper bunk by grabbing the bed post and rising, feet first, into bed. Alas, in his school vaulting debut, he got sideways on the way up and came down on the vaulting uprights, causing some structural damage to the equipment. So, no Alemany victory. No pole vaulting for anyone for a while.

But he lived.

Anyway, back to Eugene. Oregon. (No relation.)

Everything about those ’72 trials was appealing. The competitive urgency—only the top three finishers, among scores of athletes in each event, would qualify for the Olympics. The setting—Hayward Field, on the University of Oregon campus, was the home office of the school’s celebrated coach, Bill Bowerman, a co-founder of Nike whose public jogging programs there were an early spark in activating the American running boom.

Eugene already was proclaiming itself “track capital of the world.” (These days, its slick brand is a slightly more humble “TrackTown USA.”) A vast number of spectators in the trials’ daily capacity crowds seemed to include a stopwatch among their accessories. As well as a pair of running shoes, at a time before running shoes were worn for anything but running. My juxtaposition to so many folks so casually familiar with fitness, beyond the athletes themselves, helped shake me out of my fat period and prod a circadian running habit that still persists.

It would be another 12 years before I covered the first of my 11 Olympics. (Sports editor Isaacs already was credentialed for the 1972 Munich Games, thyroid surgery bumped me out of Montreal in ’76 and President Jimmy Carter’s U.S. boycott of Moscow in ’80 nixed that assignment.)

But the ’72 track trials offered an enticing glimpse of international sport’s sway. The event’s tangible expectation led me to seek out local prodigy (and emerging global player) Steve Prefontaine, then a 21-year-old Oregon junior who already held American records at two distances and already had a reputation for arrogance. In fact, he seemed friendly enough, and hardly aloof.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t even want to talk about track right now. If you want to talk about the birds and the bees or the local pubs, that’s different. I hope you’ll understand. I’m very nervous about all this and I get upset easily. Somebody will ask a dumb question and I’ll blow up and I don’t want something like that to happen.”

So, no formal interviews, but with his 5,000-meter race not scheduled until the eighth of the meet’s 10 days, Prefontaine nevertheless proceeded to be a constant presence at Hayward Field, signing autographs, sitting shirtless in the sun, jogging when the track was clear. It was as if being seen let everyone—especially his rivals—know he was ready. “I don’t want to give away all my secrets,” he said. “But I sure want them to know I’m around. It’s a psyche.”

He won the 5,000, breezily, breaking his own U.S. record, his star still rising. He ran with conviction, his head cocked slightly to the left and upward toward the scoreboard clock, his own pace more a concern than any challenge from his competitors.

Within three years—after having set every American record in seven distances from 2,000 to 10,000 meters—Prefontaine was not around, killed in a one-car accident hours after winning another 5,000 race at Hayward Field. There were reports of an excessive blood-alcohol level. And I remembered that he told me, instead of track, we could talk about the best pubs in Eugene. Duffy’s, he said, was his favorite.

The trials returned to Hayward Field in 1976 for the next Olympic cycle, as energized and dramatic as their first run there. But with an entirely different Prefontaine presence. Shortly after his death in May of ’75, city and university officials had completed a woodchip-and-bark running path through grasslands and woods alongside the Willamette River near the university campus. It had been Prefontaine’s idea, modeled on the style and terrain of European cross-country courses he had experienced while competing overseas.

Of course, I took my daily runs during the ’76 trials on Pre’s Trail, along with multitudes of other trials’ visitors and local residents. I bought a “Remember Pre” t-shirt.

This July, for a sixth time, the Olympic trials will return to Eugene, culling the U.S. track men and women who will compete at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. Hayward Field will be packed with the nation’s most knowledgeable track fans. Pre’s Trail will be crowded with runners, some more serious than others. And fortunate sports journalists will get to sample the whole bonfire of enthusiasm.

The Olympics as a classroom

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We were in a taxi in Seoul, Korea, in the early fall of 1988, Newsday colleague Steve Jacobson and I, chasing some Olympic happening or other. The cabbie, intent on making the most of having so many furriners in his presence during that rare global assembly in his city, brandished a small notepad. He said he was collecting words from his passengers’ native vocabularies as a way to improve his language skills, and asked for a contribution.

“Kibitz,” Jake offered.

And that’s what we did, during the brief ride.

It is among the joys of covering Olympic Games to connect, even in some small way, with people and cultures one is not otherwise likely to encounter as a sports journalist. In the Olympic enterprise of fun and games—a world so familiar—the parallel universe of mysterious customs, bizarre happenings and quirky systems affords a broadening experience.

Seoul was one of the more educational of my 11 Olympic stops. Koreans put surnames first, so I became Mr. John for three weeks. (My business cards were in English as well as the Korean alphabet, which is phonetic, so my name came out, approximately, like John Jin-son. Fifteen years after Seoul, when the governor of Gangwon province was in New York beginning that region’s pitch to host a future Winter Olympics, Mr. Kim Jin Sun studied that business card, gave a brief bow and noted with a sly smile, “We are brothers. Jin Sun.” Sure. Brothers from another mother.)

His surname “Kim,” by the way, is strikingly common in Korea—along with “Park” and “Lee”—a fact that was dramatically demonstrated on my first trip to Seoul, leading up to the ’88 Games, with fellow U.S. journalists.

Then, a different Mr. Kim had just finished squiring three of us around the city to meet various Olympic honchos when he excused himself, as we emerged from a cab, bowed and melted into a typically huge mid-day crowd of mostly men wearing mostly grey business suits. My editor at the time, Dick Sandler, suddenly realized that Mr. Kim had left his umbrella in the cab, fetched it and called out, “Mr. Kim, you’ve forgotten….”

Scores of Mr. Kims turned toward Sandler’s voice—though, alas, not our Mr. Kim, who had disappeared. It also was on that Seoul visit that we attended a professional baseball game (no beer sales, but plenty of dried squid available at the concession stands) and witnessed a Kim-to-Kim-to-Kim double play.

(And here’s an aside about a similar revelation regarding family names common to other lands, also in an Olympic setting. As pre-eminent Boston Globe reporter John Powers tells it, he was housed during the 1976 Montreal Games at McGill University, which was the venue for the Olympic field hockey competition, and from his room he could hear the public address announcements of goal scorers. Whenever India was in action, Powers repeatedly heard, Goal by Singh. Goal by Singh. Goal by Singh. His natural newsman’s thought process was, “Who is this fellow Singh? I have to write about this guy.” And he would have, had he not hustled to the next Indian field hockey game to discover that nine of India’s 16 roster players shared the surname “Singh.”)

One reason, and a noble one, that French baron Pierre de Coubertin said he created the Modern Olympics at the end of the 19^th Century was a belief that the world would not have peace “until prejudices are outlived,” and prejudices would not be outlived until everybody was exposed to the lifestyles and the mores of everybody else. It is an ideal rarely realized, but the vagabond nature of the Games does force some confrontations with one’s own ignorance.

We Americans, especially, are faced with our limitations when thrown into the Olympic soup. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Saudi Arabian newsman Syed Aref-Ali Shah reasonably noted that “in my country, you can go to any 5-year-old child and he can tell you where Los Angeles is. Here, people don’t even know where my country is.”

And even when we know where a country is, there can be an education awaiting, such as the one offered at the 1992 Barcelona Games on the autonomous region of Catalonia: That it rejects bullfighting—a sport for barbarians in Spain, that other country, I was told—and has its own language and its own flag. Before some competitions there, young men would station themselves outside the arenas and hand out beach-towel-sized bolts of cloth—yellow with four horizontal red stripes—so that all visitors could have their own personal Catalan flag, la Senyera. It is said that the four red stripes symbolize the 9^th Century Count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy, dragging his four bloodied fingers across his gilded shield in a dying patriotic gesture.

I still have my Catalan flag.

And, like that Seoul cabbie, I’ve been able to pick up bits of lingo on my Olympic rounds, though I acknowledge I merely have been, as they say in Australia, a “blow-in.” A stranger. But ready to kibitz.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

Category Archives: olympics

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Olympic idealism, Olympic optimism

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Somos el Mundo, an Olympic preliminary

Discovering the Olympic world

The Olympics as a classroom