Hiroshima Out: Japan searching for a 2020 city
BBC Sports reported today that the Japanese city of Hiroshima has formally pulled out of the race to host the 2020 summer Olympics, five months after partner city Nagasaki also pulled out.
Newly elected mayor, Kazumi Matsui, informed the Japanese Olympic Committee that the city could not afford to bid for the games, the main reason being that Hiroshima was still repaying debts for the 1994 Asian Games held there.
According to Reuters, “Hiroshima initially proposed a joint “peace bid” with Nagasaki in a move by the only cities to have suffered an atomic attack to promote nuclear disarmament.” Nagasaki, however, was forced to abandon its Olympic ambitions back in January, citing a lack of funds as well.
The Japanese Olympic Committee’s last hope rests with Tokyo, which lost out to Rio de Janeiro in the final round of 2016 Summer Games bidding. Tokyo, which is partially hoping to use the 2020 bid as an impetus to rebuild after the devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. Interestingly, in the wake of Japan’s nuclear difficulties following the quake, the plans to possibly use the games as a platform to speak about nuclear disarmament remain valid.
All bids for the 2020 Games must be submitted to the IOC by September 1st, and a winner will be selected in September 2013. The only cities to currently have an official bid on the table are Rome and Madrid, but given the popularity of the Summer Games, this will soon change.
In fact, the head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, Yasuhiro Nakamori, let slip that “the IOC suggested that if an African candidate emerged for 2020 they would be very strong contenders.” Africa has never hosted an Olympics before, and with Brazil opening the door for South American countries, it will be interesting to see if an African nation emerges to host the 2020 Games. The head of the Egyptian Olympic Committee expressed an interest in submitting a proposal, but this was before the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
Sadly during the 2010 Vancouver Games, the USOC’s Scott Blackmun stated that the US had no plans to submit a bid for 2020…but I Believe!!
NYTimes Re-post: “A Reasonable Expectation of Honesty”
“But the reason that sport has the capacity to wield such power lies in the belief that it is what it seems — a visibly honest contest. Once that changes, the game is diminished, for player and spectator alike.” – Alan Cowell
Yesterday I read an article from the NYTimes’ Alan Cowell, and rather than recap, I honestly just have to cheat and re-post because it expresses my sentiments so clearly. The moral make-up of our sportsmen and women is as essential to their game as a great jumpshot or a powerful backhand spring. It’s why most of us prefer to follow college basketball rather than the antics of the NBA. Olympians, probably more than any other class of athletes, are held to the highest ethical standard because they are (supposed to be) competing for things like honor and pride, words that have been long-erased from the vocabularies of our previous heroes, politicians and our leaders of industry. Below Alan Cowell makes a good case for why current athletes, mired in doping scandals and money matters, should look to heroes of the past to inform their present:
A Reasonable Expectation of Honesty
By ALAN COWELL
BERLIN — In this once-divided, once-imperial city, there are many monuments and memorials. Among the more modest is the Jesse Owens Allee, a street near the Olympic Stadium where the black U.S. athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Games, providing an emphatic and enduring rejoinder to Hitler’s views on racial supremacy.
And, at a time when global sport is so often beset by charges of malfeasance and corruption, the street, a short, leafy and tranquil thoroughfare, somehow seems a fitting place to ponder the striving for excellence that Owens symbolized.
In their youth, people play games and compete for the love of it, for the display of skill, for the hope of glory, for the sheer exhilaration of pushing themselves beyond pain to perfection. They play to win and to be seen to win — in the boxing ring or on the soccer field, at the wheel of a car, on track and field, on the grass and clay and composite of tennis courts. As professionals, too, they play for money.
Then, in more advanced years, or perhaps because they are inspired by the fray, people pay to sit in the stadiums and tune to satellite television to watch and cheer on their champions, believing that what they see before them is true.
Sport, in other words, answers our yearnings for heroines and heroes who reach out from the track or the arena and draw us to them.
“It was not just the four gold medals in Berlin, not just the aesthetic, wonderful style with which he ran and jumped,” Willi Daume, the now-deceased president of the West German Olympic Committee, said when Stadium Allee in what was then West Berlin was renamed in 1984, four years after Owens’s death at 66. “It was the fascination of Jesse Owens’s personality that won people’s hearts.”
Yet, after his Olympic victories, there were no book deals, no TV contracts for this great U.S. athlete. Back home, he worked as a playground janitor. Hitler had snubbed him publicly in Berlin, but there was no laudatory invitation to the White House, either. When his amateur career ended, he was paid to run exhibition races against cars, trucks, motorcycles, horses and dogs, according to his obituary in The New York Times. Gold medals alone, he said, did not put food on the table. “Sure, it bothered me,” he said. “But at least it was an honest living. I had to eat.”
Only later did be become a well-paid inspirational speaker on tour.
Of course, no one would pretend that sport has simply been about competition in the way the original Olympians envisaged it. Money has enhanced it, raised standards. The practitioners of politics have found and exploited sporting emblems — consider the boycotts of South African teams in the apartheid era, followed by Nelson Mandela’s embrace of the Springbok rugby squad, once reviled as the very soul of white exclusivism.
But the reason that sport has the capacity to wield such power lies in the belief that it is what it seems — a visibly honest contest. Once that changes, the game is diminished, for player and spectator alike.
It would be naïve to deny the crookery — boxers throwing fights; cyclists and shot-putters stuffed with steroids; betting scams in cricket; rigged wrestling; bribed jockeys; the 1998 corruption scandal in the bidding for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The bigger the budgets, the greater the temptation.
Money floods through top-level sports, lofting star players on a glittery tide of opulence. But in return for their wealth, we expect honesty. We can tolerate the vast sums paid to soccer heroes if they score beautiful goals. The whiff of malfeasance, of expediency, breaks the unspoken covenant.
And, looking at recent events — particularly the maneuvers leading to the election of Sepp Blatter to a fourth term as president of FIFA, the world soccer organization — it is hard to keep the faith.
Mr. Blatter, 75, was the sole candidate. His only potential challenger on FIFA’s executive committee had been suspended days before the vote along with another executive committee member as charges of corruption swirled around the body’s highest figures.
“FIFA’s reputation is now at an all-time low and obviously the election with just one candidate was something of a farce,” Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain declared in Parliament.
Across Europe, pundits and analysts reached for analogies to describe the rich, closed world of the global soccer administrators and came up with comparisons to the mafia, Josef Stalin, the North Korean dictatorship and the wiles of Machiavelli.
At a time when the Arab world is rising up in quest of democracy, said the columnist Stephen King in The Irish Examiner, “has FIFA caught itself on the wrong side of history?”
In his years as FIFA president, said Oliver Fritsch in the German weekly Die Zeit, Mr. Blatter has “made soccer rich.” But he has led the global game into “moral penury.” Just this week, not directly related to FIFA, match-fixing suspicions surfaced anew in Finland and South Africa.
Unlike in Owens’s day, sports are run as businesses by closed coteries of administrators and entrepreneurs who devise their own rules. Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and would most likely remain so whoever ran it. That gives its global administrators the easiest of products to market to the greatest number of people.
The sport, said Hajo Schumacher in the newspaper Die Welt, “produces so much enjoyment and advancement, so much achievement and creativity, so much global mythology and togetherness.” Yet it is run by “a gerontocracy whose behavior exemplifies the complete opposite.”
Strolling on Jesse Owens Allee, I recalled a remark attributed to the athlete during his post-Olympian speaking career. “How many meals can a man eat? How many cars can he drive? In how many beds can he sleep?” he said. “All of life’s wonders are not reflected in material wealth.”
Maybe they are not and maybe they should not be. But his point is harder to make now than it was in his day, when material reward came second to honoring his own land and shaming a dictator.
K.O. at Battle for US Olympic Broadcast Rights
Greetings and Salutations, dear reader (hah! two pop culture references in the first five words…I’m nice. 5 points if you can tell me where they’re from).
Anyway so sorry for the prolonged hiatus from Good Times and Gold Medals. I got caught up in the not-so-little business of graduating from college and figuring out the future, but it’s done! Undergrad is a wrap, and the future is looking bright, so with persistent kicking from two of my good friends, I once again delve into the world of sporting excellence and entertainment that is the Olympic Games. Well actually, I never really leave that world, but you do, so I’m here to drag you back.
This week on As the Torch Burns, the dust is only beginning to settle from the battle for broadcasting rights for 2014 and 2016. Ever since the January shakeup at NBC, the question of whether the network’s dominance could finally be challenged by a more confident ESPN or Fox Sports has been on everyone’s mind. New owner Comcast seemed much less gung-ho about committing to the Games than the guys at General Electric, especially in light of the $223 million lost at the Vancouver Games. Still it seemed promising that Comcast would use the Games as a way to validate their new leadership and maintain NBC’s close relationship with the IOC.
Plot Twist!! Less than one month before he was to lead the NBC delegation to Switzerland to do battle royal for the 2014/2016 rights, Dick Ebersol, the architect of NBC’s Olympic dominance since 1995, resigned from the Sports Division. Unable to reach a compromise with Comcast about his four-year contract, Ebersol chose to pack up and leave his 22-year career at NBC Sports.
Comcast took a moment to recognize Ebersol and the ending of an era, but kept it moving by appointing former head of Turner Entertainment Group Mark Lazarus as the new lead. Bringing in an outsider…interesting.
Continuing on, bidding began this past Monday at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland (home of the IOC and the International Olympic Museum). The NYTimes claimed that the feel surrounding the meeting was one of “Lowering the Bar”. For the first time since the mid-1990s, ESPN and Fox stood a good chance to beat NBC, and it seemed as though all three delegations were calculating the least amount it needed to bid rather than the usual rallying of resources to deliver a KO.
Presentations were made Monday and Tuesday, followed by sealed bids and deliberation. The NYTimes reports, “Fox dropped in four envelopes, ESPN put in two and NBC dropped in a thin envelope and a noticeably thicker one.” Pins and needles, folks, pins and needles.
And the winner……Comcast NBC!!!
End of an era, my foot! Comcast NBC bid a KOoooo $4.38 billion for the US rights to the next FOUR Olympics. That’s right, 2014 Sochi, 2016 Rio, and two Games that we don’t even know the location of yet. For the record, Fox bid $3.4 billion for the next four Games, and ESPN $1.4 billion for Sochi and Rio only. The IOC breathed a huge sigh of relief at this sign of NBC’s continued commitment, with member Richard Carrion releasing the statement, “We were blown away by the NBC presentation and the passion the team has for the Olympics…I’d be less than honest if I said the dollars didn’t come into play.”
Here’s to another decade of Matt Lauer and Al Roker and their heroic (and hilarious) efforts to become Olympic athletes within a 3-minute news spot. Cheers!
Missed Connections: 2010 Singapore Youth Olympics
Saw your pics in the news back in August, but was busy getting ready to fly to Paris. Wish I could have followed you, but all I have are these memories. Meet up in Nanjing 2014?
Music of the Games: “One Day” ~ Matisyahu
Have you ever had one of those random Saturdays where you just walk out of the house and go wherever the wind blows you?
Definitely had one of those yesterday. A friend came into town, and we more of less spent the day traipsing (if I may) around Boston, stumbling into one random shop or another. Upon returning home, we headed out to find dinner and ended up crashing the Kol Echad Alumni acapella concert at the local Hillel. (I rarely give out personal info on the blog, but here’s a freebie: I’m not Jewish).
As the group launched into one Hebrew song and then another, I did that thing when you kind of stare politely and blank out. Don’t get me wrong, it was really lovely (shout-out to Kol Echad), but it was in Hebrew. It’s like when really great choirs sing in German or something during a church service. It’s very pretty and you know they’re talking about God, so you just smile and nod along. Yea, that was me.
Anyway to get to my point, after two beautiful nod-alongs, the host introduced the next song as “one of the anthems of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.” Suddenly my ears perked up like he was reading this week’s lotto numbers. The group went into “One Day” by Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu, and all I could do was thank the wind for blowing me to Hillel on a random Saturday night. Enjoy!
Citigroup, inc: Official 2012 bank of champions
In March, financial service group, Citigroup, Inc. (aka Citi) signed a $30 billion deal to become the official banking sponsor of the US Olympic Committee at the 2012 London Games.
Similar to Comcast/NBC Universal’s claims to all broadcasting rights and Heineken’s pouring rights at the Olympic park, Citi will be the official bank of the 2012 US Team for the next two years. Citi will be replacing Bank of America whose deal expired in 2008. Such an early deal benefits both Citi, which will be able to integrate the USOC image into its marketing campaigns, and the Committee, which will be able to begin promoting its athletes well before the games.
In recent years, the economic downturn led several banks and financial entities to cut funding to sports organizations. Citi is one of the many financial groups that received aid from the federal government during the recession, bringing it some sharp criticism and intense scrutiny. Now that Citi has paid back the $45 billion it received in aid, this deal and others like it will be an important part of shaping Citi’s post-recession image.
Ed Skyler, executive VP for global public affairs, stated it best, “Sponsoring the team is a great way to express our gratitude to the American people for their support, not just over the last three years, but our 200-year history…Comebacks happen in business just like they do in sports.”
Britain’s Identity Crisis and National Branding at the Olympics
BBC’s Olympics blog recently posed the query: “What is the image of the UK around the world?” Good question.
The inquiry originated with the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who in this next year and a half leading up to the Games will be increasingly preoccupied with the impact of the Games on the UK’s national brand. And rightly so.
Rewind 3 years: The world watched with baited breath as the Beijing 2008 Games opened with the insane 2,008 drummers sequence (and honestly just got even crazier as it went on. Photos here). The build-up to the games, however, was a spectacle in and of itself. China won the 2008 Summer bid back in 2001, defeating its more Westernized, democratic competitors, Toronto, Paris, Istanbul, and Osaka. Media outlets speculated that the bid had been won through widespread international support, despite protests by human rights organizations. Regardless, China now had 8 years to strategically re-brand its nation in anticipation of their summer in the world’s spotlight. Beijing’s campaign slogan became “One World, One Dream,” a call for the world to unite around the Games for a better future. Their mascot was a dancing character with extended arms, welcoming the world to “Beautiful Beijing.”
They even rolled out the big guns. Some obviously bigger than others. (Photo STR/AFP/Getty Images).
Unlike the UK’s Foreign Committee, China posed no such question to the world. They knew where they stood. The issue of the UK seems to be that no one really knows for sure where they stand in the world. Powerful, but at times in the US’ shadow. Developed, but currently struggling economically. Open to world trade, but part of the EU, so not really open to world trade. China’s image needed work. The UK’s needs definition.
The word on the table right now is “generous” as proposed by committee chair Richard Ottaway. London as generous, diverse, and inclusive. Other words given in the blog, however, include “stuffy, aloof, and emotionally chilly.” Roger Mosey asks, “So what do you reckon: will “generous” win the day? And is it possible to translate the aspirations of London 2012 about modern Britain into a reality our diplomats can communicate with confidence – because they’re true?”
Regardless of its previous image, Beijing came away from the 2008 Games with massive gains in international credibility and global recognition. Soon the world will find out what impact the Games have on the UK’s global rep. But right now the more pressing question is, What is the UK’s global rep?
Official “Pouring Rights” for the 2012 London Games go to the Dutch
London’s Olympic planning committee has decided to pass on a local British brewing company Fuller’s in favor of powerhouse Heineken as the official suppliers of beer at the 2012 Games.
In a deal worked out between the Dutch brewing company and the committee, Heineken will be branded the official lager of the games and have exclusive “pouring rights” at all bars in the Olympic Park. BBC reports that this was to the great disappointment of London-based British brewery Fuller’s, which was hoping for their “London Pride” beer to be a major part of the London Games.
http://www.united-nations-of-beer.com/heineken.html
While this could have stirred up some warm-and-fuzzies, realistically it just wasn’t an option. In light of the tail-end of the recession and lessons learned from Vancouver’s financial struggles, the London committee is clearly thinking more bottom-line than People’s Choice. About 2,000 British citizens are employed by Heineken UK, which supplies bars around the country.
“London 2012 is also a global event and it is important to have global brands involved. Their brand will be vital in the success of the event and it must be understood that without brands such as Heineken sponsoring the event, we simply couldn’t host the event because of the huge financial sums involved,” explains London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton.
insidethegames blog reports that Alexandra Palace (also called The People’s Palace or my personal favorite, Ally Pally) has been chosen as the official “Heineken House,” a giant public beer hall in North London.
Comcast shakes up the race for Olympics broadcasting rights
Breaking News: On Tuesday, the FCC and the Justice Department approved Comcast’s take-over of NBC Universal from General Electric….who cares, right?
Wrong. Almost every two years since 1964, NBC’s peacock-shaped logo has remained perched in the corner of America’s television screens as Olympians defy the laws of physics above it. NBC has dominated the broadcasting of both Summer and Winter games for decades, thanks in large part to Dick Ebersol, head of the network’s sports division. In 1995, Ebersol made some huge moves to acquire rights to all Olympics from 2000 to 2008 and later proceeded to outbid Fox for the 2010 and 2012 rights as well. This magnificent tour de force to some (heist to others) required a massive amount of funds, granted largely due to chairmen at General Electric who had a soft spot for the Olympics and a shine for tradition.
Now the strings are being held by a new company: Comcast (also known as Xfinity, but really still known as Comcast).
What’s on the line? Rights for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia and 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And the stakes are high, folks.
Every Olympics secures 17 straight nights of prime-time dominance. The downside is, this security only comes every two years, unlike the weekly power of say Sunday Night Football. Comcast’s chairman, Brian Roberts, is a Maccabiah Games medalist and attended the Games in Vancouver. Downside: He wants to make money, and NBC actually ended up losing $223 million in Vancouver due to the recession and could lose more at London in 2012. Comcast is a national company with domestic interests, whereas G.E. is an international company with international audiences. The loss of the 2016 Chicago bid to Brazil will presumably weaken Comcast’s desire to have the rights, which Jacques Rogge and IOC have publicly valued at about $2.2 billion ($2.7 billion in private), the highest bid amounts ever.
The fate of the 2014 and 2016 Games media rights will be decided at an auction later this spring by the IOC through sealed bids from NBC (Comcast), ESPN, Fox Sports, and possibly CBS-Turner. I appreciate NBC’s high standard of Olympic coverage, and I find the little peacock comforting (like Hurricane Schwartz’ bowtie during a blizzard). Then again, change is good.
Regular Programming will resume shortly…
Bonjour from Paris, readers! Yes, I have spent the last four months living and learning in the City of Light, Love, and La Vie en Rose. Thus, you can hopefully begin to understand my woeful neglect of Good Times and Gold Medals. I’m sorry! I can explain! See what had happened was…
A good friend of mine from Kazakhstan was helping me pack when he gave me some advice I will keep for the rest of my life (pencils ready…..seriously write this down!):
“When you travel, take only what you need, in order to leave space for the new.”
Some of you probably rolled your eyes just now, but I took his advice, both literally and figuratively, and in the words of a certain poet, “It has made all the difference.” I packed my suitcases full of clothes, shoes, my Bible and little else. I left my West Wing DVD sets at home. I left my photo albums filled with friends and the familiar. And, after some struggle, I left this blog as well. It was not my intention to abandon any of these things, but for four months, I did just that. Because what my friend meant is that you can’t really leave home if you take it all with you. It was completely worth it. Every second of it, good or bad, has been life-changing. Un grand merci, Paris! Je t’aime!
But alas my Parisian adventure is coming to a close, and my fingers are itching to discuss what’s been going on in the Movement since I left. Updates on London 2012. A word about two Korean athletes, one from the North and one from the South, at peace with each other even as their countries edge toward the brink of war. And more. I’m back, full of croissants, fromage, and enlightenment. So stay tuned because regular programming will resume shortly…
