Track needs rivalries — but now no Bolt v. Gay

Perhaps more than anything, track and field needs rivalries, and when Tyson Gay pulled himself out of the men’s 100-meter dash Friday evening at the U.S. track and field championships in Eugene, Ore., it signaled yet another serious blow to the sport’s effort to become anything but increasingly marginal.

It is no fun to write such things.

Here’s how much I like track and field: My wife and two daughters were out of town. The son was over at a friend’s for the evening. I had the house all to myself. What did I do? I was one of precisely 3,067 people nationwide enduring the online live-stream of the field events while simultaneously checking the as-they-happened results from the sprints on another website — which inexplicably were being held back for showing later on ESPN.

Earlier this month, after the Prefontaine Classic, I wrote a column that essentially said track was going nowhere fast in the United States. I proposed some suggestions for change. LetsRun.com, among others, linked to my column; the message boards there picked it up, one of the posters declaring I was an idiot.

Maybe. But that’s why I have two dogs. They don’t care.

Possibly, though, after more than 10 years of covering track and field, I have picked up a few things.

Like:

Unless and until someone else runs in the 9.6s, as Tyson Gay did, Usain Bolt stands alone in the sprints.

That’s not healthy.

It’s not healthy for Bolt and it’s not healthy for track and field.

Obviously, Gay’s problem is in fact his health — now his hip. Frankly, he has had such a succession of injuries over the past few years that it’s not clear, really, whether he can get it back together in time for the Olympics next year.

Where does that leave the state of the sport?

It’s far from improbable that the Jamaicans take the top-three spots at the 100 at the world championships late this summer at Daegu, South Korea.

Good for Jamaica, maybe.

Good for track? Uh, no.

Again, the sport needs rivalries, and in particular in its marquee event, the men’s 100.

None of the Americans is even within shouting distance of Bolt right now.

Walter Dix, who won the U.S. title on Friday in 9.94, is a really good sprinter, the bronze medalist in both the 100 and 200 in Beijing. His personal best in the 100 is 9.88; problem is, that’s a full three-tenths of a second behind Bolt’s world-record 9.58.

Michael Rodgers, the 2009 U.S. national champion, ran 9.99 Friday to earn the third U.S. slot at the 2011 worlds. His personal best is a 9.85, at the Pre three weeks ago.

The guy who finished second Friday in Eugene, Justin Gatlin, in 9.95, is of course the 2004 Olympic champion. He is back from a four-year doping ban.

Gatlin has every right to run. He has served his time.

But meet promoters in Europe have made it plain he’s still not welcome there. And his appearance in Daegu, wearing red, white and blue with “USA” on it — which, again, he has earned — is guaranteed to spark a rash of stories in the feral British press and elsewhere that will a) compare his case with that of Dwain Chambers, b) with that of Marion Jones, c) rewind the Trevor Graham saga, and d) remind one and all that the U.S. track scene suffered for years from doping and wonder if the current crop of athletes, despite well-known advances in testing, can be said to be competing cleanly.

To the dismay of USA Track & Field, it will be no great surprise if one or more stories manages to wrap in e) all of the above.

Track needs to move out of precisely that morass.

Maybe Bolt can run even faster than 9.58.

But he doesn’t seem in 2011 to be building toward a lightning strike the way he was in 2009 and 2008; his early-season times in those years were far more suggestive than this year’s.

Beyond which — he simply can not do everything for the sport all by himself. Nor should he be expected to do so.

He needs a rival.

Especially in the United States. Now, though, Bolt v. Gay, the sort of thing that might have gotten track onto the JumboTrons at football stadiums — just the way Michael Phelps’ swim races were shown on those big screens — is gone for 2011.

It might even be gone for 2012.

And track and field is left to be — what? Except for one week every four years at the Olympic Games, when it rocks, what then?

American Handball Arrives at a Place Called Hope

When David Thompson, who was in goal that night down in Guatemala City for the United States men’s handball team, surveyed the scene playing out in front of him, he didn’t just see a collection of guys and stories that even the most imaginative Hollywood scriptwriter might have trouble dreaming up.

He saw hope.

He saw a U.S. men’s handball team qualify for the Pan American Games for the first time since 2003 by routing Guatemala, 38-24, in the second match of a two-match play-in series. The Americans had tied with Uruguay, 23-23, the night before.

“This was special,” the 31-year-old Thompson said, and when he’s not tending goal for the U.S. team he knows special when he sees it. He’s a Methodist pastor.

The U.S. men were forced to the play-in option after losing another would-be qualification match in December to Canada; the U.S. women punched their Pan Am ticket by beating Canada at that December event.

Suddenly, there are stirrings at U.S. handball, which has always seemed like the one Olympic sport Americans should be great at — a mix of, among other things, lacrosse and basketball — but for a mixture of complex reasons has never been much of an item on the U.S. sports radar, not even the Olympic sports scene.

How sweet it is -- the U.S. men's handball team after qualifying for the Pan Am Games // photo courtesy USA Team Handball

Candidly, the United States is not going to win an Olympic medal in 2012.

Scratch that. All things are possible. Minister Thompson knows this to be the truth.

But let’s be practical. For the Americans, it would be enough just to qualify.

Handball is a big deal elsewhere, and particularly in Europe. If the U.S. men in particular had not made it at least to the Pan Am Games, another three or four years would have gone by with probably yet more struggles, operationally and financially.

That’s why what happened in Guatemala City earlier this month is so significant.

Especially since the American men broke through without their star player, Adam El Zoghby. He tore his ACL in December, playing against Canada. El Zoghby, born in New York, played in 130 international matches from 2000 through 2008 for Egypt; in 2009, he decided to play for the Americans.

Without him, everyone else had to step up.

What a crew.

“For us,” Thompson said, “it has been, well — there’s been a lot of change. The last time we were in the Pan Am Games was in 2003. There were all of three players in Guatemala who were on that team.”

Those three:

The two goalies, Thompson and Danny Caparelli. And Gary Hines, consistently one of the team’s leading scorers.

Because of the 23-23 tie with Uruguay, the Americans either had to beat Guatemala by nine goals or win by eight and score more than 21. Uruguay had defeated Guatemala 20-12 in their first match.

Hines scored seven.

As he looked out from goal, Thompson could see the 22-year-old guy who had once played on a first-division team from Argentina and who, as things had turned out, had come with his brother to Park City, Utah, to work at a ski resort on his summer break. Guillermo Acevedo scored twice that night.

Here, too, was the 18-year-old from Germany who was born in Kentucky who speaks maybe not such great English but was running the offense from the start of the game like a veteran. “I’m a really proud mom, proud he has the opportunity to be a part of the USA team handball team,” Mike Williams’ mother, Ceyda, said.

Here, too, was the guy who was born and raised in Sweden who now lives in Norway and works the graveyard shift doing finance work so he can play handball during the days; he scored 11 that night. Martin Clemons Axelsson, whose father is from West Virginia, said, “I can just say from my 22 years playing handball … this was one of the highlights of my career, definitely.”

Thompson, incidentally, who usually backs up Caparelli, got the start against Guatemala. By all accounts, he put on a goal-tending clinic.

The obvious way into the Olympics would be for the Americans to win the Pan Ams, in October in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Steady, now. The Americans have to prove they can beat not only Canada but, especially, Argentina.

In the rounds at the 2011 world championships, Argentina defeated Sweden; the Swedes went on to finish fourth. France won the worlds; earlier this month, in an international friendly, the French beat the Argentinians by only five, 35-30.

The 2003 U.S. Pan Ams team finished third. If the 2011 U.S. edition were to finish as high as second or third, there’s yet another potential way into the Olympics — a qualifying tourney next spring in Europe.

“There’s definitely hope,” Thompson said, and for the American handball program that is absolutely notable. “I think that’s what we have. We have hope.”

No bum story: Sarah Groff’s breakthrough

Six months ago, Sarah Groff could barely walk.

This past weekend, she raced to the bronze medal in Kitzbuhel, Austria, the first-ever podium finish for an American woman in the International Triathon Union’s world championship series.

When you know the back story of what mental toughness it took to make that breakthrough, it’s all the more incredible — and why she has to once again be considered a real contender to make the U.S. team for the 2012 Games.

This is mental toughness of the sort it takes first to endure. Then to understand who you are. Then, ultimately, to prevail.

Sarah grew up in New England. She went to Middlebury College, where she was not only an All-American swimmer but double-majored in conservation biology and art — how’s that for a combo? — and graduated cum laude. In 2008 she was ranked No. 4 in the world in triathlon.

In March of 2010, at her training base in Australia, Sarah fractured her sacrum in what didn’t seem like much of a fall from her bike but turned out to be, well, a big deal.

Before the fall: Sarah Groff training in Kenya // photo: courtesy Sarah Groff

There are maybe two ways to describe what she had broken. There’s the polite way: the sacrum is that triangle-shaped bone at the base of the spine. Then there’s, like, what you’d say in real life, and what she herself posted in a cartoon on her blog, using the English and Australian variation on the word. She had a broken bum.

But being an over-achiever, Sarah didn’t really feel much like slowing down.

So she didn’t. Even though, as she now says, “I was miserable.” The year 2010, she said, “chewed me up and spit me out.”

Classic story.

By the end of the year, things seemed to be getting better. So Sarah and some training mates headed to Kenya, to a high-altitude training camp in a little town called Eldoret.

It’s a base known the world over in running and triathlon circles because of Kip Keino, a middle-distance running pioneer and multiple Olympic medalist from the 1960s and ’70s who is now an International Olympic Committee member.

A couple days in, on another bike ride, a wheel slipped. Sarah took another fall. “A nothing fall,” Sarah said.

Except it wasn’t.

Within a few days, she couldn’t run.

What she could do, however, was spasm. Involuntarily. Her legs would just start shaking.

Of course she had no idea what was going on. And no easy way to find out. Eldoret is a long way from anywhere. It’s in western Kenya and thus even a long way from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.

Sarah decided the smart thing would be to head home and find out what was going on.

The international flights out of Nairobi operate overnight. Sarah was stuffed into economy class. Carrying a backpack that was too heavy.

She flew to London like that. Then she flew back to Colorado Springs, to the U.S. Olympic Training Center. There she underwent an MRI.

Three guesses what it showed.

Her sacrum was fractured — and in the exact same spot.

One more from Kenya: left to right, training partners Vicky Holland (of Britain), Sarah Groff, Lisa Norden (Sweden) // photo courtesy Sarah Groff

For emphasis now — imagine flying overnight out of Africa, with a broken bone in your butt, stuffed into a tourist-class seat, your legs given to spasm, not knowing why. For added emphasis — you’re in pain.

Literally, she had to learn to walk again.

And, after that, to run again. Her mind had to accept that it was okay for her feet and joints and pelvis to accept the shock and pounding of running, of hitting the ground again.

Which is where the best part of the Kenya trip came in handy. In Eldoret, she and her coach, Darren Smith, who is Australian, met another Australian coach, Rob Higley, whose life quest has been for the perfect human running model and who has been a presence in Kenyan running circles for many years now.

“Trust me, I’m a long way off,” Sarah said with a laugh, referring to her running form and meaning from perfection. “But at least my pelvis is stable!”

The Kitzbuhel race, Sarah said, was — well, it was fun. That’s what happens when you’re healthy and fit. For most of the race, she said, it felt like she was “playing triathlon with a whole bunch of girls from around the world,” and during the run, when triathlons increasingly are won and lost, “I was just thinking about maintaining good technique and focusing on every second.

“When the last two girls surged on me with a lap to go,” Sarah said, “that’s when it wasn’t easy anymore. I hadn’t been in that position before. That’s going to be the next level.

Paula Findlay of Canada won the event, in 2 hours, 5 minutes, 52 seconds over the Olympic-distance course. Helen Jenkins of Great Britain took second, four seconds back. Sarah finished in 2:06.27.

Laura Bennett of Boulder, Colo., finished sixth, in 2:06.44. The Kitzbuhel event marked the first time two American women finished in the top-six of a WCS event in the history of the three-year-old series.

Thirteen months now until London, and the Olympics.

“Between now and then I am just trying to stay healthy,” Sarah said, and in this instance that’s all the more reasonable, “and become a better triathlete every day.”

An American archery thunderbolt

Maybe there’s something in the water in central Iowa, something that produces teen-age Olympic sport sensations.

Three years ago, it was Shawn Johnson. This was way before “Dancing with the Stars.” This was when Shawn was hanging out at Chow’s Gymnastics & Dance and going to Valley High in West Des Moines. Shawn went to Beijing in 2008, won four medals, one of them gold on the balance beam, came back home and — she was a star.

Miranda Leek, identified long ago as one of the best up-and-coming archers in the United States, graduated last month from Dowling Catholic, also in West Des Moines. Graduation Day came two days after her 18th birthday. The weekend before, at a trials event in pouring rain in New Jersey, she’d had to show nerves of steel to make the three-member 2011 U.S. world championships recurve team — beating out older, more experienced rivals.

Making the team was just the start. A few days ago, at a World Cup event in Antalya, Turkey, the U.S. team — Miranda, Jennifer Nichols, Khatuna Lorig — stormed through the tournament to take the first-ever U.S. recurve World Cup silver medal. In a final marked by driving rain (again), with lightning in the area, the Americans fell to South Korea, 207-190.

The score didn’t matter. The loss didn’t matter.

What mattered was the thunderbolt of second place.

There’s not just hope in American archery circles. There’s excitement.

The history-making U.S. women's recurve team in Antalya, Turkey -- Khatuna Lorig, Jenny Nichols, Miranda Leek // photo courtesy USA Archery

Archery can be super-complicated. Here’s the essence of it all:

A recurve bow bends away from the shooter at the tips when the bow is strung.

To say that the American women’s recurve team has for years been an under-performer would be — well, gracious. And yet — there’s undeniably talent.

Lorig, a native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, competed in her first Olympics in Barcelona in 1992, shooting for the Unified Team and winning a team bronze medal; she carried the flag for the U.S. team in the closing ceremonies in 2008, so honored after advancing all the way to the quarterfinals, finishing fifth, in the women’s individual event.

Nichols is a two-time Olympian, 2004 and 2008, from Cheyenne, Wyo. She finished ninth in the women’s individual event in Athens.

Talent, though, is not enough. You need depth. You need chemistry.

Lorig is now  37. She is married. She has an 18-year-old son — that is, her son, Levan Onashvili, and Miranda Leek are the same age.

Nichols is 27. She is a dean’s list student majoring in international studies at Texas A&M.

“I have amazing teammates,” Lorig said. “It’s kind of like we are meant to be together.”

“When we’re competing individually,” Nichols said, “that’s where our mental strength comes from — the confidence in our ability, our training, our equipment. It all just comes together. If we can step to the line in confidence, we’re going to come fully loaded and ready to shoot. When it comes to the team, we haven’t felt this confident in years.”

“They’re really great,” Miranda said. “We get along great together. Not just as archers. But as friends.”

Mike Usherenko, Lorig’s coach for 10 years, said she and Nichols have made it clear to Miranda that she — Miranda — absolutely belongs on the world stage and in  return Miranda has brought “something to this team” that “we didn’t have for some time,” a “new level that all three an perform equally and support each other.”

Miranda Leek takes aim // photo courtesy USA Archery

The U.S. head coach, Kisik Lee, who moved to the States in 2006 after serving as Australia’s coach during the 2000 and 2004 Games, a man of distinct purpose and vision, observed simply, “They believe in each other. They believe in their relationship and in the team and in USA Archery. They didn’t have that previously.”

The world championships beckon, in early July in Torino, Italy.

“She is not just a 17-, 18-year-old girl,” Lee said of Miranda, adding that the federation’s “culture had changed” and she, a product of junior development programs, is emblematic of that.

He said, “I had a dream to make the USA the best team. I know we needed a better culture. We needed a team.”

Archery is so much a mental game. Here’s why there’s so much excitement in American archery circles: “It’s going well,” Miranda said. “It’s really fun.”

U.S. women’s water polo team wins out in China

One of the best, if most unheralded, stories in American sports notched another milestone Sunday.

The U.S. women’s water polo team, building toward London and the 2012 Games, won a major tune-up event called the FINA World Super League Final, defeating Italy in the championship game, 9-7. The tournament was staged in Tianjin, China.

The victory gives the U.S. team six World League Super Final championships and five straight FINA titles — three Super Final victories, one world championship (Rome, 2009) and one World Cup.

Shortly after winning the final game, in a phone call from China, two players who over the last several years have seen much of the American program, said they were pleased, yes, but far from satisfied.

The U.S. women's water polo team poses for a snapshot after winning the 2011 FINA World League Super Final tourney // photo: courtesy USA Water Polo

“I think we grew a lot as a team this week,” Villa, arguably the mainstay of the U.S. team since the 2000 Sydney Olympics, said.

“Things are really going well,” said Rulon, who played in the 2004 Athens Games. “But we are pretty far off from where I and the rest of the team want to be.”

That’s experience talking, and that’s also buy-in — buy-in to the program and mind-set of Adam Krikorian, the women’s team’s head coach since the spring of 2009.

It’s easy to explain why.

One, the U.S. team has, over the past  decade, won everything except for Olympic gold. That is the goal, and everything along the way is a stepping stone.

Two, this edition of the U.S. team was brought together at the beginning of 2011; it is, in many regards, a brand-new team. Moreover, starting in January, Krikorian put them through a series of rigorous workouts. He said it would be hard. It was. But it also produced results — undeniably better fitness.

As in any team sport, you win with defense. In Tianjin, the better fitness started to really show itself.

Over the course of the tournament, the U.S. team held opponents to about six goals per game.

“Obviously, winning the World League Super Final is nice,” Krikorian said. “Every tournament — you’re playing to win. The more important thing is I look at how we were with our focus, and our focus this trip has been our defensive effort, and we were phenomenal.

“To hold teams to an average of six goals per game — that is what we talked about what we wanted to accomplish. We did it defensively and we did it using everyone. The strength of this team is we are deep and we do it using everyone.”

Next up for the U.S. team: the 2011 world championships, back in China, in Shanghai, in mid-July.

“Even though we won, there are still plenty of things we can better at,” Krikorian said. “We will watch the video and they will be easy to find, believe me, and hopefully we will play better at the world championships.”

A gold-medal salute to the 1980 U.S. Olympic team

Five San Diego-area seventh-grade students, telling the story of the 1980 U.S. Summer Olympic team, have won a national history contest — keeping the story alive of the team that never got to compete at the Games because of boycott.

“We are so excited,” their teacher, 28-year-old Hillary Gaddis, said Thursday, after the young people from the Day-McKellar Preparatory School in La Mesa, Calif. had won it all in the “Kenneth E. Behring National History Day” contest at the University of Maryland, adding, “We did it. We got the gold medal — it was incredible.”

Craig Beardsley, a swimmer on the 1980 team, was among those in the audience, she said. He had planned to stay for the preliminary round of the competition but was so taken he stayed for the finals, she said.

John Moffet, another 1980 swimmer, was also on hand, filming the contest for a documentary he has in the works about the boycott.

The contest wrapped up a year-long project that saw the Day-McKellar students advance through local and regional rounds. Along they way, they did 32 primary-source interviews and scored a controversial letter from  President Jimmy Carter.

The history-making team: Maxwell Major, Alfreda Shelton, Thomas Day, Mikela Chatfield, Nick Young

“When we started this, we didn’t know where it could go,” Gaddis, 28, said. “Going into it, it was just this project. Look at what this has turned into.”

Indeed. Here, in their own words, is what it was like and what it means:

Thomas Day, 12 years old: “It was unbelievable. First they called out third place. We weren’t announced. They called out second place. We weren’t announced. It was in the [Maryland] basketball arena. They called out the name of our production. They called out our names. I yelled, yeah! The girls screamed.”

Nick Young, 13: “One of the highlights was preparing and getting all the way to nationals and competing, all the things we did on the way there. I think I’m going to take away from this experience a wider spectrum of seeing things.”

Mikela Chatfield, 12: “It was our first time ever performing for that big an audience — I was just excited to be representing our school. It was definitely worth it. It has just been amazing — everyone who has helped us.”

Maxwell Major, 13: “I thought they were going from first place down. I thought I heard ‘first’ when they were doing ‘third’ and I was almost devastated. When I heard our names I was so excited but even though I had seen this coming I shot out of my seat and was cheering like crazy and was running straight for the podium.”

Alfreda Shelton, 11: “I think I will remember how much work we put into this project and how close I got to my team members — winning and becoming the best in the nation. And I think people should remember that the athletes gave up their dreams.”

Denver 2022? Is that the best U.S. chance — for now?

Every first-rate politician has a stump speech — practiced material that’s safe and sure, stuff he or she can turn to when playing to a new or different audience.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, is a first-rate politician. You don’t get to be elected president of the IOC, and then re-elected, without being an expert in the swirl of politics.

Earlier this week, the president set off a flurry of speculation about a potential U.S. bid for the 2020 Summer Games with one of his practiced riffs. It made for good theater and excellent politics.

It’s absolutely in the IOC’s interest to invite an American bid.

From an American perspective, though, the balance of interests would seem to tilt differently. It suggests that it might make a considerably great deal more sense for the United States to graciously take a pass and sit this one out. That is, say no — politely — to 2020.

The background:

This past Tuesday, at the news conference at which it was announced that NBC had bought the rights to televise the Olympics in the United States from 2014 through 2020 for $4.38 billion, the question came up whether this financial turn might prompt an American bid for the 2020 Summer Games.

Out came a riff of the sort the IOC president has delivered many times. He said, “Of course we are very indebted to the United States of America for what they have done in the past and what they are doing now for the Olympic movement.

“You are the country that has organized the most Olympic Games. You are the country with the best athletes in the world; you are leading on the medal tally. You are contributing a lot. So if there is a bid coming for 2020 from the United States of America, we would be very happy.”

That was artfully done. The president’s words immediately set off speculation: Was the United States bidding? Was the IOC inviting an American bid?

It’s a no-brainer for the IOC to solicit an American bid. For one, it’s in the IOC’s interest to invite as many bids as possible from as many countries as possible. For another, the IOC would figure to benefit — as it did during the New York 2012 and Chicago 2016 bids — from the publicity a 2020 campaign would bring in the United States.

Therein, however, lies the crux of the matter. New York got crushed. So did Chicago, and after the president of the United States made a personal appeal on his hometown’s behalf.

Why would a 2020 bid do any better?

Because, right now, the 2020 field is looking thin?

So far, Rome has announced it’s in. Madrid would seem likely.

Tokyo might want in. But if Pyeongchang, South Korea, wins the 2018 Winter Games, will the IOC go back to Asia for the Summer Games just two years later? Munich and Annecy, France, are also in the 2018 Winter race. The IOC will pick the 2018 city on July 6.

Other potential 2020 candidacies are just rumors at this point, among them Doha; Dubai; Istanbul. Doha holds the potential to be the most intriguing.

The deadline for submitting a 2020 bid is Sept. 1. There’s not a lot of time left to decide.

What city would the U.S. Olympic Committee put forth?

There are perhaps only three cities in the United States that can credibly bid for the Summer Games, and regrettably right now none of them screams “winner”:

Chicago — where President Obama’s former chief of staff is now the mayor? Think he remembers Chicago getting 18 votes?

New York? A great bid. Got 19 votes.

Los Angeles. All the facilities. Can do the Games on short notice. But already staged Games twice, in 1932 and 1984, and the Coliseum is, like, old.

As for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where some local leaders have Olympic fever — get real. Not going to happen.

As for Dallas, and Cowboys Stadium? The stadium, granted, is great. Now — what’s the narrative that’s going to compel the IOC to visit Dallas in the heat of the summer? Two dozen years after the heat and good times of Atlanta?

San Francisco? Everyone’s favorite American city, right? But there’s no stadium; there’s no public money in California for that kind of project; the Bay Area sprawls across a bunch of different jurisdictions; the freeways are a mess; and on and on.

Picking a suitable city would be only the start of the to-do list.

It’s hard to imagine rallying the White House for all-in support again. Yet if the last two IOC elections have proven anything, it’s that you can’t win unless you have the full backing of your national government (Sochi 2014, Rio 2016).

Beyond that — the American system of federalism makes cobbling together the financial guarantees the IOC demands a challenging undertaking. If in other countries the federal government can simply sign off on such guarantees, that’s just not possible in a system where the 50 states and the national government have distinct lines of authority.

The guarantee-issue may well have effectively doomed New York’s bid just hours before the 2012 voting; it led to a creative end-around financing plan for Chicago, which had to be approved by the city council there (it was), which involved a lot of local politicking, and for what — those 18 IOC votes and that first-round exit? Is the Chicago city council likely to be eager to do that all over again?

There’s yet another financial matter at issue. The USOC and IOC have been at odds for years now over the USOC’s share of broadcasting and marketing revenues. It gets 12.75 percent of the NBC TV deal and 20 percent of certain top-tier marketing contracts. The day after the $4.38 billion NBC deal was announced, the two sides resumed talks over the USOC’s shares.

The USOC’s chief executive, Scott Blackmun, has consistently said that it won’t bid for 2020 unless there’s a deal with the IOC over those shares.

Understand, though, that Blackmun is not saying that if a deal does get done the USOC will then bid. He is not saying that at all.

And no one is saying that a deal is going to get done by the Sept. 1 deadline to submit a bid. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t.

Remember, though, that Sept. 1 is not even two years since Chicago got whacked. The 2016 vote took place Oct. 2, 2009. The USOC has made it plain that it needs to build relationships and go slow. Again, it needs to go s-l-o-w.

The USOC chairman, Larry Probst, presumably is in line to become an IOC member at some point. But he’s not one yet. Why launch a bid when the USOC doesn’t know when he’ll be able to work the room?

There’s more. But that’s enough, save these couple of thoughts:

Rogge’s term ends in 2013. The dynamic afterward, under a new president, whoever that may be, will doubtlessly prove different. In the meantime, Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016 took the IOC to new places; Pyeongchang offers a similar possibility for 2018. If the Koreans were to win, what evidence would suggest the IOC would be looking to return to the United States, “the country that has organized the most Olympic Games,” for the final election of Rogge’s term? The 2020 site will be chosen in 2013.

Finally, the United States won the medals count at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. What if in the coming years the best shot for a winning bid from the United States proves to be a Winter Games entry?

It’s a long way away, 2022. The IOC election for 2022 will be in 2015. But they’re already talking about it in Reno, Nevada. They held the Games there (pretty much) — in Squaw Valley, California, in 1960. Great mountains. Here’s the challenge with Reno: Aside from security, which is always priority No. 1 with the IOC, the leading issue within IOC circles right now is betting, in particular the influence that illicit betting can have on sports. Of course, gaming is highly regulated in Nevada. Even so — how is that distinction going to be easily explained to the IOC?

For entertainment purposes only, how about this for a 2022 thought: Denver. The IOC decamped there in 2009 for an executive board meeting. The Colorado mountains were out the window of the hotel. The USOC could pretty much run the bid from its headquarters 90 minutes away, in Colorado Springs. And you want a story? The only city ever to give the Games back (early 1970s) has realized its mistake and wants to make amends with a great and gracious American welcome?

Hmm.

A love story: the lipstick-wearing shot-put champion and her man

Everyone loves a love story. Have you heard the one about the pretty, lipstick-wearing shot-put champion?

No, really.

Jill Camarena-Williams threw the shot 19.76 meters last weekend at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore. That’s 64 feet, 10 inches. That was the best American throw in 23 years — since Ramona Pagel threw 20.18, or 66-2 1/2, at a meet in San Diego in June 1988.

Jill didn’t win the shot at the Pre. Nadezhda Ostapchuk of Belarus did, with a throw of 20.59, or 67-6 3/4, best in the world this year and one of the top-50 throws of all time.

Jill was hardly down about it. Just the opposite. She was beaming. And why not?

Jill Camarena-Williams and her hubby, Dustin

The Olympics are only a year away and she is a legitimate medal contender — with another chance to prove it Thursday, at the Bislett Games in Oslo, another world-class meet.

She has her health. Her back is pain-free, after a bummer of 2009, and anyone who has had lower-back pain knows what that can be like.

That day in Eugene, she had her family in the stands — her mom, Marilyn, and her dad, Marvin. Her coach was there, too — Craig Carter.

Mostly, though, she has her man — her husband, Dustin.

And to think that Eugene, and Hayward Field, is kind of where it all started — at the 2008 Olympic Trials.

Dustin said, “If you had asked me at the Trials,” where he was working as an athletic trainer and she had just qualified for the U.S. Team, “if I was going to marry her — I’d say you were crazy.

“But everything has a plan.”

Jillian laughed.

To make a long story short, she — the athlete — and he — the trainer — live in the same world. They talk the same language. At the Trials, he worked on a knee that was giving her some trouble.

After she made the team, they went out to celebrate — with her parents, he being such a gentlemen and all — at the Roadhouse Grill in Springfield, Ore., the town right next to Eugene, for a nice casual dinner.

After that, she went to the Olympics, making the finals, finishing twelfth. He went to the Paralympics with the U.S. staff.

During that time, though, they kept chatting online. She told him, when I get back from China, I think I’m going to move up to Provo, Utah, where he was based, to finish a master’s degree — in exercise science — at BYU. He helped her find an apartment.

They hung out together as friends. After about a month, though, each of them thought, hmm, maybe this is more than friends.

They were married Sept. 5, 2009.

She’s now 29. He’s 32. She throws the shot. He runs Ironman-style competitions. They hold hands. They laugh at each other’s jokes.

She said, “He’s such a good person, so good-hearted. He wants everyone to do well. It made me fall in love with him.

“If I stopped throwing the shot, he’d be okay with that. I joke, oh, I weigh so much more. He’s like — you’ll throw the shot that much more!”

Dustin laughed. “What she has found,” he said, “is that balance.”

She nodded. “I get in the ring. I know what to do. I’m relaxed, way more than I used to be. I know everything is going to come together at a meet.”

Isn’t true love great?

NBC’s $4.38 billion knockout punch

There’s an old maxim in boxing. If you want to beat the champ, you have to knock him out.

That’s pretty much the way it was always going to play out when it came to the contest for the U.S. broadcast rights for the coming editions of the Olympic Games, which the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday awarded to NBC — a $4.38 billion deal that stretches through the 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 Games.

Fox was in the game. The ESPN/ABC combination was, too.

Even so, NBC, which has televised every Summer Olympics in the United States since 1988, every Winter Games since 2002, was always the favorite, despite the resignation May 19 of Dick Ebersol. This process was always bigger than one man, no matter how towering a figure.

Eight years ago, the last time this process played out, NBC agreed to pay $2 billion for the rights to the 2010 and 2012 Games. A General Electric sponsorship bumped the full package up to $2.2 billion. That time around, Fox bid $1.3 billion. ESPN offered to share revenues with the IOC but never specified dollar figures.

This time, NBC swung the knockout punch — again.

ESPN opted to bid only for the 2014 and 2016 Games. According to Associated Press and Sports Business Daily, it offered $1.4 billion.

Fox put in a bid for 2014/16 and, as well, for 2018/20. Its two-Games bid was $1.5 billion, its four-Games bid $3.4 billion, AP and SBD reported.

NBC went big, for four Games and $4.38 billion.

What else did you expect?

As IOC president Jacques Rogge put it in a news conference Tuesday, referring to NBC, “I can say really that the Olympics are in their DNA.”

The IOC, like any institution, has a comfort zone. With NBC, the IOC has enjoyed growth, prosperity and — under Rogge’s direction in particular — financial security. While it might well have achieved those things in partnership with other networks, the fact is it is NBC that has been there through the ups, the downs, the Salt Lake scandal — everything.

This deal anchors the IOC’s finances through 2020. It figures to do the same for the U.S. Olympic Committee, which now gets 12.75 percent of the U.S. rights fee. The USOC and IOC are currently in active negotiations over the USOC’s broadcast and marketing rights shares, Rogge saying the new NBC deal figures to be a “positive factor” in those talks.

Here are the numbers: NBC will pay $775 million for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia and $1.226 billion for the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics.

It will pay $963 million for the 2018 Winter Games and $1.418 billion for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Neither the 2018 nor 2020 site has been decided. The IOC will pick the 2018 city on July 6. Three cities are in that 2018 race: Munich; Annecy, France; and Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The IOC still hopes to reach a separate extension of the GE sponsorship, officials said Tuesday.

The IOC’s relationships with NBC, beyond Ebersol, run deep indeed.

To be clear: The IOC did not structure the process so that NBC could win. Hardly. The bids were what they were. The IOC didn’t tell anyone what to offer.

Nonetheless: If it was the case that the process was delayed so that there could be signs of life amid the global economic downturn, wasn’t it also patently obvious that the auction was pushed back so that the Comcast/NBC merger could be fully completed?

Wasn’t it equally obvious when the IOC went around dropping hints that a four-Games package would be welcomed? All those hints came after NBC lost $223 million in Vancouver. A four-Games package clearly would enable bidders for the next package to amortize costs over a longer term.

Brian Roberts, the Comcast chairman, said in that same news conference that the longer term was “strategically important” and of “great value to us.” He said Comcast expects to make money on the $4.38 billion deal, calling the company’s position “very comfortable.”

Roberts added, “We said all along we were going to take a disciplined approach were we would have a path to profitability. By having a longer term, we were able to come out and achieve that goal.”

It’s far too facile, meanwhile, to say that Tuesday’s deal is only about the money. To know even the first thing about the IOC and its culture is to know that.

So what else?

The IOC is actively trying to engage with young people. It last year launched a Youth Olympic Games in Singapore. It has a lively Facebook site.

NBC’s deal gives it the rights to television, tablets, mobile phones, broadband — to every platform now known or to be conceived, as Mark Lazarus, the new chairman of the NBC Sports Group, put it in that same news conference. “That’s part of the value for our new company, to bring the Games to more people across more platforms,” he said.

For years, the knock on NBC was that it held the good stuff back and showed it only in prime-time.

Fox and ESPN made clear they would show events live. But everyone knew NBC would be doing so, too — that was one of the main benefits of the Comcast merger. Before, NBC had to rely on prime-time advertising sales. Now there would be considerably less financial pressure because of the added revenue stream from cable sub-fees.

Starting in 2014, Lazarus said, NBC would make every event available live, on one platform or another. Of course, the best stuff presumably will be shown again, in prime-time. Prime-time still draws families together before the big screen; that remains one of the main lures for sponsors.

Beyond that, what the Olympics are about — what makes them different from every other property — is story-telling. That’s what Roone Arledge understood at ABC, when the Olympics first became a television event in the United States, when screens showed only black-and-white grainy pictures.

Story-telling is Ebersol’s passion.

That passion has been passed on to the NBC team. It’s the DNA thing Rogge talked of. It was at the core of the message delivered Tuesday to the IOC in a presentation that included Bob Costas and that, by all accounts, was simply first-rate.

“We were blown away by the presentation,” Richard Carrion, the IOC’s lead negotiator, said. “The passion [the NBC team] had for the Olympic Games was very impressive and very evident to all of us. They know — they have been doing this for quite a while. We knew that they know what this is about. They know the values that are important to all of us. It was a combination of all those things.

“… We are happy to renew it.”

Track and field — going nowhere fast in the United States

A friend and I were sitting outside at a great little restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday when some dude with his shirt off, two feathers pasted to the back of his head, went riding by on a bicycle, smoke billowing around him. The feathers were black and red. Each was at least two feet long.

Not sure what kind of smoke it was but many fine people in Eugene are often, you know, mellow.

Watching the dude go by, I thought, everything seemed pretty much normal in Eugene, which bills itself as Track Town USA.

It’s a lovely thought, Eugene as Track Town USA, except — really — it’s not. There’s no place that’s Track Town USA. It’s a big problem. After this weekend’s Prefontaine Classic, before the meet this weekend in New York, before the nationals back in Eugene later this month — it’s time for everyone connected to the sport to recognize that it’s time for a thorough re-think.

Track and field is going nowhere fast in the United States.

It can, and must, do better — especially because USATF, track and field’s governing body, is getting $4.4 million annually in grant money from the U.S. Olympic Committee, the most any governing body is getting, and with that kind of cash comes heavy responsibility.

USA Swimming, for comparison, is doing all kinds of clever stuff. At its Olympic Trials, they’re plunking down a temporary pool inside a basketball arena. They shoot off fireworks and they play cool music and they have hard bodies and, frankly, it rocks.

Track and field needs to do the same kind of out-of-the-box thinking.

For instance:

What about holding the track Trials at, say, Cowboys Stadium? Make the event an — event. If Cowboys Stadium is good enough for the Super Bowl, it’s good enough for the Trials. Okay, the 2012 Trials are set for Eugene. Beyond?

In the meantime: Why isn’t there a reality-TV show where, for example, a bunch of sprinters are all living in the same house and vying for a shot at the Olympics? Surely some cable network would buy that concept.

At meets, why aren’t camera crews on the infield, up close and personal, listening to the athletes grunting and breathing hard and talking smack with each other? Why not at the Trials? The cameras are right there on the floor on the basketball floor during NBA games; they’re practically in the huddles during time-outs.

Track needs more personality and it needs to develop strong personalities; it needs sweat and drama dripping in high-def TV.

Frankly, the sport needs a lot more TV and, at the same time, a lot less TV. That is, it needs to be on the air a lot more but in shorter blocks.  It needs to be on regularly but  for, like, an hour. That’s all. An hour. It can be done. You don’t need to watch every prelim, every throw, every everything.

Track needs this kind of stuff to move past its doping-soaked past, and the sooner the better. When I got home from Eugene, I asked my youngest daughter, who’s 12 — our three kids are not big sports fans — to name some basketball players. Shaq and Kobe and other names came right out. Football players? Tom Brady and some others. Track? “Usain Bolt and that Marion lady who went to prison.”

That’s what track must confront.

And this:

Eugene has a dedicated and knowledgeable group of track enthusiasts. Yes, Hayward Field is soaked in history and the University of Oregon program is traditionally one of the best.

So what?

That’s a subculture even in Eugene.

You don’t think so?

Check out the website of the Eugene Register-Guard, purported protector of the faith. Now click through to the sports section. Read the line at the very top of the page, where the newspaper gets to promote how it sees itself. Does it say even the first word about track and field? Nope.

It says, “Oregon Football, breaking sports updates, NCAA and Pac-12 news, prep sports.”

Now let’s get really real.

I am truly fond of Eugene. I saw it for the first time when I was 17, just three days after I was graduated from high school in southwestern Ohio. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before; it was love at first sight. During college at Northwestern, I came back to Oregon, to do a three-month internship at the newspaper in Bend, the Bulletin. After graduation, I tried to get a job with one of the Oregon newspapers but couldn’t get any takers. My loss.

Oregon is a long way from everywhere. Eugene is farther still.

All the things that can make it charming can sometimes make it seem a lot less so when we’re talking about the kind of logistics and production values associated with the major-league sports that track is competing against.

Parking around Hayward Field is difficult to begin with (by the way, thank you to Jeff Oliver for helping me out with a pass to the Pre meet — much appreciated). It was more complicated this past weekend because it was move-out weekend at the university dorms across the street.

Those of us who have had the privilege of covering the Super Bowl had to laugh when the note went out that it would be helpful to bring our own ethernet cable to Hayward Field so as to ensure internet access. Do you really think the writers and broadcasters in Dallas this week covering the NBA Finals are being asked to bring their own cables so they can access the internet?

The New York Times was not in Eugene this weekend. Neither was the Los Angeles Times. These were just some of the other outlets not there, either: the Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated.

But then, why would an editor at any of those publications authorize the expenditure of roughly $1500 to go to Eugene?

Sports depend on stars.

Bolt wasn’t in Eugene. In fact, unless something changes, he’s not due to run anywhere in the United States in 2011.

Tyson Gay wasn’t in Eugene. (Instead, he was in Clermont, Florida, where he ran a 9.79 100 meters in a heat in something called the NTC Sprint Series, according to Reuters. He did not compete in the final, according to official results. A YouTube video shows that he ran before a crowd of dozens.)

Tirunesh Dibaba, the distance queen from Ethiopia, appeared in Eugene. But that’s all she did. She appeared. She didn’t actually run, citing injury.

South Africa’s Caster Semenya, the women’s 800 meter world champion, made her first American appearance in Eugene, and ran. She finished second in the 800. But she inexplicably didn’t show at a pre-meet news conference. After the race, she had to be tracked down to talk to reporters for two minutes and three seconds.

Galen Rupp, the American distance standout, didn’t run in the 10k Friday night. He and his coach, Alberto Salazar, cited concerns about allergies — along with the worry, further spelled out on the USATF Facebook page, that if Rupp ran and had an allergy fit he wouldn’t be ready for the nationals.

That decision underscores a major part of the problem.

There are really only two meets this year that matter — the nationals, June 23-26, and the worlds, Aug. 27-Sept. 4.

The rest has devolved, regrettably, to varying degrees of noise, and everyone knows it.

Why should fans care if the athletes, coaches, shoe companies and other sponsors — everyone else who has a meaningful stake in the game — make it plain that an event such as the Pre, allegedly one of the nation’s top meets, is something you can skip without any real consequence because you’re way more worried about the nationals?

This disconnect has manifested itself at the top leadership levels of the sport. USATF’s chief executive’s job has now gone unfilled for months amid the departure of Doug Logan. Now there is talk, as reported by my colleague Philip Hersh in his Chicago Tribune blog, that the USATF board wants to pluck the president and chairwoman of that board, Stephanie Hightower, and put her in the CEO job.

For real?

That didn’t work for the USOC — see the example of Stephanie Streeter — and it’s going to draw special scrutiny if that’s the decision at USATF.

For those who would say, oh, it did work at other, smaller national governing bodies — track and field is not archery or fencing. Again, USATF gets $4.4 million a year from the USOC. It is the bellwether NGB. The situation is different.

It boggles the mind that USATF seemingly can’t get anyone in the entire United States to take this job. Why, a reasonable observer might ask, might that be?

For starters, all the reasons detailed above. Plus, USATF is based in Indianapolis, which on the excitement scale beats out Milwaukee because Indianapolis has the Colts and the Packers play in Green Bay but maybe doesn’t out-do New York; the factions within track and field can be notoriously partisan; there are the road runners and there is USATF and it’s not clear where the two communities converge, even though it seems incredibly obvious that they should; the federation holds no realistic chance of staging a world championships in the United States in the foreseeable future; and on and on.

Oh, and the other reason USATF seemingly can’t get anyone in the United States to take the job is because, after the Logan experience, USATF doesn’t seem to be looking too far outside the existing track community.

When it’s precisely outside-the-box thinking that’s needed.

It all makes you sometimes just want to think to yourself — what, exactly, is the USOC getting in return for that $4.4 million? Relay teams that keep dropping the baton at the Olympics and world championships and — what else?