Lopez Lomong, and “all the things people in the world dream about”

What Lopez Lomong does when he runs is fantastic stuff.

But that, of course, is just the start of all there is to tell when the telling revolves around Lopez Lomong.

“I am a voice for people who never told their story,” he says. “I have to tell their stories.”

When most Americans checked in on track and field four years ago, Lomong was the flag bearer for the U.S. team marching into the opening ceremony at the Summer Games in Beijing.

He was one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, born in southern Sudan, forced to flee when he was just 6 years old to avoid an attack by the militia group known as the Janjaweed. He and his family ran for three days until they crossed into Kenya. After being separated from his family, he lived in a refugee camp run by Catholic missionaries for 10 years. An essay he wrote in 2001 about what he would try to do in the United States got him that chance; he was placed with a foster family in upstate New York. He went on to run in high school and college, became a naturalized U.S. citizen and made the 2008 U.S. Olympic team in the 1500 meters.

In Beijing, he made it to the 1500 semifinals. He posed for pictures with President Bush.

Lopez Lomong, left, and Brittany Morreale at her graduation from the Air Force Academy // all photos courtesy Brittany Morreale

Lomong and Morreale atop the Incline– once a railway, now a workout favorite for everyone from novices to Olympic athletes — near Manitou Springs, Colo.

Fast forward to April 2012 and the Peyton Jordan meet at Stanford. Now the 27-year-old Lomong is every bit the professional track athlete. Now he is training in Portland, running 80 to 85 miles per week under the direction of Oregon Track Club coach Jerry Schumacher.

This night, Lomong, running the 5000 meters, not only unleashes a powerful kick but blows away the field. He crosses the finish line and stops, an easy winner.

Just one problem.

He has miscounted laps. He has one to go.

Oh.

He fires up the jets and takes off again.

This is a supremely difficult trick. But Lomong manages it, anyway. And wins the race again. Twice, as it were — and, as it turns out, in what was then a world-leading time, 13:11.63.

“My body felt so good,” Lomong said, laughing and adding, “We train so hard that racing is easy. Every time we have a race coming up in a couple weeks it’s like I can’t wait — that’s an easy day.”

This weekend, Lomong will race the mile at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore., against a world-class field. The mile isn’t an Olympic event; maybe it should be, but that’s a discussion for another day. The Pre is “another indicator” of where he is and what race or races he ought to aim for at the Trials.

As Lomong eases back into the spotlight, he paused this week to reflect for just a moment:

“I love the United States,” he said. “This is the country that gives me a second chance. This is my gift, to give back to this country that has given me a second chance. I owe this country so much. I owe the fans. I love it so much. I wear the uniform with pride. I hold my head high and say, ‘I am an American.’ ”

Assuming Lomong makes the U.S. Olympic team again, and if his Stanford kick is any indication you have to think he’s a solid bet, he will be reunited in London with his longtime girlfriend, Brittany Morreale, 24, of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif.

She is a Rhodes Scholar now doing her work in Oxford as well as a first lieutenant in the Air Force.

They met when she was on the track and cross-country teams at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; he was in the area, where the U.S. Olympic Committee maintains a center, training; half a season later, he asked her out while they were both recuperating from a hard workout in an ice bath. How’s that for romance?

They have been an item now for four years.

At Oxford, Morreale is studying anthropology — specifically, the role of traditional authority at the community level in South Sudan, which last July became an independent nation. “Originally it was inspired by Lopez,” she said. “It has become really personal.”

The day after the closing ceremonies in London, the two of them will travel to the town where he was born and spent his first six years. It’s called Kimotong, in a state called Eastern Equatoria. There, in concert with World Vision, the Christian relief agency, they intend to launch a long-term project — it’s dubbed “4 South Sudan” — with, naturally, four areas of focus: clean water, health care, education and nutrition.

A ‘tukul’ is a traditional east African hut made of mud and reeds. This is the Lomong tukul where Lopez was born and spent the first six years of his life, in Kimotong, in the nation now known as South Sudan.

Through appearances at the Chicago and Los Angeles marathons, Lomong has helped raise just over $100,000 — enough, they figure, to drill several boreholes and wells in Kimotong.

It’s critical, he said, to find a well or wells to deliver water. Three years ago, his younger sister, Susan, just a teen-ager, was sexually assaulted as she was en route one day to find water. Lomong has written about the incident previously and when asked will talk about it, saying it has become a key motivator for him in trying to effect change not just in Kimotong but elsewhere in the developing world, where girls often find themselves vulnerable simply because they’re trying to find water to drink or to use for cooking.

The only working pump in Kimotong

A girl getting water out of a hole in the ground in Kimotong

A village with water frees its girls from that fear and from the burden of walking hours to find it; when that burden is lifted, that opens up the possibility of going to school; with school comes endless possibilities.

In Susan’s case, the assailant’s identity remains unknown. Susan became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, whose name is Choper.

“I look at this,” Lopez Lomong said, “and I am so blessed to be in America.

“I ran through all these obstacles to get to America. In my house, I have a faucet and clean water. I don’t have to go to a river or a lake. And $50 will provide clean water for a family for life. That’s incredible. I just want to be able to bring clean water so that girls like my sister don’t have to walk all these miles and along the way they can overcome all those hardships. We want them to be able to go to school and continue in their lives and dream big. Be teachers and doctors and pilots and all the things people in the world dream about. All the things that were pushing me forward.”

“Hello, partner”: USOC, IOC resolve financial differences

QUEBEC CITY, Canada — It was about an hour after the U.S. Olympic Committee and International Olympic Committee had announced they had signed the agreement that had ended seven years of talks over how to split certain key revenues, and USOC board chairman Larry Probst was standing in the hall of the sprawling convention center here when up came Thomas Bach.

An IOC vice president, the president of the German Olympic committee, Bach is one of the most influential senior officials in the movement.

As he approached Probst, Bach had a big smile on his face. He said, simply, “Hello, partner.”

Such a remark would have been literally unthinkable a few years ago — as recently as October, 2009, when Chicago was unceremoniously booted out of the voting in Copenhagen for the 2016 Summer Games, won by Rio de Janeiro.

But not Friday. Bach wasn’t the only one seeking out Probst and, as well, Scott Blackmun, the chief executive of the USOC. Here was Rene Fasel, the Swiss president of the international ice hockey federation, sliding up to Probst to talk up the Stanley Cup finals and to inquire whether Probst — who lives in Northern California — might be around because Fasel was for sure going to be down in L.A. to catch the Kings.

It has been said many times before when explaining the way the Olympic movement really works but on the occasion of the deal signed Friday that re-arranged the financial ties between the USOC and IOC it bears repeating: relationships are everything.

IOC and USOC officials announcing the signing of the new revenue deal: left to right: IOC communications director Mark Adams, IOC executive board member Richard Carrion from Puerto Rico; Yasmine Braeckevelt, executive assistant to the IOC president; IOC president Jacques Rogge; USOC board chairman Larry Probst; USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun

The USOC and IOC jointly announced Friday that they had signed a new revenue sharing agreement between them that runs from 2020 until 2040.

The deal resolves a longstanding dispute over the USOC’s share of television and marketing revenues that had undermined the American committee’s standing in the Olympic movement and played a key role in sinking Chicago’s 2016 and New York’s 2012 bids.

Now the USOC will weigh whether to bid for the 2022 Winter or 2024 Summer Games.

New York and San Francisco would seem to top 2024 possibilities, with Chicago of course under consideration as well, maybe even Los Angeles. Though Dallas and Houston have floated interest, there’s little to no suggestion they can win internationally.

Denver, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City and Bozeman, Mont., have indicated 2022 interest.

There are arguments to be made for 2022 or 2024. That said, it’s plain the Summer Games are, and always have been, the IOC’s big prize.

The USOC board intends to meet next month in the Bay Area, and the bid game figures to be a big topic. “Our strategy is to develop a strategy at this point,” chief executive Scott Blackmun said at the  news conference announcing the revenue deal.

Rogge was at that conference, too. He said, “This is a very happy moment for the IOC as well as for the USOC. This agreement will definitely strengthen both sides.”

The genesis of Friday’s announcement is a deal that was signed in 1996 designed to run for — honestly — forever. It gives the USOC a 12.75 percent share of U.S. broadcast revenues and a 20 percent cut of Olympic top-tier marketing revenues. Over time, key IOC officials came to believe the USOC share was excessive. That led first to resentment and then outright hostility.

Talks aimed at striking a new deal began in 2005.

In reality, this deal started on Oct. 3, 2009, the day after Chicago got smacked down in Copenhagen, and Probst was left to figure out how the situation had gotten this bad, why no one on the American side had seen a first-round exit and, maybe worst of all, why the president of the United States had been invited to stump for Chicago in person, President Obama’s hometown, only to have the IOC reward the Americans with a mere 18 votes. Four years before, New York had gotten 19.

Probst vowed to become more engaged, and did. He hired Blackmun. The two said they would work at the relationship thing. They did. Big-time. They traveled the world. They didn’t ask for anything special. They played it humble and low-key and said the USOC was simply trying to be one NOC among many, just another member of the Olympic family.

It took some time, naturally, for Blackmun and Christophe de Kepper, now the IOC director-general, to get to know and trust each other. They emerged as the point people on the deal, which essentially got done in a marathon session in recent days.

The deal essentially features three component parts:

– The USOC will pay a share of what’s called Games costs;

– The USOC will take a lower share of incremental revenues for top-tier marketing revenues, 10 percent, according to the Associated Press, which first reported the figure.

– Same for TV, 7 percent, according to AP.

A working example:

Let’s say the baseline television revenues for the four-year Olympic period, which in Games-speak is called a quadrennium, are $250 million. Let’s also say inflation bumps that up to $270 million. The USOC will take its usual 12.75 percent share up to that $270 million. That would equal $34.425 million.

If, however, revenues for the quad actually end up being $300 million, the USOC will take that lower percentage, 7 percent, of the difference, the $30 million. That would equal $2.1 million.

Total (again, these numbers are totally made up): $36.525 million.

What isn’t made up is that NBC paid $4.38 billion to broadcast the Games from 2014 to 2020. The USOC gets 12.75 percent of that. Do the math.

This is critically important to understand: the USOC is the only Olympic committee in the world that is self-sufficient. Everywhere else, the Olympic committee gets government funding. Not the USOC. Through the 1978 law that set it up, Congress said the USOC must be self-sufficient. That’s why the USOC can’t — and couldn’t — give up its broadcast or marketing revenues.

Philosophically, the IOC understood all along that the USOC is a leading contributor to the Olympic scene. It also understood that NBC agreed to pay $4.38 billion in part because the U.S. team wins a boatload of medals and because the likes of Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte and Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White plant viewers in front of television screens. That’s inarguable.

At the same time, the IOC might now go about and make deals in emerging market — China, India, Brazil. It’s fair for the USOC to give on those deals.

The obvious question: why did it take seven years to get to Friday?

Because Probst and Blackmun inherited ill will and, as Blackmun put it, “It’s all about relationships, and you can’t build relationships overnight.”

Probst on Friday recalled his first meeting with Puerto Rico’s Richard Carrion, who along with Gerhard Heiberg of Norway and de Kepper formed the IOC’s negotiating team. This was at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. “More of a lecture,” Probst said, laughing, saying that since then he and Carrion — and their wives — have become genuine friends: “It’s all about friendship, partnership, relationship.”

“In Copenhagen,” Probst said, “I was a deer in the headlights. Things have changed.”

In Copenhagen, many of the words directed at and about the Americans were unpleasant. Things have changed.

Another IOC vice president, Singapore’s Ser Miang Ng, called Friday’s announcement a “historic moment,” saying it was the “start of a new relationship between the USOC and the Olympic family, not only the financial aspect but the goodwill it is creating and the opportunities it is creating for everybody.”

Denis Oswald, a Swiss lawyer who is on the 15-person IOC executive board, declared, “It’s very important. It was our wish that the USOC comes back as a full member of the family and understands they have to be a part of it. I think it’s a good solution.”

“It’s a real milestone,” Bach said.

“It’s a win-win situation. For everybody. For the IOC, for the USOC, for everybody. It’s a great success for Jacques Rogge,” Bach said, adding a moment later, “For him personally, it’s a great day. Now the way is free for many things.”

Three for 2020 in, Doha and Baku out

QUEBEC CITY, Canada — In cutting the 2020 Summer Games bid city field Wednesday from five cities to three, the International Olympic Committee eliminated both Baku and Doha, immediately raising the provocative question of whether Doha — which, let’s face it, is due to put on soccer’s 2022 World Cup — is ever going to get its chance to make its case before the full IOC.

The IOC’s 15-member policy-making executive board, meeting here amid the sprawling SportAccord assembly, passed Tokyo, Madrid and Istanbul through to the so-called “candidate city” phase.

The IOC will select the 2020 city at a secret vote in September, 2013, in Buenos Aires, a congress marked also by an election to succeed Jacques Rogge, who because of mandatory term limits will be stepping down after 12 years as IOC president.

The contours for the 2020 election are plain:

Will the Eurocentric IOC, after electing Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 2018 Winter Games, want to return to far-away Asia for Summer 2020? This is Tokyo’s second-straight bid, Madrid’s third, Istanbul’s fifth overall.

Happy: Bid leaders from Istanbul, Tokyo and Madrid after their three cities were passed through to the next phase of the 2020 campaign // photo courtesy Tokyo 2020

The IOC report released Wednesday that assessed all five would-be 2020 cities called Tokyo’s application “very strong.” Tokyo typically has graded out terrifically well in such so-called “technical” reports. Now comes the hard part:  the political sell.

“We have to explain to the members our planning … the excitement … [why] it would be the best Olympic Games and a model for the future,” asserted Tsunekazu Takeda, the president of Tokyo 2020 and the Japanese Olympic Committee.

The report called Madrid’s file “strong.” Obviously, Spain is currently beset by economic woes. At the same time, much of what’s needed to stage an Olympics is already built; that’s the advantage of two prior bids. But can the Madrid 2020 team deliver a winning message?

Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., a key Madrid bid official, said, “The IOC, by coming to southern Europe, would be giving a new generation of youth hope and opportunity, and we can afford to do it  because the infrastructure is already in place.”

Can Istanbul run the gamble of bidding for the Games and the 2020 European soccer championships simultaneously? The IOC report, noting that Istanbul’s file offers “good potential” but needs to be “refined,” stressed that the notion of not only bidding for but actually staging the Olympics and soccer so close together — they would be held just months apart — presents “significant risks.”

Ugur Erdener, an IOC member as well as president of the world archery federation and the Turkish Olympic committee, said the Games were his country’s “first priority,” adding, “That is very clear.”

The announcement Wednesday follows Rome’s February withdrawal from the 2020 race. Some had considered it a favorite. The Italian government said it simply could not provide the financial guarantees the IOC demands.

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, was never going to win for 2020 — Azerbaijan doesn’t even have an IOC member — and so whether they were passed through was always more a matter of passing interest, no more. Make no mistake: a Baku bid is to be taken seriously because they have abundant resource and will. But Baku is for future editions of the Games.

The intrigue in this 2020 election was always Doha, the capital of Qatar.

Then again, the intrigue in the early stage of the 2016 election involved Doha as well.

Four years ago, the IOC cut Doha at this same stage, even though the 2016 technical review had it rated ahead of Rio de Janeiro, which then went on to win.

This time, after a ferocious internal debate at the IOC’s executive board session meeting last summer at the time of the world track and field championships in Daegu, South Korea, Doha was allowed to jump into the 2020 race amid the proviso it hold the Games from Oct. 2-18 to avoid the desert heat.

Doha has successfully staged the 2006 Asian Games and, last December, the Arab Games. Doha has won the right to stage, among other significant events, the 2014 swimming world short-course championships and the 2015 men’s world handball championships; last spring, it put on the IOC’s sport and environment conference.

Overwhelmingly, the summer sports federations said ok to the Doha bid.

The Qataris are adamant about the use of sport as one of the four “pillars” of both a “national vision” plan that aims to achieve concrete goals by 2030 and, as well, to cement Qatar’s role as a “leading nation in bringing the world together,” the Qatar Olympic Committee’s vision statement.

Here in Quebec City, there was more debate.

In Olympic politics — as in all politics — perception is as important, if not more so, than reality. It may or may not matter that the issues confronting Doha are on-the-ground real. What matters is that some number of key Olympic stakeholders believe they are real enough.

Is the country big enough for the Olympics? The soccer World Cup is big. But the Olympics are a completely different scale: 28 simultaneous world championships. The financial aspects might pose no difficulty, the IOC report said, but building, coordinating and testing transport, housing, competition and non-competition venues as well as identifying, training and housing a Games workforce, all within seven years “presents a major challenge and risk.”

What about the idea of the 2020 Olympics as dress rehearsal for the 2022 World Cup? That’s not the way the IOC works. In Brazil, the World Cup is coming before the Olympics — in 2014, two years before the 2016 Summer Games.

There’s this, too, and it’s impossible to pretend this isn’t part of the dynamic: it wasn’t going to happen that Rogge’s final months in office were going to be marked by questions at news conferences relating to whatever did or didn’t happen in the 2022 FIFA election that gave Qatar that World Cup.

If in Baku they have resource and will, that can be said time and again in Doha. Anyone who has ever been there knows how patient, persistent and committed they are in the emirate to achieving their goals.

Disappointed: Doha 2020 bid leaders meet the press after the IOC cut the Qatari capital from the race

“We will continue and we will not give up. Sport is in our DNA,” Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, a Doha 2020 vice-chair and secretary-general of the Qatar Olympic Committee, said after the IOC announcement.

Echoed the other Doha 2020 vice chair, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, “We’re good learners. We’re good listeners. We’ll be back.”

It all begs the question: when are they ever going to get the chance to least get a vote before all 115 members of the International Olympic Committee? That, rest assured, would be a most interesting vote.

Which brings the underlying issue squarely into focus, doesn’t it? Is that really why Doha got cut?

USOC finances: stability rules

The U.S. Olympic Committee was a lot more fun, reporting-wise, when it was embroiled in chronic turmoil. For many years, the USOC could be counted on to be the sports writing version of the Soap Opera Full Employment Saga.

Oh, for the days gone by when there would be hastily arranged meetings of the USOC at, say, the O’Hare Hilton or the Antlers in Colorado Springs and the chief executive would be sending looks of love (not) to the assembled scribes.

Those tender feelings washed over me yet anew Friday while reading the USOC’s tax return, which is called a Form 990, for 2011.

The U.S. government makes the USOC file the Form 990 once a year, of course. It is made publicly available each May.

This year’s version, like last year’s, underscores the fundamental point about the USOC as it is now:

It is, thanks to board chairman Larry Probst and chief executive Scott Blackmun, stable.

From a management viewpoint, stable is really, really good.

From a journalism standpoint — stable is really, really boring.

Just kidding — stable is excellent.

Here’s what the Form 990 says, and for the USOC to be able achieve these results in a down economy is testament to the way Probst and Blackmun have been steering the ship, and the culture they have created, which in the 14 years I have been covering the Olympic movement, and in particular the USOC, is distinct, and I mean that in the most connotatively positive way:

Revenue (page 9): $140.7 million.

That’s down from $250.6 million in 2010. What?!

No need to freak out. This is the way the Olympic cycle works. Broadcast revenue is recorded only in a Games year, and in 2010 the Winter Games went to Vancouver.

Expenses: (page 10) $185 million, down from $191 million.

Note: that’s $6 million less in expenses than the year before.

Again, over a four-year cycle, the revenue and expense sides tend to even themselves out.

Blackmun’s compensation package (page 7) totaled $742,367, higher than the year before because he didn’t work a full year in 2010 and wasn’t eligible that year for a bonus; moreover, his 2011 number also includes a long-term performance bonus that has to be counted for tax rules even though Blackmun hasn’t been paid it yet. If it  does get paid to him at all, it will be in 2014 and then doubly counted in that Form 990 but in a different line item — tax forms always an accountant’s dream and a journalist’s nightmare.

Before anyone jumps to criticize a long-term performance incentive, think about the instability of the CEO position and what that has cost the USOC over the past several years, in sheer salary dollars and reputation.

Unlike many other years, the USOC reported one — only one — person in the chief executive’s position. How boring. It’s like people enjoy working there.

Former chief operating officer Norm Bellingham’s compensation package (page 8) was reported out at $655,219. His compensation, salary part of the year, was moved to a consultant’s role, as he worked on high-performance planning and funding and other strategic projects, typically with Blackmun. Note: 2011 was his final year with the USOC.

In another area: the USOC’s top five contractors include four direct-mail vendors and one hospitality company (page 8). That’s in line with previous non-Games years.

Also: Schedule I, toward the back of the form, detaIls the amounts the USOC pays out to, among others, the national governing bodies. US Ski & Snowboard got the most in 2011, $3.45 million. USA Track & Field got $2.7 million, US Speedskating $2.5 million and USA Swimming $2.49 million.

In just a few weeks, American athletes will compete at the London Summer Games. There it is expected that they will vie with the Chinese and the Russians for supremacy in the medal count.

The USOC is locked in a messy and longstanding dispute with the International Olympic Committee over the USOC’s shares of certain broadcasting and marketing revenues.

There are many things the USOC does imperfectly. But to its credit, it is transparent about its financial details.

Feel free to argue that it is transparent because the U.S. government makes it be so. But — every spring we know what the USOC is up to, and who gets paid what, and how much it is spending on what, and anyone anywhere in the world can make judgments about whether all of that is in the public interest.

As we head toward London, don’t you wish the same could be said of our friends at the Russian and Chinese Olympic Committees? Indeed, of all the national Olympic committees in the rest of the world?

Indeed, of the IOC?

“It’s our time”

LOS ANGELES — In Sydney 12 years ago, the U.S. women’s water polo team took silver when the Aussies scored to win gold with 1.3 seconds remaining.

In Athens in 2004, the Americans took bronze.

Four years ago in Beijing, the U.S. women again took second, this time when the Dutch scored the winning goal with 26 seconds to go.

These are the facts that everyone associated with the U.S. women’s water polo knows by heart. This is why, when the 13-player U.S. team was announced Thursday at a ceremony at the LA 84 Foundation, the legacy building from the Summer Games here 28 years ago, the rah-rah video closed with this tag-line: “It’s our time.”

Time will tell, of course, whether this U.S. team will do what the three that came before it could not, whether it can meet the challenge coach Adam Krikorian has long set, which he reiterated Thursday in public, to rise to “competitive greatness.”

The 2012 U.S. women’s water polo team poses for its first pictures

He said, “It’s about bringing your best when your best is needed.”

What sets this team apart is that it is, truly, a team.

Under Krikorian, who took over after Beijing from Guy Baker, the players have come together to form a remarkably close bond.

Their unity could have come apart after the U.S. team got drilled at the 2011 world championships in Shanghai, the Americans ultimately finishing sixth.

Instead, they rebounded. At the Pan American Games a couple months later in Guadalajara, Mexico, they not only won to claim their Olympic qualifying spot, they did so in astonishing fashion, rallying from three goals down at halftime to knock off Canada for the gold medal in a penalty shootout. The final score: 27-26.

“We learned at the world championships how not to deal with adversity,” Krikorian said, adding a moment later, “Two months later, we showed how to deal with adversity.”

Goalie Betsey Armstrong may be the best in the world. She deflects such praise, saying Thursday: “I know these girls have my back. I have their back. It’s a genuine relationship.”

Heather Petri was one of the shooters in that Guadalajara penalty drama. “No nerves,” she said. “It was awesome.”

Petri and Brenda Villa will now be four-time Olympians. They will have been on all four U.S. water polo teams since 2000; that’s when the International Olympic Committee opened the Games to women.

Villa, 32, was introduced Thursday as captain of the 2012 team. She has done it all with the exception of that gold medal. Indeed, she was named the FINA magazine female water polo player of decade for the years 2000-10.

Petri, who turns 34 in a month, said the medal can’t become a grail unto itself. “It’s attainable,” she said but cautioning, “You stop making it about that.” It’s the journey, the practices, the time together, she said, calling the time between Beijing and London — despite a serious injury — “the lightest of my four years” and saying, “I find joy in the smallest little things.”

Two sisters made the team: Jessica and Maggie Steffens. Jessica played on the 2008 team. Maggie turns 19 in two weeks. Jessica graduated from Stanford in 2009. Maggie starts there after the London Games.

There were no surprises in the roster unveiled Thursday. This was the team Krikorian has been going with for several months now.

It’s a defensive-minded team.

It’s a deep team.

It’s a team that — despite the presence of Villa — doesn’t rely on one outsized star to carry the load. On any given day, anybody on the U.S. team can beat you. That makes this team hard to scout, and difficult to prepare for.

NBC is prepared to show a lot of this team — even before the Games, including a July 8 nationally televised game against Hungary to be played at Corona (Calif.) del Mar High School.

“We understand that on any given day,” Krikorian said, “we can lose.”

Then again, he said, and you know what he has to be thinking, “We can win.”

Mrs. Obama shines at USOC conference

DALLAS — When she’s on a pool deck, Natalie Coughlin has no nerves. Or if she does, she hides them well. After all, competing in two Olympics, in 11 events, she has won 11 medals, three gold.

On stage here Monday, flanked by other Olympic athletes and hopefuls, it was Coughlin’s privilege to introduce the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. Wouldn’t you know? Coughlin was not only nervous — she was, as she acknowledged at the microphone, stumbling a bit over her lines, “so nervous right now.”

It was fabulous. Natalie Coughlin, tough-as-nails Olympic medalist, “Dancing with the Stars” competitor, a regular person.

The First Lady, here to promote an initiative through her “Let’s Move!” campaign, couldn’t have been more gracious. “You have a lot of medals,” she said with a smile. “No need to shake.”

Mrs. Obama has a magnetism about her that is undeniable. She spoke from the stage about, among others, the gymnast John Orozco, who grew up in the Bronx, telling the story about how his parents used to drive him an hour or more out to gymnastics practice and then how he got a job at that same gym, giving his folks his first paycheck with instructions to apply it to the mortgage on the family home.

Before they had gone on stage, Orozco had met Mrs. Obama. “It was insane. Unreal,” he said. “She gave me such a tight hug.

“Coming from where I came from, the Bronx. I used to play in the street. In the dirt. Now I’m meeting the First Lady!”

Among the athletes behind her on stage was the 400-meter sprinter LaShawn Merritt. Four years ago, he had been invited to the White House for a special dinner before the 2008 Games, where he got to meet President and Mrs. Bush. A few weeks later, he won gold in Beijing.

Then, though, Merritt tested positive for a male-enhancement product and served a 21-month doping suspension. After that, in the interests of harmonizing doping rules across the world, the USOC actively took up his case. He’s now eligible to run in the U.S. Trials and, assuming he makes the 2012 team, in London.

LaShawn Merritt’s redemption became that much more complete on Monday. He may or may not win gold again in London. But he was there on stage with the First Lady of the United States, head held high.

“It’s been a road. My soul is light,” he said afterwards. “To be there with the First Lady is amazing.”

Mrs. Obama will lead the U.S. delegation to the 2012 Olympics. Any number of the athletes with whom she spoke Monday found it captivating just to be around her.

“Meeting the First Lady created extra buzz and extra motivation,” said Nastia Liukin, the gold medal-winning gymnast from 2008 who is on the comeback trail for 2012. “It’s go time from here on out.”

“I just got my citizenship last year and today I met the First Lady,” said badminton champion Tony Gunawan. “Now that’s not normal!”

“Just another day at the office?” asked shooting star Kim Rhode. “No. Not at all. It’s not every day that you get to meet the First Lady.”

The trick, of course, is to translate that buzz into action. This is where things get far more problematic.

Mrs. Obama’s intent is laudable. The idea, she said Monday, is to join with various national governing bodies to provide athletic programming to 1.7 million kids in 2012.

There’s no doubt that something has to be done. American kids are fat.

Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. the percentage of children aged 6 to 11 in the United States who were obese went from 7 percent in 1980 to nearly 20 percent in 2008. Over the same time frame, the percentage of adolescents — ages 12 to 19 — categorized as obese jumped from 5 to 18 percent, according to the CDC.

The original idea, Mrs. Obama said, was to get 1 million young people involved. The NGBs stepped up and went beyond that, to 1.7 million.

USA Swimming, for instance, will enroll 530,000 new learn-to-swim kids in its “Make-a-Splash” program at more than 500 local pools.

As impressive as those numbers sound, the initiative Mrs. Obama announced Monday amounts only to the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s the reality:

The federal inter-agency forum on child and family statistics, childstats.gov, reports there are 76.1 million children in the United States. Of those 76.1 million, 50.4 million are ages 6 to 17 — essentially the target demographic for “Let’s Move.”

Doing the math: 1.7 million divided by 50.4 million equals 3.4 percent.

In plain English, that’s the percentage of American kids this initiative would reach.

To be equally plain, Mrs. Obama, the USOC and the NGBs involved are to be congratulated for the effort. She, too, is right when she suggests that seeing Natalie Coughlin or John Orozco or whoever it might be this summer in London might well be the spark that sets a new generation of young people “to pursue whatever dreams they hold in their hearts.”

But surely she knows, and everyone else in a position of authority does, too, that if we are going to be serious, really serious, about doing something genuinely meaningful about the obesity crisis confronting American kids, it’s going to take an across-the-board effort that goes far beyond a well-intentioned initiative reaching  3.4 percent of our young people.

As Natalie Coughlin said, and this came out loud and clear when she said this, “America’s youth are this country’s greatest asset.”

Phelps taking his last laps

DALLAS — When he was just 16, Michael Phelps was so audacious he wanted to change the sport of swimming.

With the London Olympics a mere 75 days away, Phelps, now 26, took to the stage Sunday at the U.S. Olympic Committee’s media summit, and the main reason most of the reporters and camera crews who were here was — Michael Phelps.

This comes as no disrespect to any of the other athletes who came before him Sunday or who will follow him over the next two days. Or, for that matter, any of the senior officials of the USOC.

Phelps, just as he was in Beijing four years ago, will be the star of the show in London in 2012.

He and Usain Bolt are the mega-stars of the Olympic firmament.

Bob Bowman, left, and Michael Phelps meet the press in Dallas

Indeed, Phelps has succeeded in making swimming — a sport in which the athletes spend their time submerged in water, their faces hidden from television cameras — marketable.

Last summer, at the world swimming championships in Shanghai, there was Phelps’ picture — promoting one of his sponsors — across bus stops all over town.

The U.S. Trials, just as they were four years ago, will be in Omaha. Omaha! In a pool plunked down in the middle of a basketball arena. Just like four years ago, the place will be packed.

Eight years ago, the Trials were held in a pool that was specially built and plunked down in the parking lot in Long Beach. Those Trials were jammed, too.

This is pretty much all Phelps.

Assuming all goes as expected in Omaha, Phelps and Ryan Lochte, who bring out the best in each other, will be featured on NBC for pretty much every night of the first week of the Summer Games.

On Monday, Phelps and his longtime coach, Bob Bowman, will head to Colorado Springs and sequester themselves away until Omaha. This is a new tactic. They’re going to stay up there, at altitude and away from all other distractions. Phelps needs to fine-tune.

Assuming all goes well there, Phelps will swim in Omaha and London the way he always has. Yes, there are others in the race and they spur him on. But he swims against himself and for times. He has goals that only he and Bowman know. Assuming he hits those goals — well, usually he wins.

Crews recording Phelps’ appearance at the USOC media summit

The only suspense in his program is how many races he’s going to swim in London. Probably not eight. But maybe. Who knows?

Who really cares? This time, that’s not the goal.

All along, really, Phelps’ goal was to change the sport. The eight gold medals in Beijing — in a way, they were a means to an end, a reminder that there is no goal that, truly, is too audacious. As Bowman said Sunday, in an echo of what Phelps has always said, “You can do anything you set your mind to if you have a dream and you’re willing to work hard enough.”

USOC’s “major growth opportunity”

DALLAS — Five years ago, the United States Olympic Committee raised less money in major gifts than the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, its sort-of neighbor in Colorado Springs, Colo.

For fiscal year 2007, the USOC raised less than $1 million in major gifts. In a word: pathetic.

For fiscal 2011, under the direction of chief development officer Janine Alfano Musholt, the USOC raised a net total of $10 million in gifts of more than $1,000. In two words: major progress.

In a wide-ranging news conference here Sunday at the traditional media summit in advance of the Olympic Games, USOC leaders said that they hoped American athletes would win the medal count this summer in London and that progress is being made in their ongoing revenue dispute with the International Olympic Committee.

But the most intriguing thing that was said — and which relates directly to the medal count at any Olympic Games and ultimately could prove the secret to any new Olympic revenue model in the United States — relates to the USOC’s development campaign.

It’s a potential game-changer.

At the lectern: USOC chief communications officer Patrick Sandusky. Left to right: board chairman Larry Probst; chief executive Scott Blackmun; chef de mission Teresa Edwards; chief of sport performance Alan Ashley; chief development officer Janine Alfano Musholt

As USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun reminded everyone, the focus at the leadership level is “to generate resources.” With that comes the ability to do all the other stuff the American public not only wants but expects — like, for instance, win the medal count.

Of course, the ground rule, spelled out in a 1978 law enacted by Congress, is that the USOC must be privately funded.

This is what makes the USOC different from every other national Olympic committee in the world. In the rest of the world the Olympic committee is an arm of its government.

For emphasis: the USOC must raise every penny it spends.

To grossly simplify, the USOC largely depends on television and sponsor money.

The crux of the dispute with the IOC is that the USOC gets a special cut of the NBC and sponsor deals that no other NOC gets. The USOC gets 12.75 of the NBC money, $4.38 billion from 2014 through 2020, and 20 percent of the IOC’s top-tier sponsor deals.

From the perspective of the rest of the world — it makes sense that everyone else might be upset. Why should the USOC get special treatment?

From the USOC”s perspective — it makes sense that the USOC is super-protective of its share. Everyone else is getting funds from their federal governments. The USOC isn’t. What is the USOC supposed to do? Cut back? And let Russia and China roll over the American team?

It’s not as if the USOC is in position to ask the federal government for money, either. For one, it’s not the American way. For another, as Blackmun observed, “It’s hard for us to make a case that we should receive government support when we have won the [overall] medal count at every Summer Olympic Games since Barcelona [in 1992] and won the medal count at Vancouver,” a reference to the 2010 Winter Games.

As it is, it’s something of a miracle that the U.S. teams do as well as they do. The USOC’s annual budget is roughly $150 million, about the same as Ohio State spends on its athletic department.

Which is where the notion of an enhanced development campaign comes in.

Everyone knows football drives sports programs at Division I universities.

The amount of money that can get thrown around those programs is, in a word, obscene.

Just to take one example:

In 2003, Lewis Field at Oklahoma State was renamed Boone Pickens Stadium after alum and oilman T. Boone Pickens donated $70 million. That gift, $20 million of which was earmarked for stadium expansion, according to the OSU website, generated $100 million in gifts and pledges. In 2006, Pickens donated an astonishing $165 million more.

The stadium was re-dedicated in 2009. They set an attendance record there last fall. The OSU football team played in a BCS bowl game in January, the Fiesta Bowl, and won, beating Stanford and Andrew Luck, who would go on to be the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.

That’s called success breeding upon success.

Why can’t the USOC replicate that kind of success?

If there are boosters willing to do that kind of thing for dear ol’ alma mater — why won’t someone stand up and do that for the red, white and blue?

Because no one had ever really thought about it.

Which is crazy.

Why, in particular?

Because, as Musholt said, “We could change the way the movement is funded in the United States, in a good way.”

About two or three weeks ago, about half the members of the USOC board of directors got together in Denver to talk about this very thing.

“When we talked longer-term, we talked orders of magnitude different than what we are talking now,” USOC board chairman Larry Probst said.

Just to be imaginative, why couldn’t 20 or 100 really rich people contribute fractional shares toward USOC financing?

Why couldn’t life insurance policies or annuities be contributed? They do that in college development offices all the time.

This particular revenue stream is so obvious. It’s just sitting there, practically begging to be tapped.

It is, as Blackmun called it, the USOC’s “major growth opportunity.”

Warrior Games: what brings us together

This is an election year, and we Americans will spend a great deal of the next few weeks and months enduring partisan rhetoric and sharp reminders about what divides us.

The Warrior Games, which just wrapped up in Colorado Springs, Colo., offered a great lesson in what brings us together.

Any one of the some 220 stories in the Warrior Games would have given you pause. Some would have made you cry. The Games, underwritten in significant measure by Deloitte, are put on by the U.S. Olympic Commitee for wounded, injured and ill veterans and service members.

Steve Lipscomb, who is now 44, of Goldsboro, N.C., is a Navy petty officer specializing in logistical support.

Scratch that. Steve Lipscomb is an outstanding petty officer, so good that six years ago he was picked to work with the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight demonstration team. He served with the Blues from 2006-09.

Lipscomb and his wife, Sharon, are the parents of two little girls. He is a diehard Pittsburgh Steeler fan. He is also a big Duke basketball fan.

In August, 2010, Lipscomb was diagnosed with stage four gastric cancer.

It’s terminal, he was told.

I’m going to beat this thing, he said.

Wearing ribbons of support for Navy petty officer Steve Lipscomb at the 2012 Warrior Games: back row, left to right: Navy Force Master Chief Dave Pennington (retired), Navy Safe Harbor adaptive athletic reconditioning program; Navy Lt. (retired) John Edmonston, 32, Bremerton, Wash.; Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Angelo Anderson, 22, Portsmouth, Va.; front row: (seated) Navy Master-at-arms Third Class (retired) Nate Dewalt, 24, Woodstock, Md.; Navy culinary specialist Judi Boyce, 24, Mt. Olive., N.J. // photo by U.S. Navy Lt. Michael Fallon

Last year’s were the second Warrior Games. Lipscomb was among those chosen to represent the Navy, despite the fact he was enduring a heavy chemotherapy regimen.

Many of his Navy teammates were 20 years younger. Some were confronting severe combat-related injuries.

Along with his wife and family, those 2011 Warrior Games gave Lipscomb motivation to carry on. Others on his team, he reasoned, needed help as much or maybe more than he did.

Judi Boyce, a 24-year-old Navy cook from Mt. Olive, N.J., underwent brain surgery on March 30, 2011. The Warrior Games were held in mid-May of last year.

“They didn’t think I would make it,” she said. “Steve hooked me up with a pair of sneakers and said knowing you’re going to use these afterward will help you get through surgery. He sent me Girl Scout cookies and a key chain.

“… I came to the Games with a shaved head. He didn’t care. For me, he was the one trying to help me look on the bright side. Not many people thought I was going to make it. Steve was there for me when I had my surgery. It shows you the power of sports and healing.”

Lipscomb not only competed at the 2011 Warrior Games — he was chosen the Navy and Coast Guard torchbearer at opening ceremony.

He said at one point during last year’s Games, “We as a team push each other and came together like I’ve never experienced. I’ve been on many teams my whole life but one of them are like this one.”

The Games, the teamwork, the camaraderie — it all worked. Lipscomb returned to active duty, according to Georgia Monsom, herself an amazing woman, retired after 30 years in the Navy as a command master chief, now a non-medical care manager for the Navy’s “Safe Harbor” organization, which coördinates aid for sailors, Coast Guardsmen and their families.

Georgia Monsom is Steve Lipscomb’s care manager. If you were in any kind of trouble, you’d want Georgia Monsom looking after you.

Georgia Monsom, a hero in her own right // photo U.S. Navy Lt. Michael Fallon

When she first met Lipscomb, she said, he was in a really bad way. And then, she said, with pride, “He beat it. He went cancer-free for 10 months. It’s just phenomenal.”

“… Then he went into remission for 10 months. He returned to active duty. He was keeping it at bay. Unfortunately, on March 13,” two months ago, “he went back into the hospital with what we thought were kidney stones.

“We almost lost him on April 19. They called the family in and said, ‘He’s not going to make it.’

But he did.

And why?

“He kept saying, ‘I’ve got to make it to the Warrior Games. I’ve got to be there for the Warrior Games.’

“We kept saying, ‘Your fight right now is cancer.’ We’ll make you honorary captain.”

Which is what happened.

The Navy team that competed at the 2012 Warrior Games wore ribbons for Steve Lipscomb and dedicated those Games to him, while he fought it out in a hospital in Virginia.

“Whether you are first or last, this is a united group of people,” said Navy Lt. (retired) John Edmonston, 32, of Bremerton, Wash., along with Boyce one of those who took part in the 2012 Games.

He added, “I’d do anything for Steve.”

Everyone knows the Army and Navy have a healthy rivalry. The Army competitors at the Warrior Games signed a get-well-Steve card.

“For sure,” Edmonston said, “Steve is a big bringer-together.”

Georgia Monsom said she has herself a new mission. Assuming Lipscomb gets himself out of the hospital and gets strong enough over the summer, it’s time for some football. Some Pittsburgh Steelers football.

“You know a guy has got to be pretty awesome,” she said, “when the Army team wants to do a shout-out for someone from the Navy, right?”