Craig Masback's Blog

Number 5 - Sunday, September 2, 2007

A year from now, we'll be celebrating the successes and deconstructing the disappointments of the Beijing Olympics. An Olympic Games already described by many as "the most important in history" will be part of history, for better or worse. Meanwhile, the media is whipping itself and the public into the year-out frenzy about all the things that won't go right, which I find one of the most annoying aspects of Olympic hoopla.

All Olympics of recent vintage have been targeted for shortcomings in the years leading up to the Games. The 1984 Games in Los Angeles were going to be a "disaster" because traffic was going to come to a standstill, a thick cloud of smog was going to descend on the city, and the private financial model was going to mean the end of the Olympics altogether. Angelinos still remember the period of the Olympics as featuring the best ever traffic flows and I recall baby blue skies and cool, crisp nights. Not unimportantly, the Olympic Movement emerged stronger than ever as Peter Ueberroth's financial acumen led to net receipts of over $200 million.

Prior to the 1988 Olympics, there were predictions that North Korea would disrupt the Seoul Games by invading or convincing communist nations to boycott. Neither occurred. Prior to Barcelona in 1992, it was predicted that the stadiums wouldn't be built in time, which didn't turn out to be true. In 2000, the stated fear was that Sydney Olympic Park was too isolated and would suffer from huge spectator bottlenecks. It turned out to be a delightful spectator experience.

The articles preceding the 2004 Olympics were relentlessly negative, predicting à la Barcelona that the stadiums wouldn't be ready and à la Los Angeles that the traffic would come to a standstill. There was further endless speculation about security, with predictions that the precautions taken would either fail to prevent an attack or would squeeze the life out of the Games. In the end, the stadiums were spectacular, traffic was never an issue, and the spirit of Olympic wonder survived the prudent and effective security precautions.

The lessons in all of this? The media should just shut up! Every media outlet has now written their cliché article about athlete and coach worries about the air quality in Beijing, including several written from Osaka, looking forward to the Games. Fine. No one who has been to Beijing in the last decade hasn't commented about the blanket of smog that cuts visibility and burns your eyes and lungs. And it doesn't take a Pulitzer prize to get athletes and experts on the record about their concerns for their health next summer. So, here's a clip-and-save prediction: like the LA traffic, the Seoul boycott, and the Athens stadium issues, the Beijing air quality issue will be a non-issue. The traffic restrictions, factory shutdowns, and cloud seeding will all combine to let the sun shine through on a glorious Games. If I'm wrong, remind me next year and I'll run 10 circuits of Tiananmen Square without a gas mask on.

Meanwhile, if the press really cares about the Beijing environment (or the environment in general), how about agreeing to stop writing the cliché "air quality" articles and save a few trees, which will help put more oxygen in the air.

Speaking of clichés, how about a cease and desist on "Olympic boycott" stories. Please list for me the Olympic boycotts that have accomplished anything other than penalizing athletes. I recall all too well the promises made by the Carter administration in early 1980 about how IBM wouldn't ship computers to the Soviet Union and the government wouldn't ship U.S. grain as part of a coordinated government boycott that would include keeping U.S. athletes from going to Moscow. In the end, the computers and grain went to Moscow, the athletes didn't, the USSR stayed in Afghanistan, and we armed the Taliban, which 27 years later now attacks our troops stationed in Afghanistan.

The World Track & Field Championships prove that more than 200 nations can get together for the purely positive purpose of competing in the 47 events that make up our sport with little or no discussion of politics. Let's try to keep it that way in the lead-up to Beijing.

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Craig A. Masback is the Chief Executive Officer of USA Track & Field (USATF), the national governing body for track and field, long distance running, and race walking. Headquartered in Indianapolis, the organization has more than 90,000 members throughout the country. Masback is responsible for overseeing programs ranging from youth track and field, to selecting teams to represent the United States at the Olympic Games and World Championships, to administering programs for age 40+ masters runners.