The newest investigation into the enabling of Larry Nassar paints a picture of an organization that is beyond repair. The organization was willing to overlook everything, as long as programs, like gymnastics were bringing in new medals and money.
The 1968 Summer Olympics were 50 years ago this week. Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' raised gloved fists were many African Americans' Summer of Love – and Pride, and Reckoning.
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Why is the United States Olympic Committee protecting USA Gymnastics? Whatever the reason, it’s time for it to stop. Why, amid what is one of the worst sexual-abuse scandals in sports history — one much bigger than the Penn State scandal that took down the longtime football coach Joe Paterno, an athletic director and a university president — hasn’t the Olympic committee fully held the gymnastics federation accountable for its incompetence?
The Olympics are coming back to Los Angeles. But the games are notoriously bad news for poor people in host cities.
Jackie Robinson, writing in 1972: I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame running backin 2016 said he stands '100 percent' behind Colin Kaepernick. Further, Kaepernick 'made all the sense in the world' in explaining his position. This is part of a long tradition of athletes, especially African American athletes combining sport and protest. (* ESPN)
As the Olympic Games go, the reviewer says, it's time to ask the big question: which were the worst Olympics ever? David Goldblatt's The Games is a history of the tarnished Olympics, from Avery Brundage to, yes, London 2012. The evidence shows indisputably that it was Hitler's Berlin games of 1936, which set the stage for spectacle and nationalist-racialist sentiment.
The reality of anthropogenic climate change is hardly an issue among climate scientists any more, but the spinmeisters on the payroll of the oil industry keep it alive in the "national conversation." One of their standard gambits is to point to record cold weather, as occurred this winter in much of the United States, and chortle, "What warming?"
Athletes are going into the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics knowing that protesting homophobia may entail a sacrifice. It’s a stunning comment on our times that so many seem not only willing but eager to make it.
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