U.S. Olympic leaders decline leadership role on fate of 2020 Tokyo Olympics, refuse to call publicly for postponement

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U.S. Olympic leaders decline leadership role on fate of 2020 Tokyo Olympics, refuse to call publicly for postponement

The leaders of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, chief executive Sarah Hirshland and board chair Susanne Lyons, did just what I expected in a Friday media teleconference,

They equivocated.

Completely passed the buck to the International Olympic Committee on the fate of the 2020 Olympics rather than have the USOPC stake out a higher moral ground, which the IOC long has been unwilling to do on far more matters than just the coronavirus issue.

Fell back on bureaucratic speak.

Repeated several variations on the mantra, as expressed by Lyons, “I can assure you there is no circumstance when the USOC would send our athletes into harm’s way.”

Declined to take a stand showing they meant what that mantra implies.

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Erin Popovich: Swimming to her place on the wall

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Erin Popovich: Swimming to her place on the wall

One day about 10 years ago, Erin Popovich was walking down the hall to the pool at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where she was training for her fourth and final International Paralympic Committee Swimming World Championships.

As usual, Popovich passed the gallery of photographs on the hallway wall of champion swimmers who had trained in that pool. Michael Phelps. Janet Evans. Matt Biondi. Natalie Coughlin. And many more — all swimmers she had looked up to during her career. Pictures she had seen very often but that still continued to arrest her eye, even if only in passing.

“It truly was a wall of legends,” she said.

And then, on this day, Popovich stopped in her tracks. There was a new photo of a swimmer on the wall: Erin Popovich.

“No one had told me it was going up there,” she said. “I hope I have done it justice and that it can stay up there a while longer.”

As it turns out, the pictures have come down during a renovation.

But Erin Popovich’s place among U.S. swimming legends is assured forever with her selection to the Class of 2019 of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame.

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