With defending champ out, U.S. Skating team selection process could be muddle again

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With defending champ out, U.S. Skating team selection process could be muddle again

It won’t stir a relatively widespread public reaction like the one that followed the selection of the U.S. women’s singles figure skating team for the 2014 Olympics.

But defending champion Jason Brown’s injury withdrawal from the upcoming U.S. Championships in St. Paul may lead to hot debates within the sport’s ever-shrinking fan base about the choices of the U.S. men’s team for the March World Championships in Boston.

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Scoundrels and Their Scandals→

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        The Godfather of soccer

        The Godfather of soccer

If there were a tone poem composed about the past year in sports, it would have a recurring theme with discordant sibilance to express sporting scandals, from silly to scurrilous to sordid, that resounded across the globe in 2015.

Implicated were presidents of the world’s two most far-reaching sports federations, Sepp Blatter of FIFA and Lamine Diack of the IAAF.

(A Swiss and a Senegalese. More sibilance.)

My Op-Ed for Around The Rings.

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Deans of Olympic sports writers reflect on careers→

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If there were a podium for figure skating reporters -- or for Olympic sports reporters, to be more inclusive -- longtime journalists Phil Hersh and John Powers would almost certainly be standing on it. 

Icenetwork sat down with the two globetrotting journalists to discuss figure skating and their memories of the sport, from the Battle of the Brians in Calgary to the Sochi mixed zone, and everything in between.

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My final column as a Chicago Tribune staffer→

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That is when I convinced the first of the eight Chicago Tribune sports editors during my tenure that the newspaper needed someone paying full-time attention to the Olympics from multiple standpoints: sports, bureaucracy, politics. My argument would soon be reinforced, as there were to be three more Olympics in North America from 1996 through 2010, and the Games would move to a biennial schedule.

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