Home

For the past 33 years, Globetrotting has selected annual medal winners in international sports, given to those athletes for whom an Olympic gold is the ultimate goal.

The pandemic that has shattered lives around the world made it impractical and unsafe to have most international sports competitions for the last nine months - and even those that have taken place in the current winter season have been changed by having athletes opt out or, in the case of figure skating, becoming essentially domestic events.

Given that, trying to give awards in the format I used in the past seems like a fool’s errand.

Yet it would not be good to let the year pass without some shout-outs to athletes in Olympic sports, both active and retired, whose achievements or courage (or both) were noteworthy.

And even if some WNBA players consider a league title bigger than Olympic gold, I am making them eligible because all WNBA athletes deserve an award for being front and center on issues like racism, sexism and pure misogyny (An aside: sports on the 2020/21 Olympic program in which there clearly is a bigger prize than Olympic gold include soccer, men’s ice hockey, men’s basketball, men’s road cycling, golf, baseball and tennis.)

To begin, though, we give a special Amorality Award, made from tarnished nickel, to the International Olympic Committee for:

1) relentlessly continuing to shove the 2020/21 Olympics down the throats of a Japanese public among whom, according to polls, 63 percent feel the Tokyo Summer Games should either be cancelled or postponed again to beyond 2021.

2) allowing the international sports federations that govern boxing and weightlifting, both Olympic sports, to be unchecked cesspools of corruption for decades. And those are only the latest examples of a lack of oversight, similar to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s failure to address the festering problems in USA Gymnastics that turned into the horrific Larry Nassar abuse scandal.

3) hiding behind its mantra of “we don’t interfere with the internal affairs of sovereign nations“ in refusing to speak out, let alone levy sanctions, against 2022 Winter Olympic host China for what human rights groups say is mass incarceration and ethnic cleansing of its Uighur population. (And, yes, the IOC should also have blasted the USA, 2028 Summer Games host, for the Trump administration’s policy of ripping children from parents and essentially caging them because they had entered the country illegally.)

After washing my hands several times, that leads me to acknowledge some athletes in 2020 whose courage of conviction and / or action makes them the moral counterbalance to the IOC:

*Hayley Wickenheiser of Canada, an IOC member, winner of four Olympic hockey golds, Hockey Hall of Famer and now a doctor in training, called out the IOC in mid-March as “insensitive and irresponsible” for continuing to insist the 2020 Olympics would go on as planned. Someone in the IOC then had the gall to send her a message saying she should have consulted them before speaking out. At the time, Wickenheiser was doing medical training in hospitals dealing with Covid patients. Five days after her critical post, Canada said it would not send teams to Tokyo in 2020. Two days after that, the IOC and Japan announced postponement of the Tokyo Games.