A Kind Of Chaos: The Science And Sport Of Bobsledding
A U.S. sled makes its way through curve 10 on the Lake Placid, N.Y. track during training runs.
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John Tully for NPR
Imagine a minute of pure adrenaline: a race down a track of ice at speeds up to 90 miles an hour, enduring crushing gravitational forces around the curves.
Bobsled is one of the thrilling — and punishing — sports in the Winter Olympics. The U.S. hopes to repeat its recent medal-winning performances at the 2018 Olympics next February in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Meantime, they’re competing on the World Cup circuit, including a stop in Lake Placid, N.Y., site of the 1932 and 1980 winter Olympics. High up on Mt. Van Hoevenberg, bobsledders from around the world launch into practice runs. The glistening track is about a mile long, with 20 sharply-banked curves. It’s beautiful, but terrifying.
“A good run, especially in Lake Placid, can feel like you’ve been shoved in a metal garbage can and kicked down a rocky hill,” bobsled pilot Elana Meyers Taylor says.
She’s a two-timeOlympic medalist (silver in Sochi in 2014; bronze in Vancouver in 2010).
“Yeah, it can hurt,” fellow driver Jamie Greubel Poser, who won bronze in Sochi, says. “We consider bobsled an impact sport. You’re hitting walls at 80 miles an hour. It can literally feel like a boxing match. I’ve ‘seen stars’ driving.”
“[When] we’re going down, the whole thing is just vibrating,” pilot Nick Cunningham says. “It’s loud, it’s cold, there’s no padding inside the sled. It’s very, very uncomfortable. But when you win a medal, it makes everything completely worth it.”
A bobsled (‘bobsleigh’ via the Olympics website) run starts with the all-important push: the initial burst of acceleration, as athletes run alongside the sled, propelling it down the first 50 meters of the course. The sleds themselves weigh hundreds of pounds, so explosive strength and speed in the push are critical. (It’s no accident that many bobsled athletes, Greubel Poser and Cunningham among them, come to the sport from the world of track and field).
After the push comes the load. In a two-person bobsled, the pilot jumps over the side into the front, while the brakeman vaults in from behind like a long jumper. They have to do it both quickly and delicately, so the sled doesn’t skid out. (Watch a video explainer here).
U.S. National team member, Carlo Valdes, left, and Codie Bascue, right, push off from the start for their training run in Lake Placid.
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In the four-man event, the choreography is even more intricate. The team must cram four massively muscular bodies into a narrow bobsled while sprinting at full speed. They need to perfectly coordinate who jumps in first, in what order they sit down, and where their legs go as they fold themselves in.
“It’s kinda chaos sometimes,” says Evan Weinstock, who sits in the second position, just behind the driver. Only the driver has an actual seat; the others sit on their heels,“tucked up in a little cannonball position,” Weinstock explains.
“It’s tough,” he says. “You definitely get a lot more flexible. If you weren’t before you got in the sport, you are now.”
Another peril is that bobsledders wear shoes studded with sharp spikes for traction on the ice. Bad things can happen when they jump in the sled and have to jam their feet under the teammate in front of them.
“We’re only wearing little layers of spandex,” Weinstock says.”So sometimes you get a spike in your thigh or your calf. It’s just part of it.”
Once they load, the athletes hunker down low to be as aerodynamic as possible. Bobsled racesare won or lost by hundredths of a second, so every tiny amount of drag or friction can spell trouble.
“Any single steer you do slows the sled down because it creates friction,” Elana Meyers Taylor says. “Who can slow the sled down the least wins the race.”
During the descent, it’s all in the hands of the pilot, who steers with two “D rings” attached to cables that turn the front axle.
Pilot Jamie Greubel Poser steers her sled out of a section known as ‘Benham’s Bend’ and onto ‘The Chicane’ straightaway during a training run in Lake Placid.
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“You’re pulling right to go right, and you’re pulling left to go left,” Cunningham says. “I look like I’m playing a little video game.”
The others in the bobsled keep their heads down, so they don’t actually see anything as they hurtle down the course. Pilot Nick Cunningham says that’s probably just as well.
“I don’t want them to realize some of the things I’ve seen in the front of that sled,” he laughs. “There’s been some hairy times goin’ down where I’m, like, ‘that was dangerous!'”
But even so, he won’t admit it to his teammates: “I’m just, ‘All right, guys, that was a good trip! Let’s go back to the top.’ And I’m sitting, going, ‘Oh man, that wasn’t good at all!'”
As the sleds speed around a curve, essentially vertical on a wall of ice, spectators can see the athletes’ bodies shaking from the intense pressures exerted on them. Bobsledders endure forces up to 5 Gs, which means they’ll feel force equal to five times their weight.
“It’s like the G forces are trying to suck you through the bottom of the bobsled,” Evan Weinstock says. “It forces our stomachs through our legs. It feels like you’re getting folded in half like a pancake.”
One tiny wrong move in a bobsled can mean disaster.
The Lake Placid track is known among athletes as one of the more technically challenging courses in the World Cup circuit.
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“Crashing is one of those things that it’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when,” Elana Meyers Taylor says.
She’s crashed more times than she can count.
“There’s sharp things in the sled that’ll cut you up,” she says. “And the biggest thing is, it is very, very loud. It is scraping, and it is piercing.”
In the sport of bobsled, Meyers Taylor says, “we’re all playing with Newton’s laws. And whoever can navigate those laws the best, wins the race.”
“A lot of physics actually goes into it,” Cunningham adds with a grin. “Go figure, because in high school, I was always, ‘Ah, I don’t need this stuff, I’ll never use this stuff again.’ And now, that’s how I make a living.”
Remembering Bruce Brown, Whose Search For The Perfect Break Redefined Surfing
Bruce Brown, seen in 1963, attempts to balance a mounted camera on his board while catching a wave. The man behind the seminal 1966 surfing documentary The Endless Summer died Sunday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., at the age of 80.
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Bob Bagley/Bruce Brown Films via AP
Updated at 5:48 p.m. ET
Writing on June 16, 1966, just one day after the film The Endless Summer finally got a wide release, The New York Times remarked on its creator’s “courage — some might say foolhardiness.” For years, he struggled to convince film distributors that even people who had never seen a beach before would want to see his surfing film.
And Bruce Brown was right.
On Sunday, more than half a century since The Endless Summer hit big screens across America, Brown died at the age of 80 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He leaves behind a film that defined surfing for a worldwide audience and, after a slew of earlier big-screen misrepresentations, finally did so on the sport’s own terms.
There had already been a surfing boom in Hollywood by the mid-1960s, to be sure, but the surfers they featured rarely failed to be flimsy depictions of no-goodniks or ninnies — and rarely failed to frustrate actual surfers. Then, Brown’s film came along.
“What Bruce did, and what nobody has done since, was to square the circle,” Matt Warshaw, author of The History of Surfing, told The New York Times. “He was able to present surfing as it really is, to non-surfers.”
“Endless Summer is 50-something years old now,” Warshaw explained to Surfer magazine earlier this year, “and every year that goes by, it’s harder to remember the degree to which Bruce broke the laws of entertainment physics by managing to please and impress both his core audience and the general public.”
Bruce Brown readies his camera in this undated photo.
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Bob Bagley/Bruce Brown Films via AP
The documentary, which featured two of Brown’s friends on a round-the-globe quest to find the perfect wave, was — as Ian Buckwalter wrote for NPR — “part surfing film, part travelogue, occasionally even anthropological study and wildlife film, but ultimately it visually taps into the wanderlust that sends us to far-flung beaches in search of an escape from life that we can’t find at home.”
It was shot on a shoestring budget of $50,000 and destined to earn more than $30 million. But it was by no means his first film.
“I started off when I was 14, with an 8-mm camera taking pictures of surfing to show my mom,” he told the skateboard company Dusters California in a 2014 interview.
He enlisted in the Navy after high school in the 1950s, drew a dream assignment aboard a submarine in Hawaiian and used his 8-mm camera to film home surfing movies in his down time. After his discharge, he would show the movies at small venues in Southern California for the price of a quarter, until a local surfboard manufacturer put up a few thousand dollars for him to produce a whole feature in Hawaii, Slippery When Wet.
What followed was a series of movies (one every year, in fact) that would get a limited release and were attended mostly by other surfers. But even these small-scale pictures made an impact. In fact, his 1961 film Surfing Hollow Days lays claim to its own corner of surfing history. It includes the first footage ever shot of surfers riding arguably the world’s most famous break, and even coined its name: the Banzai Pipeline off Oahu, Hawaii.
But it was The Endless Summer that caught the world’s attention, at least eventually.
Prospective distributors were deeply skeptical about a beach film’s ability to draw audiences far from the beach. So Brown and his associates pursued a crazy idea to show the film about as far from the beach as they could get: Wichita, Kansas. The Inertia, an outdoors sports news site, sums up how the stunt “has become part of the movie’s lore”:
“Wichita was slammed with a huge snowstorm that winter and icicles dangled from the marquee of the Sunset Theater that bore the name of the film in February 1966. [Promoter R. Paul] Allen feared a flop, but beneath the frosty sign that first night stretched a long line of Kansans, hopping up and down to stay warm while waiting to watch the adventures of Robert August and Mike Hynson on the big screen. The movie sold out two straight weeks. Distributors in New York still weren’t impressed, but the movie’s success in the middle of winter, in the middle of America, convinced Brown and Allen to keep fighting, and they rented out a theater in Manhattan and finally got the buzz they needed to turn the film into a $30 million behemoth.”
“I put everything I had on the line,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “If it wouldn’t have worked, it would have been the ball game.”
The immortal film poster for The Endless Summer, which you may recognize from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, not to mention college dorm room walls across the country.
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Monterey Media Inc.
But it did work. Shortly after the film hit the big screen on a wide scale, it became a cultural icon, one so recognizable that even its movie poster is now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Brown was eventually enshrined in surfing’s Hall of Fame, and his film was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which selects works for their cultural and historic importance to the U.S.
Brown would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for his documentary on motorcycle riders, On a Sunday. And after a long retirement he even returned in the early ’90s to release a sequel to his seminal surfing film. That sequel was co-written with his son Dana, who went on to craft documentaries in his own right, such as 2003’s Step into Liquid.
Still, it is The Endless Summer that defines the elder Brown’s legacy as a filmmaker and an ambassador for the sport he loved. And as soon as news of his death surfaced publicly, emotional tributes flowed in from some of the surfing world’s living legends — all-time greats such as Kelly Slater and Stephanie Gilmore, neither of whom had even been alive when the movie hit theaters.
“Thank you for showing us the world as you saw it,” Slater said on Instagram. “We need more like you. On to the other side. I hope to bump into you again in some other place and time.”
A post shared by Kelly Slater (@kellyslater) on Dec 11, 2017 at 8:03am PST
Ultimately, Brown says it was less his work as a filmmaker than his love of surfing that defined him.
“I had no formal training,” he told Dusters. Before heading to Hawaii to film his first full-length feature, “I got in the plane with a book on how to make movies. It was a real thin book, too.
“I had no interest in cameras other than surfing,” he added. “I just wanted to take pictures of me and my buddies surfing — you know, just to show people.”
Writer Will Leitch Defends His Position That The NFL Is Ending
NPR’s Kelly McEvers speaks with writer Will Leitch about his piece in New York Magazine: “Is this the End of the NFL?” In his piece, Leitch notes that football used to bring people together across political lines, but that’s not the case anymore.
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Is this the end of the NFL? That is the question at the top of a recent piece in New York Magazine. It was written by Will Leitch. And his answer to the question is, yeah, the NFL is kind of over. Will Leitch is here now to defend his position. Hello there.
WILL LEITCH: Hello. Good afternoon.
MCEVERS: You point out in your piece that football really used to be something that, like, brought people together. There’s this great detail you talk about, how Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Nixon even bonded over football. That’s obviously not true right now. I mean, how divisive do you feel, like, football has become?
LEITCH: Yeah. You know, one of the things – like everything else these days, the NFL has not been able to escape politics. And I think because it’s gotten so popular it is right there, dead at the center. But the problem is because it’s not been able to avoid politics it’s actually getting it from both sides. On one hand, you know, you have liberals saying that, like, the game is too cruel and worried about concussions and head injuries and the health of the players, or that the league is too militaristic and too much beloved love of the flag and all of that stuff. On the other hand, you have conservatives saying, we’re not going to watch this league until the players stop kneeling. And…
MCEVERS: Right.
LEITCH: …It’s left the league without a natural constituency.
MCEVERS: Did you ever think football would be at the – at – like, in the middle of the culture wars? Like, is this a surprise to you?
LEITCH: It’s so strange to think of the NFL, you know, which is – you know, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is a game where people run around and throw a ball and tackle each other – has become some sort of big political thing. You know, and listen; sports has always wanted to consider itself separate than politics. Fans always claim that they want that. Like, they want to get away from politics for a day. You know, the way things are going it’s hard to blame them. I certainly understand the sentiment.
But, you know, standing for the anthem is a political act. Paying for your ticket is a political act. When these stadiums are built with public financing, these – sports has never been able to be completely separate from politics. And I think the reason the NFL has gotten caught up so much in this is it’s gotten so big. You know, the NFL really in the last decade has become so powerful in large part because how much power it has in the world of television. We’re all watching things on DVR.
MCEVERS: Right.
LEITCH: And sports, specifically the NFL, is not a DVR game. So people have to watch it live, which has helped them on ad rates. I would argue that one of the mistakes the NFL has made in that, however, is they have overcompensated in that way.
MCEVERS: Right.
LEITCH: And they’ve given away too much power to television.
MCEVERS: Whether or not this is the end of the NFL, I mean, we have to talk about concussions and injuries. I mean, I think, you know, when you used to watch a football game and you’d see a big hit you’d be like, wow. And now it’s – you know, I think we all have a very different reaction.
LEITCH: Yeah. You know, there was a time not long ago where those big hits were the highlight hits and really promoted the league. Now as more and more scientists come out about how – the damage it causes, it’s not just the big hits. It’s also just the actual sustained – they call them subconcussive hits.
MCEVERS: Yeah.
LEITCH: The dangers of the – playing football are so much more evident now. The NFL has tried to get out ahead of this, but I think you make an argument the games have actually gotten worse. The things that they’ve tried to get out of the game have not made the game safer, have made it less aesthetically pleasing. It’s an existential issue for the NFL, and it’s one they really continue to struggle with.
MCEVERS: And then you talk about how football’s really losing out to the NBA. What is it about that that they have this, like, inverse relationship, you know?
LEITCH: Yeah. The NBA is really in a peak period right now. You’ve got a team like the Golden State Warriors, an all-time great team including superstars like Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry, who is probably the most popular player in the league. You’ve got LeBron James, one of the best players of all time, who is not just, you know, a great player, but I think is one of the larger things that’s really helped out the NBA. They, unlike the NFL, have very much encouraged their players to express their personalities and sometimes to express their political beliefs.
I remember when LeBron James, after President Trump told – said that he was not going to invite Steph Curry and the Warriors to the White House, and LeBron James refuted that and actually called the president you bum, which is kind of a crazy thing to think of, an NBA player calling him you bum. But perhaps what’s even crazier is it seemed to work to shut Trump up. He actually has not talked about the NBA since then. So I guess it requires someone at the level of LeBron James.
But I do think that’s the issue. The NBA has encouraged social media. They’ve encouraged free sharing of highlights. They’ve encouraged their players to express themselves in a way that I think sells the individual and sells the excitement and the off-court stuff as well that the NFL is really kind of lumbering and struggled with.
MCEVERS: I mean, we should be clear. Like, a lot of people still watch football on TV. And this also isn’t the first time that someone has proclaimed that the game is done. I mean, it’s still holding down, like, No. 1 TV rankings.
LEITCH: Yeah. There’s no question. People are still watching the NFL. The numbers have been down a little bit, but not dramatically so. And mostly the numbers being down has just allowed people on both sides to claim that the reason they’re mad at the NFL is the reason the ratings are down. Oftentimes it’s a little bit more complicated than that.
MCEVERS: Yeah.
LEITCH: But, you know, these are – this is the type of thing where the numbers start to go down slowly and then perhaps very quickly. You know, you’ve seen the idea – you know, youth participation in football is way down. The more we understand about the damage of the game, there’s just a lot of different factors that are all kind of nibbling at the NFL on the edges. So it’s starting to wobble. And there was a time five years ago it felt like the NFL was unconquerable. And I think it’s – there’s no question there’s some wobbling going on.
MCEVERS: Will Leitch, thank you so much.
LEITCH: Of course. It’s my pleasure.
MCEVERS: Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and a senior writer at Sports on Earth.
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Barbershop: Russia Olympic Ban, NFL Hitting And More
On this week’s Barbershop, NPR’s Michel Martin talks sports and culture with journalism professor and sports commentator Kevin Blackistone, CNN’s AJ Willingham, and documentarian Bryan Fogel.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now we’re going to head into the Barbershop. That’s where we gather interesting folks to talk about what’s in the news and what’s on our minds. Sitting in the chairs for a shape up today are Kevin Blackistone. He’s a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and a frequent ESPN commentator. He’s here with us in our studios in Washington, D.C. Kevin, welcome back.
KEVIN BLACKISTONE: Thank you.
MARTIN: Also with us, CNN writer AJ Willingham. She joins us from Atlanta, Ga. AJ, welcome back to you, as well.
AJ WILLINGHAM: Hey, there.
MARTIN: And finally, film director Bryan Fogle. His documentary, “Icarus,” revealed the extent of Russia’s state-run doping program at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Bryan’s with us from his home in Malibu, Calif. And he’s back with us, as well. Bryan, thank you so much for joining us once again.
BRYAN FOGEL: It’s a pleasure.
MARTIN: So let’s start with this huge story in the world of international sports – the decision by the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC, earlier this week, to bar the Russian Olympic team from the upcoming Winter Games in South Korea. That means the Russian flag won’t be seen at the opening ceremony, the anthem won’t be played.
Russian athletes who do want to compete can do so by proving that they haven’t been cheating by being cleared by an independent panel in compliance with the World Anti-Doping Agency. But even then, the athletes who do compete have to wear neutral uniforms. And the official record books will show that Russia did not win any medals in this upcoming Olympics. Now, this comes after the IOC finished its own investigation and concluded that Russia was guilty of executing an extensive state-run or state-backed doping program.
Now, Bryan, this is your subject. This is a subject of your film. And folks who want to hear, like, the whole story, Bryan was actually on this program earlier this summer where he talked about this in detail. But if you just briefly tell us, for those who didn’t hear that conversation – and I do recommend it – how did they do it?
FOGEL: I got into this story as, essentially, wanting to prove that the anti-doping system in sport was a fraud. And that journey led me to Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov who was running Russia’s World Anti-Doping Agency laboratory at the time. And over about two and a half years of working with Dr. Rodchenkov, a chain of events happened that led him to flee Russia under duress and threat of his life.
He came to Los Angeles and, essentially, blew the whistle and told me and my film team, over seven month’s time, the extent of what is this 40-year operation that cheated every single clean athlete on planet Earth, robbed thousands and thousands and thousands of Olympic medals under the hands of the Russian ministry to which Grigory was in charge of this program.
MARTIN: So let me hear from everybody on this. And, Bryan, I’ll ask you to start. Now, some people are saying, wow, it’s about time. Other people are saying, you know, who gave Russia the 2014 Sochi Olympics to begin with? It’s – this has gone on for so long. You know, how is it possible that, you know, all of a sudden now, these particular athletes are going to pay the price for this? And, Bryan, I just want to hear your thoughts on this.
FOGEL: Well, I think that this is not a question of clean athletes or doped athletes or question of doping. This is a question of a criminal conspiracy to cheat an international sport. And what they did in the Sochi Games was literally break into these untamperable collection bottles and swap out the dirty steroid urine of Russian national team athletes and substitute it with clean urine of that same athlete.
So this isn’t a – what we want to call a Lance Armstrong of it, meaning, hey, everybody’s doing it; and if you can get away with it, then, you know, then is it really cheating because you’re doing essentially what your other opponents might be doing? This is pure outright criminal fraud. And the Olympics finally said, we are not tolerating this and banned Russia because they sent a statement to the rest of the world that this sort of behavior is no longer acceptable. I don’t think that it ever was acceptable.
BLACKISTONE: Kevin, what do you think about this?
BLACKISTONE: Well, first of all, let me congratulate Bryan on his film, the findings of which were actually cited by the IOC in making their decision. But it is farcical in a lot of ways, and it is very problematic. And the interesting thing to me about this is that, for one, we’ve been here before.
We made half a step in the last summer games because the Russian track and field athletes were banned. And the question then was, well, do we not think that the other Russian athletes in other sports were not also part of this state-run program? And, clearly, now we’re arguing that they all are, and they’re going to have to prove their innocence on their own.
MARTIN: AJ, what do you think?
WILLINGHAM: There are two things about this that really intrigue me, Michel. One of the first things is, of course, there are echoes of what’s happening in the global-political climate. You have people all the way from the top down denying that this even is happening. You have Putin denying this is happening. You have a large section of the Russian populace not really believing this is happening. You have calls for, it’s a conspiracy from the West against Russia to try and demean Russia’s power, which is, of course, this rhetoric that we also see in the political sphere.
But the other thing that’s really intriguing about it is that what else is coming in 2018? The World Cup is coming to Russia. And that is a huge sort of referendum, I think, not only on the IOC and just the Olympic sort of community in general, but FIFA. And what are they going to do about the fact that, you know, obviously, it’s being hosted by Russia, and it features Russian players? And this really couldn’t have come at a worse time for anybody involved.
MARTIN: So let me turn a corner now. And I want to bring up another topic that involves sports and, you know, possibly politics. This week, there were several hard hits that were very hard to watch in the NFL. First, the New England Patriots’ tight end, Rob Gronkowski, give a nasty helmet hit to a player who was lying face down on the ground who was defenseless.
Then, on Monday night’s game, between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals, the Steelers’ linebacker, Ryan Shazier, made a legal tackle and injured his back. Immediately after the hit, it appeared that he couldn’t move his legs. He was taken to the hospital. Apparently, he’s either had or is going to have surgery to stabilize his spine. But that was a very hard thing to watch. And then two players who were involved in these hits – the Bengals’ safety, George Iloka, was fined, and the Steelers’ receiver, JuJu Smith-Schuster, was suspended for a game.
So, AJ, I want to start with you on this one. You know, is this the right response? I mean, people are still talking about that. In fact, I read one column from a columnist in Pittsburgh – said, you know, the reason I’m – you know, forget Colin Kaepernick; the reason I’m not watching football is I don’t want to watch somebody die. And so do you feel that the league is responding appropriately? And what do you think about what just happened last week?
WILLINGHAM: I think, first of all, it’s important to establish that this is the absolute worst of football. You know, a lot of players – there have been a couple Steelers players who have come to Smith-Schuster’s defense and said, you know, this – you know, what are you expecting from this sport? You know, be a man and sort of just go in there. And there’s no doubt that this was an AFC grudge match – that this was a particularly sort of difficult, you know, very heated game. But it’s just – it’s absolutely unacceptable. And I think the league has an opportunity here to create better sort of rules to deal with this.
Look at college football. A lot of people are calling for the NFL to look to college football and say they have a targeting rule that – you know, it’s not perfect. Of course, it’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s enforced unduly. But the targeting rule would – for instance, Smith-Schuster and Iloka would both be punished under that targeting rule. They would be taken out of the game and suspended the first half of the next game.
And so I think that the NFL needs to look at putting in place more consistent rules so that you don’t have things like this happening where, for instance, Iloka was suspended, and then he wasn’t. He was fined, which was bringing that punishment down. And so now you have these Steelers coming in and speaking out against that. And it’s just really inconsistent. And I think the more consistency that the league can get with it, the better we can deal with this overall problem.
MARTIN: Kevin, what about – what do you think? I mean, is this a flare up of some kind? Or is there a bigger problem here that needs to be addressed? I mean, for example…
BLACKISTONE: Right.
MARTIN: …Just to AJ’s point, Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers’ quarterback, was asked about the game after the Monday game. And he said, well, that’s just AFC football. I don’t know whether he saw what everybody else saw or…
BLACKISTONE: Right.
MARTIN: …What He. Was defending his player but…
BLACKISTONE: You know, he’s expressing the masculinity that’s in the game. You know, I’ll say a couple things. One thing that’s kind of disingenuous on the media’s part is we hype these games as great grudge matches. And we bring up what’s happened in the past between these particular teams. And then we have this shock and awe after something horrible happens.
You know, I went back to look at the statistics over the last few years in terms of penalties for unnecessary roughness, personal fouls and ejections. And, actually, they’ve been down over the last three years, which is a good sign, which means that some of the rules and some of the emphasis on not having egregious violence in the game may be getting through. And so I think that these particular incidents were more anomalies than anything else. But we all see them, and we all focus on them.
The thing that I thought that was really bad was the Gronkowski play because that was – after a play is over, one player is in a vulnerable position and not expecting to be hit. And he gets hit in maybe the most vulnerable spot on the body, which is the back of his head, the back of his neck. The other plays happen within the context of the game. And so I don’t think that they should necessarily be penalized as heavily as Gronkowski. In fact, I – you know, the more and more I thought about it, Gronkowski should have received an even heavier penalty.
MARTIN: Bryan, before we let you go, do – I know this isn’t particularly your expertise. I know that you’re into cycling and other stuff, but do you have any final thoughts about this? I don’t know if you’re a football fan, but do you have any thoughts about this?
FOGEL: You know, I am a football fan. And I think that, you know, it’s all part of the greater sporting thing, which is, you know, sport is essentially gladiator games, and it’s war without the weapons. And so, you know, we can’t have it both ways. I mean, we want these guys to go out there and essentially beat each other up and prove that, you know, New England is stronger than Denver, et cetera. And that is also the risk of sports.
MARTIN: Well, that was Bryan Fogle. He directed the documentary “Icarus” that exposed Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. He was with us from Malibu, Calif. Also with us, sportswriter and journalism professor Kevin Blackistone with us from our studios here in Washington, D.C., and CNN writer AJ Willingham with us from Atlanta. Thank you all so much for speaking with us.
BLACKISTONE: Thank you.
WILLINGHAM: Thank you.
FOGEL: Thank you.
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Hope Solo Announces She Is Running For U.S. Soccer Presidency
U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo during the quarterfinal match against Sweden at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the last match in which she played. Solo announced Thursday she is running for the U.S. Soccer presidency.
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Hope Solo, the goalkeeper who was a key part of winning U.S. teams at the Olympics and World Cup, has announced her candidacy to be the next president of U.S. Soccer.
“What we have lost in America is belief in our system, in our coaches, in our talent pool, and in the governance of US Soccer,” Solo wrote in an extensive Facebook post on Thursday. “We now must refocus our goals and come together as a soccer community to bring about the changes we desire.”
Current U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati declared Monday that he would not seek re-election, flinging the race wide open.
In her post, Solo tells the story of her own decades-long experience in the U.S. soccer program, whose women’s national team has often been the best in the world while the men have made only intermittent progress.
“I was just a kid from a lower-middle class family in Richland, WA,” she writes. “My parents gave me a great life but they had no choice but to say ‘no’ time and time again to the outrageous expenses that we would incur with every team, every tournament, and every camp. I was the best player in the state, but I couldn’t afford gas money to drive across the mountains to play in tournaments, stay two nights in the hotel and eat out.”
The cost of youth soccer is often pointed to as one reason the U.S. men’s team has not become an international power, despite the United States’ wealth, large population and success in other sports.
Solo laid out a platform of four core principles: creating a winning culture, equal pay and opportunities for women, addressing “pay to play” and lack of diversity in youth soccer, and bringing transparency to U.S. Soccer governance.
She is one of at least nine candidates. The first seven to declare were all men, including current Vice President Carlos Cordeiro and two former players who are now TV commentators, Kyle Martino and Eric Wynalda.
Solo is the second woman to throw her hat in the ring this week, after Kathy Carter announced her intention to run. Carter, a former NCAA goalkeeper, has been the president of Soccer United Marketing, which is both the marketing arm of Major League Soccer and holds the marketing rights for U.S. Soccer and the Mexican national team, The New York Times explains.
Candidates for the job must secure three nominations from members of the organization or athletes on its board. Solo’s spokesperson toldSports Illustrated that she had secured the necessary nominations ahead of Tuesday’s deadline to be an official candidate in the February election.
Solo is recovering from shoulder surgery and hasn’t announced her retirement, SI reports, but she hasn’t played in a game since the U.S. team’s loss to Sweden at the 2016 Rio Olympics. She called the Swedes “cowards” after the loss and was subsequently suspended from the team and had her national team contract terminated. She’s also had brushes with the law in recent years, including a domestic violence case from 2014 and an incident in which her husband was arrested on suspicion of DUI while driving a team van in which she was the passenger. He later pleaded no contest.
The race marks a watershed moment for U.S. Soccer. Gulati has been the head of the governing body for 12 years, overseeing a period of growth “in revenues, registrations, opportunities for women, governance and international stature,” according to ESPN.
But his tenure as president was upset when the men’s team lost to Trinidad and Tobago in October, which SI‘s Grant Wahl called “the most surreal and embarrassing night in US soccer history.” The loss meant that the team failed to qualify for next summer’s World Cup.
“[T]he loss to Trinidad was painful, regrettable and led to a lot of strong emotions,” Gulati told ESPN. “And to be honest, I think at this point, that’s overshadowed a lot of other things that are important. So fair or not, I accept that and think it’s time for a new person.”
Gulati continues to hold two powerful perches: a seat on the FIFA Council and chairman of the united bid by the U.S., Canada and Mexico to host the 2026 World Cup.
The outgoing president told ESPN on Monday that he had met with seven of those who have declared their candidacies.
“I think several of them would be in for a pretty big shock about what the job is — it’s not just about national teams,” Gulati said. “It’s about 4 million registered players, referees, medical safety, grass-roots stuff. It feels like that stuff gets ignored sometimes.”
Former USA Gymnastics Doctor Sentenced To 60 Years In Child Pornography Case
Former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced on Thursday for possession of child pornography. He is pictured here in court in Lansing, Mich., last month.
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Updated 5:40 p.m. ET
Former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who has admitted to sexually assaulting minors, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for child pornography.
“You have to wonder whether he felt he was omnipotent, whether he felt he was getting away with something so cleverly,” U.S. District Judge Janet Neff said Thursday in a Grand Rapids, Mich., courtroom, according to the Lansing State Journal. “He has demonstrated that he should never again have access to children.”
Federal prosecutors had sought the 60-year sentence, which is the maximum under sentencing guidelines. “The government said he had 37,000 images of child pornography, including images of children as young as infants,” MLive reports. Nassar had pleaded guilty in July to three federal counts of possessing and receiving child pornography, and obstruction of justice for attempting to destroy evidence.
Nassar, 54, still awaits sentencing in two separate state cases in which he admitted to sexually assaulting women and girls, primarily during medical appointments.
On Nov. 22, he pleaded guilty in Michigan court to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving seven victims, after maintaining for more than a year that his medical treatments had been legitimate. A week later, Nassar pleaded guilty in another court to three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct related to assaults at the Twistars gymnastics club near Lansing. The state cases involve nine young women; one of the victims is part of both. Plea deals in the cases suggest a minimum sentence of 25 to 40 years and a maximum of life in prison, the State Journal reports.
After the sentence was handed down, one of Nassar’s defense attorneys told reporters that his client was “devastated, obviously.” Another member of his defense team told the Detroit News that he planned to appeal, saying he had “nothing to lose.”
More than 100 women and girls say that Nassar abused them, by “digitally penetrating them during medical appointments,” the News reports.
Nassar first started working with USA Gymnastics as a trainer in 1986, according to a timeline from the Lansing State Journal and the IndyStar. After completing his medical residency, he was appointed national medical director for the sport’s governing body in 1996 and attended the Olympics in Atlanta with the team that year. He became a team physician and assistant professor at Michigan State University in 1997, where he worked until he was fired in September 2016. The firing came a few weeks after a former gymnast filed a criminal complaint against Nassar with the university’s police.
“Nassar was the subject of a misconduct complaint in 2014, brought by a woman who was a recent MSU graduate and alleging ‘abuse during a medical procedure,'” the Journalreported last year. “The university investigated the complaint but did not find a violation of MSU policy.”
Nassar is being sued in federal civil court by more than 140 women and girls who allege abuse. USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee, Michigan State and Twistars are also named as defendants in the lawsuits. The cases had been in mediation, which reportedly failed earlier this week, meaning those cases will now go to court.
Since October, three of the five members of the U.S. team that won gold at the 2012 Olympics have come forward to say they were abused by Nassar. McKayla Maroney was one.
“I had a dream to go to the Olympics,” Maroney wrote on Twitter, “and the things that I had to endure to get there, were unnecessary, and disgusting.”
Russia Won't Boycott Olympics Over Ban For Doping, Putin Says
With the Russian Olympic Committee suspended by the games’ governing body, Russian athletes must compete under a neutral flag if they want to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
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Russia hosted the last Winter Olympics, in 2014. But the country is banned from being represented at the 2018 Games that start in February, after the International Olympic Committee said it found a widespread culture of Russian cheating through performance-enhancing drugs.
The ban was imposed on Tuesday; one day later, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he wouldn’t stand in any athlete’s way if they choose to compete as neutral Olympians. When it banned Russian officials from the upcoming games, the IOC said a path remained for some of Russia’s athletes to compete in the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
“Without any doubt, we will not declare any blockade, we will not prevent our Olympians from taking part [in the games], if one of them wants to take part in a personal capacity,” Putin said in comments relayed by the Russian Olympic Committee and translated by Google Translate.
“I also feel concerned for the guys, many of whom I know personally and consider them to be my friends,” Putin said, in further remarks that were reported by state-run Tass media. “Each of them has to make a decision of some kind now.”
The Olympic ban has sparked anger and a range of other responses in Russia — including calls for calm from the Kremlin. Press secretary Dmitry Peskov said, “The situation is serious, and it requires thorough analysis. One should not be carried away by emotions.”
Putin and Peskov spoke after ideas of a boycott — and perhaps the resuscitation of a version of the Goodwill Games — circulated in Russia after Tuesday’s news that the IOC had suspended the Russian Olympic Committee over a widespread and complex doping program. The IOC is ordering Russia’s athletes to show they are clean of any doping. If they go to Pyeongchang, they’ll compete under the Olympic flag; if they win medals, their country’s anthem won’t be played.
Russian lawmaker proposes resurrecting Goodwill Games after Olympic ban. https://t.co/uKTAL2frQR
— Lucian Kim (@Lucian_Kim) December 6, 2017
“I’ve seen all sorts of reaction from athletes,” NPR’s Lucian Kim says from Moscow. “Some say, ‘Yes, we’ve worked so hard. We should definitely participate, even under a neutral flag.’ And others say, ‘Under no circumstances — it’s humiliating for our country and we can only compete under a Russian flag.’ “
Elite figure skater Evgenia Medvedeva, one of Russia’s most famous athletes and the reigning world champion, vented the frustrations of many would-be Olympians who say they thought they were doing enough by being “clean.”
“I cannot accept the option that I would compete in the Olympic Games without the Russian flag as a neutral athlete,” Medvedeva said in a statement issued by Russia’s Olympic Committee (and translated into English by Google Translate). “I am proud of my country; it is a great honor for me to represent it at the games. It gives strength and inspires me during performances.”
A hard line has been taken by the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, or VGTRK, which said Tuesday that if Team Russia isn’t competing in South Korea, it won’t broadcast the 2018 Winter Olympics.
At the Kremlin, Peskov said questions remain about how the ban would be enacted. It would be premature, he said, to draw conclusions before officials have spoken to the IOC.
Peskov said that while the situation is serious, “emotions should be kept down and the decisions taken by the IOC on our country should be thoroughly analyzed before making any accusations on this account.”
His words didn’t prevent Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova from saying Wednesday that the punishment of Russia’s Olympic program was an attempt to isolate and weaken Russia, saying its critics had resorted to “Plan B,” after the country hosted the Sochi Olympics.
“Throughout history, there were so many things we had to endure from our ‘partners,’ ” Zakharova said. “But time and again, they failed to take us down, be it in a world war, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or sanctions … We survived, time and time again.”
After discussing Russia’s “revival as a sports powerhouse,” she said, “We constantly hear that we are doing everything wrong, be it our lifestyle, culture, history, and now sports.”
The ministry issued Zakharova’s words along with a slogan that spread on social media Tuesday: “No Russia No Games.”
CEO Of U.S. Anti-Doping Agency On Suspension Of Russia In 2018 Winter Olympics
NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency about the International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban Russia from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Russian athletes can still compete, but it will be under the Olympic flag.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
For reaction to the decision to ban Russia from the Olympics let’s bring in Travis Tygart. As CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, he has long argued for a tougher stance on doping. Mr. Tygart, welcome.
TRAVIS TYGART: Hey, Mary Lou, it’s great to be here.
KELLY: Glad to have you with us. I’m guessing you’re pleased with this decision from the IOC today. Are you also surprised?
TYGART: You know, I think clean athletes’ voices were finally heard, which is pleasing. Of course, no one’s totally satisfied. And we can’t remember or forget, rather, all of the, you know, athletes who were robbed. I think you mentioned in the top, you know, 33 medals were won by Russia in the Sochi Winter Olympic Games back in 2014. Eleven of those have now been disqualified. And those are 11 individual athletes at a minimum who were robbed of their opportunity to, you know, have their moment on the podium.
KELLY: Do you believe this process, the IOC review, was fair? I mean, we heard Tom Goldman just talking there about how Russia feels like they’re being singled out for political reasons.
TYGART: Yeah, look; I think that, you know, when we were in the middle of our Postal Services case, the Armstrong case, we were accused of being anti-American. I think it’s play one from, you know, criminal defense attorney and other politicians’ handbook – playbook to accuse those who are just doing their job to uphold the rules in a fair manner of playing politics. I don’t think at all in – you know, in our case in Postal as well as this situation our eye has always been on what’s best for clean athletes and the principle of fair play. And I think today is a significant victory in that regard.
KELLY: Your agency put out a statement today calling, as you did, this as a victory for clean athletes, but also saying this is a sad day. How come?
TYGART: Yeah, listen; I think we’re – you know, the Olympic movement is based on inclusion. And, you know, we want to – our athletes we hear all the time want to compete against the best. And unfortunately, when you have a country that’s not there as powerful and competitive as Russia is that’s sad. But on the other hand, that can’t come – that inclusion can’t come at the expense of clean athletes’ rights. And I think that ultimately today is why this decision is the right decision and that clean athletes will see as, you know, a step in a victory towards – for their rights.
KELLY: What about this other aspect to the decision that some Russian athletes will be allowed to compete, just not as part of Team Russia?
TYGART: Well, it’s a critical piece of it. And, you know, certainly some called for an outright ban and no allowance for any athletes from Russia to compete. And so now the eyes will be on this process to ensure that it’s done in a robust fashion and ensuring that a very, very narrow category, if any, athletes from Russia who weren’t tainted or got the advantage of this drug program are allowed to compete at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. And I think that will be, you know, incumbent upon the task force to do that in a robust and transparent manner.
KELLY: You know, this decision, of course, will send a strong message to Russia, which as we heard they’re planning to appeal. Is it also designed to send a strong message to other countries where athletes have been found to have been doping but countries that are still sending teams to South Korea in February?
TYGART: I think absolutely. And, you know, our – there were 37 countries as well as athlete committees from around the world that asked for this – basically this outcome. And I think in part it was to ensure a message was sent that, hey, you know, fair play and clean sport matters. And if you intentionally violate the rules as was done and the evidence clearly showed in this situation, there are going to be consequences.
KELLY: That’s Travis Tygart. He is CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
TYGART: Thanks for having me.
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Team Russia Waiting To Learn Fate For 2018 Winter Olympics
On Tuesday, Russia will learn whether it will be allowed to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Officials have already stripped six medals won by Russia in the previous Winter Olympics because of doping.
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
The Winter Olympics in South Korea are coming, and tomorrow we will find out if Russia is going. The International Olympic Committee is set to decide whether the Russian team can compete because of Russia’s ongoing doping scandal. NPR’s Tom Goldman reports the IOC’s decision could have a major impact on the entire Olympic movement.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: The IOC faced a similar decision last year. Leading up to the Rio de Janeiro Summer Games, an independent report detailed a widespread state-sponsored doping system in Russia during a period that included Russia’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Russian athletes won the most gold medals there and the most medals overall.
There were calls to ban Russia from the Rio Olympics, but the IOC essentially punted and had the federations that run individual sports decide. This resulted in a last-minute patchwork Russian team competing in Brazil. This time, says Olympic historian Jules Boykoff, the IOC has to act.
JULES BOYKOFF: I think we have too much evidence now.
GOLDMAN: Boykoff wrote the book “Power Games,” a political history of the Olympics.
BOYKOFF: Unlike ahead of the Rio Olympics, the process has moved through IOC channels. And so the IOC commissions that have been set up to look at doping are now banning Russians on what seems like an almost daily basis.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Ukrainian).
GOLDMAN: This Ukrainian newscast announced some of the nearly two dozen Russian athletes who’ve been sanctioned since last month, including Olympic medal winners. And the numbers are expected to grow. Additionally, the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, says Russia still hasn’t fully complied with WADA standards. The push for IOC action includes a call to ban all Russian athletes from the upcoming Winter Olympics. But even those most affected by doping think that’s a step too far.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking German).
GOLDMAN: When American biathlete Lowell Bailey earned his first podium finish top three in this 2014 race, he didn’t know the Russian athlete who finished one place ahead of him was, in Bailey’s words, doped to the gills. The Russian served a two-year suspension and returned to competition. The incident sharpened Bailey’s attitudes toward doping.
LOWELL BAILEY: Such a vile act, the worst thing you can do as a competitor.
GOLDMAN: But the anger doesn’t blind him to the fact that a total Russian athlete ban for the upcoming games would unfairly punish the clean Russian athletes.
BAILEY: In this case, I would like to see due process first and foremost. I think every athlete deserves that.
GOLDMAN: Many agree. And among those calling for the strongest possible action, the consensus is this. Ban the Russian Federation, but allow individual athletes to compete if they pass stringent drug tests. And those who get in would compete under a neutral flag, wearing a neutral uniform. Russian leaders who continue to deny state sponsored doping don’t like that, and they say they might respond by boycotting the games. For the IOC, it’s a delicate balancing act. Russia’s a major power player in the Olympic movement. But Jules Boykoff says the IOC also knows it has to be firm to back up all its tough talk about fighting doping, especially at a vulnerable time for the Olympics.
BOYKOFF: There’s no getting around the fact that fewer and fewer cities are game to host the Olympic Games. And what could happen if they make a decision that Russia reacts very negatively to – they could fracture the Olympic movement in perhaps a way that would be unfixable, at least in the near term.
GOLDMAN: Critics say the IOC has a history of deflecting tough decisions. Rarely has the call been stronger for the Committee to confront and act and start to repair a tarnished brand. Tom Goldman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CFCF’S “RAINING PATTERNS”)
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
New Jersey Takes On Major Professional Sports Leagues In Sports Betting Case
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have been known to play a long shot in an election betting pool or to bet a colleague about the outcome of the World Series. But the stakes are usually just a few dollars. Not so for the winners and losers in a case to be heard Monday that tests whether the federal ban on sports betting in most states unconstitutionally tramples on state sovereignty.
The Bradley Act
The ban was known as the Bradley Act, after its chief promoter, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.
New York Knicks player Bill Bradley is shown in New York City in Oct. 1970.
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Bradley played 10 years for the New York Knicks, helping them win two NBA championships. The former Princeton star and Rhodes scholar went on to serve three terms in the Senate, winning accolades as a serious legislator.
In all of his 18 years on Capitol Hill, Bradley introduced just one bill related to sports — a ban on sports betting.
The bill, which passed easily, banned gambling on sports in 46 states, exempting four states — Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Oregon — that had already legalized it, and giving all the rest a year in which to legalize sports gambling if they wanted to.
In an NPR interview, Bradley said his motivation was simple, and personal. “Betting on sports was betting on human beings, and I thought that was wrong,” he explained. “It turns players into roulette chips. It makes the game, which is a game of high-level competition and excellence, into slot machines, and I don’t think that should be what we do in this country.”
Bradley said there was virtually no congressional opposition to his bill back in 1992. Though Bradley added that Donald Trump, with failing investments in Atlantic City casinos, lobbied against it, believing that sports betting was the answer to his financial problems there.
After the bill passed, New Jersey did not seek to legalize gambling in its one-year window of opportunity.
That was then, and this is now, however.
Now the American Gaming Association estimates that illegal sports betting has grown to $150-billion-a-year market. And cash-starved states are salivating at the thought of raising billions from legalizing and licensing that activity, not to mention taxing the proceeds.
Down the shore
Enter New Jersey, home to at least a half dozen shuttered Atlantic City casinos, and a state where Republicans and Democrats since 2011 have been trying to overturn the federal ban or somehow get around it.
Casinos are seen along the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J., in June. In the background is the former Revel Casino.
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Seth Wenig/AP
“We intend to go forward to allow sports gambling to happen,” Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., said bluntly at an event to promote Atlantic City in 2012. “If someone wants to stop us, then they’ll have to take action to try to stop us.”
Twice the state has tried to legalize sports betting. Twice, the major sports leagues and the NCAA have taken the state to court, each time contending that the state is violating the federal ban enacted in 1992. And twice the state has lost in federal appeals court.
Now, however, the issue has reached the Supreme Court, with the state contending that the federal law unconstitutionally commandeers the states to enforce the federal ban.
Playing puppet master or just business as usual vis-a-vis states?
Arguing Monday’s case will be two men, each of whom served as solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration.
Representing New Jersey is lawyer Ted Olson who argues that the federal government cannot tell the states they have to carry out the federal ban on sports betting.
He contends the federal government cannot say to the states: “You’re just working for us. You take the responsibility. We’ll give the instructions. We’ll be the puppet master.”
He rests his case on two prior Supreme Court cases holding that the federal government cannot commandeer a state’s apparatus to enforce a federal law. Most notably, in 1997 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal law requiring state and local officials to carry out background checks on gun buyers was unconstitutional because it commandeered, or conscripted, state and local officials to enforce a federal law.
But lawyer Paul Clement, representing the sports leagues and backed by the Trump administration, says this case is very different. He contends that the federal ban on sports betting doesn’t commander anything. All it does is set out what states may not do.
Clement says that the federal ban simply says that the states “can’t authorize sports betting. They can’t authorize a state lottery system that involves a component of sports gambling.”
Clement argues that “it’s just not that unusual for Congress to tell states that they can’t do things that they want to do.”
Congress, in such cases, is establishing a federal policy that pre-empts what the states can do.
The Supreme Court has often upheld such federal pre-emption statutes — for example, barring states from adding to federally approved labels for pharmaceuticals, or barring states from setting trucking rates.
The clash of constitutional theories in this case, however, may be besides the point in the real world. In the modern economic landscape, there is a growing tolerance for sports betting. Even among the sports leagues that are fighting New Jersey in this case there is more interest in Congress in changing the federal law.
Money, money, money
The reason boils down to one simple word: money.
Everybody sees a chance to profit, from the states to the professional sports leagues.
In 2014, Adam Silver, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times calling for “a federal framework” to legalize sports betting.
The National Football and National Hockey Leagues have decided to move major sports teams to the capital of sports betting, Las Vegas.
Odds are displayed on a screen at a sports book owned and operated by CG Technology in Las Vegas in 2015.
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John Locher/AP
Major League Baseball, as well as the NBA and the NHL, have invested in sports fantasy companies. And the NFL, as well as Major League Baseball, are increasingly partnering with data dissemination firms for gambling purposes overseas.
So it is no surprise that even if the court does not uncork the bottle of legalized sports betting, Congress just might revisit its ban.
For the man who started it all — Bill Bradley — that is dispiriting.
“A lot of things make money,” he said. “The question is what’s right and what’s wrong. Do you want your children involved in betting on sports? How about little league? How about junior high school?”
After all, he says, there’s money to be made by betting on the spread in those games, too.
A decision in the sports betting case is expected later in the Supreme Court term.
