In a previous lifetime I spent four months as a temp editor for the Asian edition of the International Herald Tribune. Many of the entries from this blog, commencing in October 2008 and continuing through January 2009 were about our experiences there. First memory: The crowds. Second memory: How different it was from Beijing, where […]

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Been donkey’s years, as the Brits would say, since I did a list. It’s time. This one is going to be a little apples-and-oranges. My favorite road trips as a professional sports journalist. Some considerations: –What is more important? The travel? Or the event I was there to cover? –Or will we almost certainly get […]

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This blog commenced on March 10, 2008. Ten years ago today. It was four days after I had been fired by the Los Angeles News Group, and I wanted to let co-workers and other journalists know what had happened, with as many specifics as I could recall pertaining to the (then mostly novel) concept of […]

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Apparently, USA Track and Field doesn’t care that it cannot come up with sprint-relay teams who can get a baton around a track. Any time the U.S. has a quartet of sprinters — male or female — running in a major event, American fans who have been paying attention know they may soon need to […]

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I was in the stadium when Usain Bolt of Jamaica won his first Olympic gold medal — at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing 2008. He is up to seven Olympic golds now, including three successive 100-meter triumphs, and I’m getting tired of him and the formulaic post-race routine he has been inflicting on us for […]

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Nature or nurture? How important is the body you were born with, when it comes to sports excellence? Is it crucial? Or is it just one factor in a big bag of factors? The successes at the Rio 2016 Olympics tonight of American gymnast Simone Biles and American swimmer Michael Phelps, each of whom reinforced […]

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Rio 2016 is the first Summer Olympics I will not attend since Moscow 1980. Yes, it was a good run. I made it to eight consecutive Summer Games. Beginning with Los Angeles 1984 and continuing with Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The first four with […]

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This is one of those random events you sometimes experience on YouTube. You begin by looking for one thing, and then you follow a few more, and in not all that many minutes you stumble across something you didn’t plan to play — and didn’t know existed. Such as 10,000 Japanese performing the fourth movement […]

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Here we are at another World Championship of Athletics, the second-biggest event in what Americans call “track and field”. And another round of Usain Bolt setting world records? The 100 meters on Sunday and the 200 on August 29? I still have not come to terms with the records he already has because of the […]

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I was in China’s capital for about three weeks in 2008, before and after the Olympics, and I was deeply impressed by how awful the air was. The sun was, as I wrote back then: “a pale rumor in leaden skies.” Like nothing I had ever seen in Los Angeles, where I spent my first […]

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