With the start of the Beijing Olympics imminent, I thought it might be a good time to talk about what ails the Olympic movement and what we might consider doing to fix things.

I should mention that I love the Olympics with a passion. The higher ideals of the Games, especially, have resonated with me most of my life. I remember watching events as early as the 1968 games, and to this day I try my darnedest to have a free block of time when the Games of an Olympiad are celebrated. I've known many Olympians, many of whom were also medalists of a variety of hues, and so can appreciate the devotion the athletes have to this endeavor. I mention this because I don't want to sound like I'm disparaging the Olympic Games or the Olympic Movement. Even so, most large systems and organizations can deal with some tweaking to make them better, and this is the motivation for what follows.

Clearly, the single biggest problem revolving around the Olympics is the cost of putting on the Games. The figures are astronomical and often cripple the community that "won" the Games. And let's not forget, it isn't just the Games, but also the Olympic festival as well as the Paralympic Games as well (just because you don't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist).

Following the Montreal Olympics in 1976, there began a lot of discussion as to whether the movement would wither. After all, there was the murderous incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics perpetrated by a small group of poopy-heads. Then the Montreal games arrived with an unfinished stadium and a rising debt that took more than 30 years to pay off. When that was followed by the heavily boycotted games in Moscow in 1980 (for which I will never forgive President Carter), it seemed like the Olympics were doomed.

Then came the Los Angeles games in 1984. Though boycotted by much of the Eastern Bloc, the fact that teams from Romania and China showed up demonstrated that it wasn't just about us vs them. More importantly, for the movement, this games actually turned a profit of $200 million (approximately $400-550 million in 2008 dollars). How? Largely because the LAOOC (Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee) only had to build two new venues: the Velodrome (for biking events) and the Swim Stadium. Everything else already existed because of Los Angeles being a sport-intensive city, and also because they had a pre-built Olympic-class stadium all ready built (for the 1936 games). Add in some well-executed corporate sponsorship and you had the recipe for the model of a successful games.

Most cities, however, don't have the advantages that Los Angeles did. They have to build many venues (including several stadia), upgrade infrastructure, and provide for amazingly large amounts of security to a degree that wasn't even hinted at in L.A. Worse, many of these venues will have little worth to the locals, and will be nothing more than transitory.

The solution: establish a small number of pre-built Olympic sites around the world. Ideally, you would set up three sites in the northern hemisphere: North America, Europe, Asia; and three in the southern hemisphere: South America, Africa, Australia. You can then build large and durable facilities which, once built, only need to be maintained sufficiently so that making a site ready for an Olympics is not excessively costly.

Admittedly, on some continents the initial construction would be costly. After all, it's not just stadia and gymnasiums (and other venues), but also a complete Olympic village, housing for press and visitors, a local airport, transportation systems to all the venues, as well as resources just as potable water and waste removal facilities. Additionally, a secure perimeter must be built and maintained so as to make terror infiltration--especially during the prolonged inter-game periods--extremely unlikely.

With this system in place, the IOC would rotate sites so that there would be a primary site designated to be refurbished for a games, and a secondary site pre-prepped in the event that world circumstances might necessitate a relocation on short notice (6-12 months). These facilities would be paid from an IOC fund used solely for this purpose, paid into from the fees and revenues garnered from the games and member nations.

Bowing to the desire of prestige and the necessity of adapting to changing world conditions over the centuries, countries/cities would have a chance, once every twelve Olympiads, to bid for a games and (optionally) to create a new permanent Olympic site.

The reality is that having six sites might always be cost prohibitive. Maybe just two or three sites would be sufficient. After all, they didn't rotate sites during the ancient games. They just kept using the same one over and over (and over...as one was revived for competition in the 2004 Athens games).

The bane of Olympics since 1976-when it became obvious-was the use of performance-enhancing chemicals and other substances to increase the abilities of athletes. With millions of dollars on the line, not to mention the prestige of being a top Olympian, it's not difficult to see the allure. Even so, the idea of the games is to showcase was a human can do with determination and training.

Some argue that if everyone uses these substances, then the playing field is fair. But the fact is that it isn't fair. Athletes from countries where the means exist to develop techniques to hide this sort of cheating are at a very distinct advantage over those athletes without access to those sorts of resources. It's naive of us to think that this isn't the case. For example, while I think it's not likely that the USOC (United States Olympic Committee) sanctions or encourages this sort of behavior, their are many other less high-minded organizations available, such as the infamous BalCo, who are more than happy to give an edge to their clients. This is true in many places around the world, and--let's be fair--some countries are so hungry for success that enhancement is systemic in their athletic mindset.

Still, in the vast majority of cases the athletes are at fault. Now, I'm sure that there are some innocent abusers who truly think that they are just getting vitamins or other not-disapproved supplements, but I think they are fewer than what they proclaim. The genie is out of the bottle, and it has to be generally assumed that a world-class athlete is aware of the situation. Considering how much performance substance abuse occurs even for average high-school athletes (mostly boys), it's not at all surprising at the lengths the "top" athletes in the world will stoop to.

One aspect of how sophisticated this has all become: some (now) known users didn't acquire the tell-tale signs of enhancement: muscles too large, too much fluid in muscles, bloating, too much anger, sudden acne, gender/age inappropriate hair loss, etc. Oh, you still see it on most abusers, but an increasing number of athletes are inching ahead of the pack by not having their bodies change outside of what is within natural variation. In fact, following the 1968 Olympics, because of the number of female competitors who looked too masculine, gender testing began and is only now being abandoned except for individual cases. This system, which before genetic tests advanced was strip-search humiliating, likely was an unlikely reaction to the first significant uses of steroids by certain Eastern-bloc federations.

Fortunately, there are many sports where the chems don't really help performance, and so they haven't made any substantial in-roads. But when you talk weightlifting, wrestling, cycling, athletics (track & field), swimming, and other similarly tainted sports--you can see that clean athletes, especially from the dominant countries, are becoming increasingly anomalous.

When these athletes get caught, I have no sympathy. You place your bet, you takes your chances. No, the ones I feel sorry for are the athletes that legitimately make a mistake. They have an allergic reaction to something, or have a cold, and they take something OTC (over the counter). Thing is, most OTC drugs have banned ingredients. Medals have been lost this way.

The Solution: Right now, I think the IOC is on the right track. WADA (the World Anti-Doping Agency) has been a good first step in combating the problem. Honestly, I think that blood tests would be better than the urine test, but unfortunately blood doesn't keep nearly as well as urine does.

One thing that I would do at an Olympic games is set up an approved pharmacy that athletes with their coach/trainer could visit in order to obtain sanctioned pharmaceuticals. It's not fair for attendees out of their element to know each and every substance in each and every preparation. Easier to just make it the default that if you want help then you go to the place where the help won't get you into trouble. You'd probably have to take a test before getting the drugs, though, so that there would be a baseline.

One of the major bones of contention at every Olympic games is that there is tainted judging. Whether it's biased judging affecting the gymnasts, or incompetent whistle-blowing on the basketball court, when you add the human element to the evaluation of performance, you are going to have bias creep in.

This isn't new. For most of Olympic history, swimming and track were judged by men wielding stopwatches. Photo finishes helped on close races, but they could be very time-consuming back when the photos were actual film-and-chemical photos that needed to be processed. When electronic timing came along, it was embraced right away as an impartial witness to the events.

Solution: As much as possible start developing computer-based judging. While the technology isn't quite to the necessary level, yet, it has progressed to the point where serious advances can be made. I think a prime sport would be softball/baseball (which will be absent at the London Olympics, but might be reinstated in the future). The simple act of calling balls and strikes at the plate should be relatively easy to implement. It's astounding that strike zones aren't fixed relative to the size of the batter. Tennis has the "Hawkeye" for resolving disputed calls, but given a fixed place to scan (i.e. home-plate) the process should be much easier.

The next step up would be artistic gymnastics. The moves are well-defined and should be quantifiable. The trick is in making adjustments based on a given gymnast's build.

And so forth. Keep advancing the technology until you can have it keep track of a ball and multiple fast-moving players on a field. It will revolutionize sports.

A firestorm erupted in the American women's basketball community in the Spring of 2008 when it was announced that an American player with no ancestral ties to Russia would be granted a citizenship so that she could play (for Russia) in the Olympics. She was labeled as disloyal, a traitor, unpatriotic, and an opportunist. The hypocrisy was astounding.

The fact of the matter is that sports on the highest level have long passed the point were nationality has much meaning for many of the participants or coaches. Case in point, the head coach for the US women's soccer team is from Sweden. The head coach of China's women's basketball team is Tom Maher, who head-coached Australia's women's team to medals in 1996 and 2000, and New Zealand's team in 2004. Athletics has found much of the top talent from around the world training in only a few of the top countries--taking full advantage of the local knowledge.

Solution: Frankly, the genie is out of the bottle with this one. If nationality is really an important consideration then I think that the allowed paths to competing for an ancestral or adopted country need to be codified globally, instead of allowing each country to make its own rules.

I think you do need to have to either actually emigrated and become a naturalized citizen of a country, or, if you are going to allow ancestry, then I'd say that at least two of a participant's grandparents had to have had citizenship of the country that a competitor wished to represent. At least then there would be some obvious connection to a country.

As for the cross-pollination caused by sharing knowledge...I don't think you can get around that. It's called sportsmanship.

Ever since the IOC moved the Winter Games to the middle of an Olympiad, the Games haven't been the same-winter or summer. Staggering the Winter and Summer Games by two years has lessened the public's emotion for the games. Not only does it make the Winter Games seem that much smaller in comparison, but the Summer Games get affected by the lack of that extra "oomph" the Winter Games provided.

With some sort of Olympic Games going on every two years, I sometimes finding myself thinking, "Didn't we just have and Olympics?" Truth be told, I feel that more when watching a Winter edition than Summer.

Solution: This is actually pretty easy: put the Winter Games back on the traditional olympiad cycle. In truth, if global warming continues, then the outdoor winter sports (i.e. the snow sports) might just become moot. As it is, Winter Games are plagued by decreases in available venues, and increasingly "dry" Olympics where snow has to be made and/or trucked in. The ice sports will survive as, even now, they are enclosed in an arena.

It's almost impossible to talk separately about money and politics in and around the Olympic movement. The Olympics are a very big business on a very grand stage. The most obvious manifestations of this in recent games come from the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, as well as the cynical face China is putting on to showcase itself to the world. To all of this, the fickle finger of blame inevitably points in one direction: the IOC (International Olympic Committee).

Many reforms were put in place following the Salt Lake City scandal. IOC members were removed, more athletes were installed, and some limits to service were put in place. Even so, one factor remains: the president of the IOC tends to wield a disproportionate amount of influence. This is hardly a new phenomenon.

Starting with Pierre de Coubertin and on through the likes of Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio Samanranch, the IOC has often found at its summit men of strong personality and conviction who will sometimes run roughshod over the process in order to get their way. Sometimes this is good: Coubertain did manage to revive the games, after all; sometimes it is bad: Brundage was a bigoted cuss.

To be fair, events of the day don't always make it easy. Often, host nations will use an Olympics to be a sort of "coming out party", to show the world that they should be counted with the best of nations. They aren't even coy about it. Germany certainly had a political agenda heading into the 1936 games. The U.S., too, did it best to bolster an "everything's OK" face during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In 2008, China has never shied away from the fact that this is a political event meant to bolster China's image to the world.

But even countries without so much at stake often put their own imprint on a games. Boycotts, almost always politically fueled, have had a crippling effect on the games, especially those in Montreal (African boycott due to South African apartheid), Moscow (Western boycott due to USSR in Afghanistan), and Los Angeles (Eastern-bloc because of the 1980 boycott by the west).

Solution: For the IOC, I think diluting some of the power of the president might help. While some have been benign tyrants, some have used the movement as an excuse to show the world how big and important their...membership...was. On balance, it's probably best to make the office of the president less important while also not weakening the post so much that they are little more than a limp ambassador. It's a difficult line to straddle.

As for the rest...you know, that's sort of the fun of the Olympics. Sometimes it leads to great things (thank you, Sydney), sometimes it leads to games that are less than memorable (wish you'd been a little more prepared, Seoul), but it always leads to an event that is unique.

The fortunes of the Olympics wax and wane with the tides. Yet, despite their ills, they always serve as an example to everyone around the world to try to achieve. After all, if the countries of the world can gather, every four years, and still (mostly) compete fairly and with a common goal that in spite of our loyalties we are all still basically the same, then maybe, just maybe, we can carry some of that in our own lives. The Olympics elevates us to be better than we are and to be close to what we hope to be...if only for 16 days at a time.

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."-Pierre de Coubertin

"My country did not send me to Mexico City to start the race. They sent me to finish."-John Stephen Akhwari on why he finished the marathon (last) after falling and dislocating his knee during the race.