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The Russian flag won't be flying in South Korea this February. This afternoon, IOC President Thomas Bach announced that the Russian Olympic Committee would be banned from competing in PyeongChang, South Korea when the XXIII Winter Olympic Games get underway in February. The Russians have been under intense scrutiny following widespread doping allegations throughout the organization surrounding the 2014 Games the country hosted in Sochi. Some athletes will still be allowed to participate, provided they can pass a rigorous and thorough examination. The "Olympic Athletes from Russia" who are admitted will compete under the Olympic flag  will certainly draw plenty of attention, but it'll be the athletes missing from the games who will be the primary talking points in the lead-up to and throughout the Olympics. Among the highest-profile sports hit by the verdict will be ice hockey. The NHL announced several months ago that it would not release its players and p...

The U.S. men’s soccer team lost 2-1 last night at the hands of Trinidad and Tobago, missing out on a chance to play at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Seething experts and fans immediately called it the national team’s most humiliating loss ever. I can’t go into the technical aspect of it all, because frankly I don’t know a lot. But let me just try to give you a sense of what I make of this mess. The program seems adrift at sea with no help in sight. The women’s side – perennial powerhouses with a wealth of young talent constantly bettering the system – delivers on the pitch, so their shuffling of coaches a few years ago was more dismissible, especially since it produced a World Cup win in 2015 under Jill Ellis. Meanwhile, the men have been failing to build sustainable growth, alternating waves of impressive play with wholly pitiful performances. On the pitch, the Jurgen Klinsmann tenure was riddled with bad losses, including a disastrous appearance at the 2015 Gold Cup and a slo...

I wasn’t feeling particularly loquacious on this Wednesday, so to cure my writer’s block, I turned to you. I’ve decided not to limit myself to one article today. Instead, I plan to write a reply to each of the responses I receive. ********************************************** An  excellent question, and one that's had quite a few "right answers" in the last two decades. Although the answer that I will provide below is technically just my opinion, I feel like I've been around long enough to see which route usually has a better result. Focusing on a single sport as a kid was the wave of the future at the beginning of the 2000s. I don't know if coaches and parents had a collective hangover from all the dehydrated food they had to eat after their bomb shelters proved useless for Y2K, but if  you wanted to be taken seriously as an athlete and have a prospective career beyond high school, coaches would tell kids to drop all their other sports, hire a...