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The map could not have spoken more elegantly. It said the Summer...
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When Doug Logan was hired as USA Track & Field's new chief executive officer on July 21, 2008, he brought with him a wealth of experience both as an international businessman and executive in the sports and entertainment industry.
He began his career in the entertainment business as a beer vendor at Yankee Stadium while he was in college. He was the promoter of the first Arena Football League game in 1985. In 1999, he formed Empresario, LLC, a sports consulting firm that represented clients in North, Central and South America and Spain. In 1995 Logan was named the first commissioner of Major League Soccer, a position he held for four years.
In his time at USATF, Logan has been an outspoken advocate for the eradication of performance enhancing substances in sport as well as a champion for reform and accountability within the sports domestic governing body. In the last year, he was also a vocal promoter of Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics.
In a candid phone conversation from his office in Indianapolis, Logan shared his assessment of Chicago's failed bid, suggested cultural changes within the United States Olympic Committee that could benefit future bids, and discussed the impact Chicago's loss will have on the sport of track and field in America.
What did you think about Chicago's bid proposal?
I've seen a lot of Olympic bids and I've got to tell you from the technical side of things, as a technical proposal for the Olympic Games in the age that we live in, it was superior. It was a superbly-put-together proposal, and technically I detected no flaws in it. I thought it was a great bid.
Of course, there are two sides of it. There's the technical side of it and the other one's the political side of it. I think it's with the political side of it that the bid was wanting.
When you look at how the voting played out, what is your opinion as to why Chicago got so few votes in the first round?
You read all of the post-mortems that have occurred in the last 72 hours and you can ride around in circles. My own perceptions are perhaps from a little-higher altitude than a lot of people are commenting on.
The perspective that I have is one that is based upon having been an individual that was, first of all, raised in a multicultural family. I was raised bilingual. Besides speaking English and Spanish, I also understand enough Italian and understand enough French to get the general gist of what people are saying to me. While I can't converse in any of the two languages, I understand them a little bit. I also was a CEO of a Mexican-owned company based in Mexico City that did work in Mexico and Central and South America so I know what the business norms are in other countries and how people function and operate effectively there, the differences in customs and ways of doing business. In Mexico, I got a real sense of true feelings of people outside of this country. I've done business in Central and South America and Western Europe and I know what it is like to deal with people from other countries, at least in a private commercial sense. I think that gives me a platform from which I can make the following statements.
I think that as an institution, the United States Olympic movement in general, and the USOC specifically, does not have either the tools or the knowledge of what it takes to operate globally in today's day and age. The lesson that was a hard lesson for U.S. corporations to learn once they started to operate on a global level, but apparently we didn't learn it as the business of sports. We are still conducting business in a parochial, provincial way, and I think that when it comes time to compete politically on a global basis we are powerless. We don't know what to do or how to do it.
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