Report calls for major overhaul of U.S. track

WASHINGTON – Five months after the U.S. track and field team failed to meet expectations at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a high-profile task force charged with investigating the underachievement released a scathing report citing a lack of professionalism among U.S. athletes, “chaos” in the organization’s relay program and a “culture of mistrust” among athletes and coaches.

The 69-page report, written by nine-time Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis and eight other members of an independent task force, recommended an overhaul of the organization’s high-performance program, improvements to its anti-doping policies and the termination of its million-dollar relay program, which it described as “a waste of money and a failure.”

The report caps what has been a difficult decade for USA Track and Field, which has struggled to maintain its standing as the world’s most decorated track team while being battered in recent years by doping revelations and seemingly declining interest – NBC arranged to have Olympic swimming and gymnastics, but not track, live during its U.S. telecasts during the August Games.

“The problem now is not that everyone’s catching up,” Lewis said on a conference call, “but we’re going backwards.”

USATF Chief Executive Doug Logan called for the analysis soon after the Olympic track and field competition, which featured subpar performances by many U.S. stars and was dominated by Usain Bolt and other sprinters from Jamaica. Though the United States led all nations by winning 23 track and field medals, its struggles came to a head with stunning, back-to-back dropped relay batons by the men’s and women’s 4x100-meter relay teams near the end of the competition.

“I became uneasy with some aspects of the competition (in Beijing), some of the performances I was witnessing,” Logan said during the conference call.

Logan said he would take a couple of weeks to digest the report and solicit opinions before taking action on the recommendations, some of which would require board action and bylaw changes. He said he hoped the task force would reconvene once a year for the next three years to evaluate progress.

The report noted that “poor planning” in advance of the Olympics and excessive travel by athletes contributed to the mediocre showing.