The Americans who raced in the women’s 4×400m relay at the 2000 Sydney Olympics have a reason to smile today: they will not have their medals taken away from them, even though their teammate Marion Jones did lose her medals for doping.

It wasn’t until 2003 that the IOC decided to take the medals away from all runners if one of the racers was disqualified. This case also follows precedent: on the gold-medal winning men’s relay team, US runner Jerome Young was retroactively banned from competing in the Olympics after it was discovered that he had been using steroids in 1999.

No word yet as to whether Crystal Cox’s relay teammates from 2004 will lose their medals: it was after the IOC decided to disqualify all of the medalists for the doping violations of one person, but she was an alternate on the team.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was head of the IOC from 1980 to 2001, died in Barcelona on Tuesday at age 89. His condition started to go downhill on Sunday, when he was admitted to the hospital.

Samaranch oversaw the Olympics during a time of upheaval; many changes were made during his time as IOC chair. In 1980 and 1984, boycotts kept several countries away. During his watch, professionals started to be allowed to compete. The Olympic schedule changed as well; rather than having a winter and summer Olympics every four years during the same year, the Olympics are now staggered. Several events were also added to the Olympics.

I personally started watching the Olympics during his term… although I was in preschool before that time, so I wouldn’t have remembered much anyway. My earliest Olympic memories were from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; I carried the American flag for the torch relay kickoff in Los Angeles for the 1996 Atlanta games, and I was able to visit the 2000 Sydney Olympic site while it was being built.

Olympic fans owe a debt of gratitude to this man, who brought the Olympics closer to where they are today.

Jaques Rogge says that he’s looking for age cheaters at the Youth Olympic Games. The first Youth Olympic Games will be held this summer in Singapore, and will be for ages 14-18. This is a good and noble goal, and I applaud him for it. However, he’ll need to do a better job than he has in the past.

Most of us who watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics may remember the Chinese gymnasts who looked like they were under age. They had “passports” that said that they were old enough to compete. However, one astute person was able to find documents using Google that said that He Kexin, who won gold on the women’s uneven bars, was 14 years old. He Kexin will be eligible to compete in this year’s Youth Olympic Games, but she will need to continue to lie about her age, or she could lose her medals from Beijing (she also won a team gold medal).

One of the Chinese gymnasts from Sydney, Dong Fangxiao, forgot about this. When she turned in paperwork to participate as an official in the Beijing Olympics… Surprise! Her Beijing paperwork says that she would have been 14 at the time of the 2000 Olympics. Yang Yun, another gymnast from 2000, is also suspected to have been underage. In a recent decision by the IOC, Dong Fangxiao has been confirmed to have been underage, and recommendations are now being made to remove her team medal, as well as those of the Chinese team. Once these recommendations are acted on, the US team from 2000 will move up into bronze-medal position.

Hopefully there will be no age cheating, but I’m doubtful. They also plan on looking for drug cheaters.

I’m talking about YouTube. Universal Sports is already on the bandwagon, and the IOC would do itself a tremendous favor if it would join in.

The YouTube of today is not like the YouTube of two years ago. There are more opportunities to control your content, and there are ways to make money off your content, at least for bigger companies like the Olympics.

I can see why the IOC wouldn’t want everybody posting Olympic YouTube videos up all over the Internet. They are very protective of their brand, and if anybody could embed Olympics programming on their web site, it might dilute their brand. The problem, however, is that they are not posting them up anywhere. If I want to see the award winning performances of Dorothy Hammel or the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics, I can’t; at least I’m not supposed to. There are some Olympics videos that sneak by and aren’t taken down for a while, but there is a lot of footage that is not available.

The IOC could post their videos on YouTube, disable embedding, and get more people interested in the Olympics. People like to browse on YouTube, and they like to search things that interest them. So in four years, when someone references Shawn White’s gold-medal winning halfpipe performance, people could look it up.

There are decades of Olympic videos just sitting in some vault that nobody has the opportunity of looking at. They aren’t selling videos of all this footage on Amazon.com; they might as well get some use out of it.