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.

It’s time to dust off any Olympic history books that you might have, because history has changed. The U.S. team of Elise Ray, Amy Chow, Kristin Maloney, Dominique Dawes, Tasha Schwikert-Warren, and Jamie Dantzscher, who originally placed fourth at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, are now bronze medalists. Congratulations!

In 2000, China won the bronze medal. While some of the gymnasts looked young, they were able to prove that they were at least 16 and could participate. If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, does this sound familiar?

In 2008, Dong Fangxiao applied to be an official at the Beijing Olympics. She turned in her paperwork to apply for the job, and guess what… she was not yet 24. Why would that be a problem? While people don’t have to be 24 to be an official at the Olympics, they do have to be 16 to participate in the gymnastic events at the Olympics. Dong was one of the bronze-medal winning gymnasts in 2000. If she wasn’t yet 24 in 2008, that means that she wasn’t yet 16 in 2000, and she wasn’t eligible to participate in those Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee can work very slowly. While they discovered this two years ago, they finally removed the bronze medal from the 2000 Chinese team today and awarded it to the United States, who placed fourth.

Dong Fangxiao did not win any other medals in the 2000 Olympics. She did place below the medal level in some of the other events; I’m assuming that in the official records, she will be disqualified in those events and other Olympians will be upgraded.

As far as the 2008 Olympics go, the IOC still accepts the passports of the gymnasts from that Olympics; however, a blogger did discover documents that showed that a couple of the gymnasts were underage. I personally believe that a couple of the passports were falsified. Should information come out that Chinese gymnasts were underage, those gymnasts would likely lose their medals as well.

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.

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.

One of the more recent controversies in the Olympics (and there have been plenty) involve women’s ski jumping. There are two separate disciplines, ski jumping and nordic combined, that involve ski jumping, and women are excluded from both of them. My question is… why?

Olympic rules require that any new event added to the Olympics must include women. That’s why when they added snowboardcross, or ski cross, they have both women’s and men’s events. Double’s luge has technically been coed since 1992. These old rules don’t require that the IOC add women’s events to already existing disciplines, like ski jumping.

Women have tried to get ski jumping added since 1998. For 2010, the ski jumpers even tried, unsuccessfully, to force inclusion. Their request was shot down.

Gian Franco Kasper, IOC member and president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), was quoted as saying in 1995 that ski jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” I believe that a similar argument was made for running the 800 meter competition… after the 800 meter competition in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, some of the women dropped to the ground from exhaustion. Doctors were quoted saying that women who competed in such events would “become old too soon”. After that event, all races longer than 200 meters were banned until 1960.

Will we see women’s ski jumping in the 2014 Sochi Olympics? So far, I haven’t seen anything to suggest it. There currently isn’t a world cup competition for women’s ski jumping, only a continental cup. I do think that there’s a good chance that it will be included in the 2018 Olympics, and by 2022, I’d be surprised if it was not included. But that will probably be too late for today’s ski jumpers.

More information on women’s ski jumpers can be found at Time.com. For information about the 1928 Amsterdam Race, see The Complete Book of the Olympics, 2008 Edition, pp. 305-306. Photo of Lindsey Van, US ski jumper.

With the Vancouver Olympics only two days away, there’s some good news… for skiers, snowboarders, and Australian bobsledders.

A storm front is on the horizon for Vancouver, and this is causing the men’s alpine to train earlier than they had originally intended. Snow may cause difficult visibility conditions over the next couple of days, when snow is expected. Hopefully they’ll get some snow on Cypress Mountain as well.

One result from the recent IOC meeting is that the Australian women bobsledders were approved to compete at Vancouver. They were the top female bobsledders in the Oceania region, but they did not meet the minimal standards for competition. Rather than take the Irish team out of competition to make room for the Aussies, there will be 21 teams competing. Being this close to the Olympics, that’s probably a good decision.

Yahoo’s Fourth Place Medal blog released a story about three American siblings that will compete in ice dancing… but not for the US. The United States has an excellent team; in order to compete in the Olympics, two of the siblings used their dual citizenship to compete for Japan instead. The third sibling will compete for Georgia, but the article doesn’t say how she managed that. It’s an interesting story worth checking out.

Members of Team USA were given nice goody bags upon arrival in Vancouver, with clothes for the Winter Olympics. Erin Hammlin tweeted: “I am in LOVE with Ralph Lauren and Nike right now. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!” I know the Opening Ceremony clothes are cute… although they might be a little warm in them if it doesn’t start cooling down!

The IOC is currently meeting, and will be taking action against Crystal Cox for doping. She most assuredly will lose her medal, the question is, will her teammates lose theirs as well?

Vancouver is only 6 days away, and athletes and officials alike are scrambling to get ready for the games.

One particular concern is the amount of snow on Cypress mountain. Vancouver has seen unseasonably warm temperatures, and helicopters are bringing in snow from other parts of the province. This massive undertaking should work… as long as it doesn’t rain. Fortunately, the weather seems to be cooperating for now. Because of the snow situation, snowboarders have had their training time cut from the normal five days to three. During World Cup competition, athletes only get two days of training before competition. In the meantime, some athletes are staying at home longer to train there, while others are training at nearby Whistler Mountain. Contingency plans are in place if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

The IOC is meeting starting Sunday to discuss the snow situation, along with other events, including the doping violation of Crystal Cox. She was an alternate who ran in the preliminary heats of the women’s 4×400 relay in Athens in 2004.

The Australian athletes may be asked to take down their flag of the boxing kangaroo, which you can see at JohnBollWitt.com. It is a trademarked picture, and athletes are not supposed to hang anything commercial from their balconies. Aussies have been flying the flag in athletic competitions since 1983 (when they won the America’s cup). They’re not trying to use it for commercial purposes… let them have their flag!