International Olympic Committee

The Olympics are supposed to promote peace and goodwill among people and countries. But only one day after the U.S. Olympic Committee announced plans to launch a new cable channel dedicated to coverage of Olympic sports, an international controversy has erupted, threatening to scuttle the channel and Chicago's bid to be the host city for the 2016 Summer Games. The International Olympic Committee, the governing body that organizes the Games, on Thursday scolded the U.S.

The U.S. Olympic Committee is the latest major sports organization to dive into the television channel business, announcing Wednesday that it was partnering with cable giant Comcast Corp. to launch the U.S. Olympic Network. "Olympics programming really goes dark for the two years between the Games, and there are many events and compelling stories that are never broadcast," said U.S. Olympic Committee Chief Operating Officer Norman Bellingham.

BEIJING -- Crisis. Disarray. Sadness. Four months before the opening of what was supposed to be the grandest Olympics in history, the head of the International Olympic Committee was using words Thursday that convey anything but a sense of joyous enthusiasm.

BEIJING -- A week of embarrassing global protests along the international Olympic torch relay has fanned Chinese nationalism at home and turned a 27-year-old disabled woman into a national hero. Jin Jing is a one-legged Chinese torchbearer who was attacked by protesters on the streets of Paris. Images of her in her wheelchair protecting the flame with her tiny body catapulted her to overnight fame in China as a symbol of the nation's effort to defend its place in the world.

CHICAGO -- When the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing, it placed its wallet above its conscience, ignoring China's history of human-rights violations in the face of a vast untapped market for its sponsors' soft drinks, cars and sneakers. "Possibly today this opens a new era for China," then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch said in July 2001. It did not.

The U.S. women's softball team calls its pre-Olympic tuneup the Bound 4 Beijing tour. A better name is Bound 4 Beijing . . . and then Olympic oblivion. The International Olympic Committee, in one of the less enlightened moves by a rarely enlightened body, voted in 2005 to kick softball and baseball out of the Games after this year. There's a semblance of logic for dropping baseball. Because its season conflicts with the Games, its top players aren't available for the Olympics.

ATHENS -- A leading International Olympic Committee official heated up the war of words over the United States' portion of Olympic revenues Tuesday, and the escalation of rhetoric could burn Chicago's bid for the 2016 Summer Games. IOC member Hein Verbruggen of the Netherlands called the U.S. Olympic Committee's share an "immoral amount of money compared to what other people get."

Four years after its athletes received a huge ovation at the first Olympics after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was told Thursday that its seven-member team would not be allowed to compete in Beijing because of a dispute with the International Olympic Committee. Olympic officials informed Iraq that it was barring the team because the government had dismissed the country's Olympic committee and appointed a new body chaired by its youth and sports minister.

The International Olympic Committee agreed Tuesday to allow Iraq to participate in the Beijing Games, reversing itself after Baghdad pledged to ensure the independence of its national Olympics panel. The decision followed last-minute talks between Iraqi officials and the IOC before today's deadline to submit competitors' names for track and field events. The Olympics begin Aug. 8. Iraq is expected to send two athletes to Beijing to compete in track and field.

Call it dopers vs. testers, Beijing edition. With 11,000 athletes converging on China in the coming days, the International Olympic Committee plans to collect 4,500 blood and urine samples before and during more than two weeks of athletic events -- a 25% increase from the 2004 Athens Games. Officials will check more than 400 athletes for synthetic human growth hormone, focusing on competitors in track and field, cycling, swimming and weightlifting.