Howard “Howie” Gorrell attended 13 of the last 14 Deaflympics since 1969 and is a 2004 recipient of the USADSF Jerald M. Jordan Award, given to those who exhibit leadership and continuous participation toward the goals of the Deaflympics.
In front of more than 600 participants of the Project Play Summit in Colorado Springs on May 17, Co-Chair Dionne Koller said that her newly-formed group, the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics (CSUSOP), is the 2020’s version of the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports (PCOS), which led to legislation in 1978 called the Amateur Sports Act (ASA).
Subsequently they attended the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum reception that evening. They roamed four floors by peeping at the exhibits and artifacts dedicated to U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
Several participants asked the museum guides where the PCOS exhibit was located. The red-faced guides told them there was no exhibit but led them to an artifact display case at the deep end of a jetty off the top floor's main space. They were puzzled after seeing only one sentence with 29 words referring to PCOS.
Twenty-nine words in through the gleaming new $96 million, 60,000 square foot museum! That sentence reads, “The Amateur Sports Act, which originated from recommendations by Gerald Ford’s Presidential Commission on Olympic Sports, was implemented due to conflicts among U.S. amateur sports organizations regarding Olympic representations.”
Earlier, Koller said, “There’s no way to do that without looking at the original act and accounting for the fact that this is not the 1970s anymore.” She paused, “I think it’s really important to have an understanding of history, where we’ve been, where the sport was at the time, but also where we are today in sports.”
This Summit was held sixteen months after the Colorado Springs Gazette article titled, “ On the trail of display errors at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum, ” which tells what I discovered inside the museum.
The participants mentioned above read the corrected blurb. The original read, “The Amateur Sports Act arose from concerns about conflicts among U.S. amateur sports organizations regarding Olympic representations.”
My commentary tells you that, according to Mike Harrigan, a former PCOS director, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) had never once held a seminar for its member organizations on the letter, spirit, and intent of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 (ASA) under which they operated.
While Congress was in the process of legislating another bill to reform the USOC, Harrigan wrote the underlying causes of what went wrong in his 2018 piece for Sports Business Journal:
- The USOC failed to properly oversee national governing bodies as required by the Amateur Sports Act of 1978.
- The USOC failed to understand certain portions of the Act.
- The USOC failed to educate its members and Congress on its contents.
- The USOC's "culture" since the late 1980s ignored everything in its legislative mandate except the goal of winning Olympic medals.
Sadly, the USOC gave Congress an unbelievable false fact about the Deaflympics. On June 24, 2003, Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation presided over testimony regarding the ongoing efforts to reform the USOC. He asked Dr. Harvey W. Schiller, former USOC Executive Director, "Can you explain why the Paralympics should be part of the current USOC structure, and why the Deaflympics remain excluded?"
Schiller testified, "Recognizing that this is a continuing sensitive issue, it was our understanding that, based upon previous competitive opportunities, that the organization that represents the deaf athletes had adequate representation within the organization as it stands." He paused, "The Paralympics itself is the organization that determines which disabled sports are part of it or not, and as you know, there are continuing arguments as to the technical requirements that could allow and have allowed in the past deaf athletes, the hearing impaired, to perform and compete in regular competition, and we didn't see at this particular time any need to specifically identify that group."
Frustrated president of the USA Deaf Sports Federation, Bobbie Beth Scoggins, told ESPN, “I have been to USOC and disabled sports meetings, countless meetings where the Deaflympics was literally ignored, accorded only a nod as might be afforded to a stepchild. We were often isolated from the decision-making and funding process."
In contrast to the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics, in which the International Olympic Committee validated 19,664 media accreditations, there were only two journalists at the Summit: an Associated Press reporter and a Gazette reporter. Several newspapers ran the A.P. article on May 18, "Olympic reform panel starts work: 'Opportunity to think big'" I learned that it was the first publication to use the CSUSOP since my commentary on March 28, "Deaflympians battle for sport & awareness." Since then, no media has yet written more about the CSUSOP.
Being a former at-large member of the USOC Handicapped in Sport Committee, I emailed a massive message to over 175 news editors on April 10 to persuade them to cover more about the function of the CSUSOP. Also, I requested them to consider writing about the USA Deaflympians' ongoing plea for Congress to include the Deaflympics in the program of the U.S. Olympics and Paralympic Committee (USOPC). Unfortunately, no paper has accepted my request.
In response to my email, USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland was afraid I was disappointed in the outcome. However, she encouraged me by writing, "I know the CSUSOP are well aware of the fragmentation and resource challenges that plague sport in our country and I'm hopeful they might find some ideas to help."
Mike Harrigan is correct that the public must help Congress and the USOPC solve their problems. You and your athletic friends must submit your public comment to the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics by July 31.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.