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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.