Kneejerk Olympic Non-Announcement Reaction

As always, the emphasis on jerk...

Having had a 3-hour flight to consider the wording of today's non-announcement announcement for the highly coveted Olympic design job, I couldn't get past the wording:

Organizers said in a statement they were “extremely pleased with the high quality” of the proposals, but the winner won’t be made public until the International Olympic Committee visits Rio in March.

It simply says the announcement was delayed, and not the decision.

Now, let's assume a decision was made. So why delay announcing the news?

Perhaps the committee is unable to decide between two entities not named Nicklaus, or, decided on an architect not named Nicklaus and in either scenario, needs more time to justify the decision. (Though they would probably be surprised how few people feel such a decision needs to be justified).

Or maybe it's as simple as someone with the IOC intervened and decided the big wigs wanted to be part of the announcement.

Either way, as Brad Klein notes, this is yet another delay and while normally it's appropriate to praise an entity for taking its time to make sure they get the right guy, the Olympic folks also need to get this course under construction!

You can bet this won’t be the last delay. Missed deadlines are just part of the process -- with any golf course and with any Olympics. That doesn’t bode well for getting the course up and running for a planned 2015 tournament test run before the Olympic Games begin the next summer.