When USA Volleyball asked four-time Olympian Lloy Ball to put together a team for a snow volleyball tournament in Moscow this week, the 2008 gold medalist was eager to accept.

Never mind that he’s never played on the snow before.

Or that, at 46, he’s not a likely candidate for the U.S. Olympic team if the discipline eventually is added to the Winter Games.

“I’ve been playing volleyball my entire life. It would just be an amazing feeling to know that me and my friends would be able to help volleyball grow,” Ball said. “To help be one of the forefathers, to get another discipline of volleyball into the Olympics, it would be awesome.”

The son of a volleyball coach and a member of the U.S. indoor team that won gold in Beijing, Ball played professionally in Russia for six years and was a natural choice to be a part of the first American team to play on the European snow volleyball tour. After what he is calling an exploratory mission, he hopes to report back to the national governing body on how it can help the sport grow.

The ultimate goal: helping snow volleyball earn a spot in the Olympics — perhaps by 2026. If it does, volleyball will be the first sport to be included in both the Summer and Winter Games.

“We want to climb this mountain step by step. We do not want to rush,” said Fabio Azevedo, the general director of the sport’s international governing body, adding that snow volleyball will join the Olympics “as soon as the discipline has an amazing relevance in the world.”

“We have our road map, we have our timeline,” he said. “We really believe it is premature now to mention anything about Winter Olympic Games. I cannot say to you 2026 is realistic or not.”

Still, they are plowing ahead.

U.S. team

After a demonstration at February’s Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the European governing body held its first snow championships in March. With its 2018-19 tour starting this weekend in Moscow, it has invited teams from the United States to compete. (Teams from Kazakhstan and Brazil were also offered wild-card entries.)

Knowing that he spent time in Russia and would make a good ambassador, USA Volleyball chief Jamie Davis called Ball, who remains active as a coach and a semi-pro grass and beach volleyball player. He pulled together a team with Will Robbins, Kevin Owens and Tomas Goldsmith.

Although they have been training outside in Indiana to get used to the cold, the first time they will play on a snow court will be in Moscow.

“I’m going to rely on my massive amount of repetition and skill training and experience,” Ball said with a laugh. “Hopefully we won’t embarrass ourselves too badly and hopefully we’ll know what to do better next time. I’m going to come back and sit down with Jamie, and maybe say `Hey, this is something that can take off.”‘

The women’s team for the Moscow tournament, which USA Volleyball put together, consists of Allie Wheeler, Emily Hartong, Katie Spieler and Karissa Cook.

“It’s a milestone for us,” Davis said. “We’re starting at level zero and building this up from scratch.”

“My hope is that we’ll get more and more athletes that are concentrating on snow, in addition to beach and indoor,” he said. “What I would hope for snow volleyball is that we’re going to be able to have players — north, south, east or west — be able to go outdoors to play the sport they love to play.”

Growth of snow volleyball

Although snow volleyball has kicked around Europe for a decade, its growth has accelerated over the last five years. The European volleyball federation officially recognized the sport in 2015, and a seven-stop European tour is planned for 2018-19, starting with this week’s event in Moscow.

Azevedo said the FIVB is hoping to add three more events of its own, including one in Argentina that will be the first outside of Europe. Davis said he hopes to host one in the United States next winter.

From there, the FIVB is planning for a snow volleyball competition at the Youth Olympics and World University Games in 2020 and the winter Military World Games in 2021, along with a possible world championship.

“We are really shaping this new discipline around the world,” Azevedo said, adding that it would have much lower barriers to entry than many winter sports, which require ice rinks or luge runs or mountains.

That could help open the Winter Olympics to countries with successful volleyball programs but no ice or snow.

“Possibly snow volleyball is the only winter sport you can just pass by and play,” Azevedo said. “You just need proper clothes, football cleats and you can play.”

Rules in snow

An earlier incarnation of the sport had two-person teams, like beach volleyball, but organizers have tinkered with the rules and settled on three-on-three, with a fourth teammate as a substitute. While indoor sets go to 25 and the beach goes to 21, snow volleyball games are up to 15.

“Thank God, because it is minus 20 in Russia — Celsius,” Ball said.

Although the court layout is similar to beach, the ball is heavier when it gets wet and players wear thermal clothing and soccer cleats for traction. Ball said the sport puts a premium on ball control and serving, because it’s harder to move quickly in the snow.

“As long as you control the serve receive and serve well, I think on any surface you can be successful,” he said.

Martin Kaswurm, who is credited with inventing the sport when he set up a court outside his restaurant in Austria, said having different rules helps distinguish the sport from “its older brother beach volleyball” and could make it more appealing to Olympic officials.

“This should help to position snow volleyball as a unique version of the game,” he said.
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The bestselling book of all time is believed to be the Bible, but the holy book is not the only title attracting readers looking for books that reflect Christian values.

Christian publishers produce a variety of fiction novels covering traditional commercial genres — historical, suspense, romance, contemporary — but their readers desire more than a good story.

“Your reader is looking for something consistent with the biblical world view,” says Andrea Doering, editorial director for Revell Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, one of the dominant Christian publishers in the market. “They are not going to run into language that’s offensive, they’re not going to run into premarital sex being celebrated as a real lifestyle or having affairs as something that is commonplace or OK. It’s not that that doesn’t happen in the plotline, but it’s not considered the best way of living. They want the story, but they don’t want to have to put a filter on.”

The Christian book market accounts for 7 percent of the total book market so far in 2018, earning $44 million, up from $39 million, or about 6 percent of the total book market, last year, according to The NPD Group. Between 2016 and 2017, the Christian market saw a revenue increase of 5 percent.

These steady increases over the past three years have continued despite a decline in Christian book distributors and the shuttering of Family Christian Stores, the largest retailer of Christian books and merchandise in the country, which closed all 240 of its stores in 36 states in 2017, after declaring bankruptcy in 2015.

Nonfiction titles tend to dominate the Christian publishing market. In December 2018, the top five Christian bestsellers were nonfiction, according to The NPD Group.

One of 2018’s overall breakout publishing stars is blogger Rachel Hollis. Her self-help book, Girl Wash Your Face, has sold more than 2 million copies since its publication in February 2018 and has stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 34 weeks. Hollis’s runaway hit was published by Thomas Nelson, a division of HarperCollins that focuses on providing Christian content.

At Baker Publishing Group, the current bestselling title is a “clean” joke book for kids. Other big moneymakers for the publisher include Manual to Manhood and The Girls’ Guide to Conquering Life, which offer basic tools for living for adolescents.

“Revell publishes books for people with a faith-based background that are looking for hope and help in their everyday life. They’re looking for inspiration. They’re looking for tools to live better,” says Doering. “In all of our fiction even, hope is definitely an element, even in the suspense. You know, the good guy wins, justice is always served. We want to show basically that there is power in the truth and there’s power in the gospel.”

The average Christian book buyer is a woman, about half of Christian book buyers are over the age of 45, and almost half of Christian book-buying households earn less than $50,000, according to a 2015 report released by Nielsen BookScan (which was acquired by The NPD Group in 2017).

On the fiction side, suspense, romantic suspense and romance are among Revell’s bestselling titles, according to Doering. Stories set in America, including in Amish country, have the most appeal to readers.

Certain rules apply in Christian fiction. For example, cursing and premarital sex are big no-no’s.

Author Vanessa Riley, a Stanford graduate with a PhD in mechanical engineering, says she rarely thinks about guidelines when writing her faith-filled historical romances. Her books are influenced by her upbringing in the American South, the so-called Bible Belt, and her own 30-day Christian courtship, during which she met and became engaged to her husband of 22 years.

“As a woman of faith, writing a story of faith, there’s just things that you’re just not going to do,” Riley says. “If you have an inground faith, if you have a passion to tell a story that’s going to edify the soul and make people think that there’s hope, you don’t really need a list of this, that and the other thing to make sure your stories fit.”

Riley, whose historical romances feature multicultural characters, has been published by both mainstream and Christian publishers, but she says it’s been a challenge to find a home for her stories in the Christian publishing world.

“I think that the inspirational market as is, is telling very similar stories to what they’ve always told and I think there is a definite market for that,” Riley says. “If they want to diversify their readership so they look like more of middle America, the urban cities, the South as we see it every day, then they’re going to have to look for more stories and I think that’s their quandary. They don’t know how to tap into these other markets.”

Doering, who has not worked with Riley, says she welcomes all kinds of characters.

“If someone positions a book as ‘This would be great to add to your multicultural or your diversity landscape,’ I would say, ‘Well, you tell me a great story and then let’s talk.’ That’s the key. For a reader, it’s all about the story.”

Although author Shawn Smucker is the son of a pastor, he says he didn’t set out to write overtly religious books, yet his young adult mysteries do reflect his Christian values. When his agent tried to sell his first book, Smucker ran into obstacles from both mainstream and Christian publishers.

“Most of the Christian houses that we sent to said, ‘Well, I’m not sure this is Christian enough. It’s a good story, it’s good writing, but we kind of are looking for things a little bit more straightforward, more easily recognizable as Christian,’” Smucker says, “and then the secular houses that we sent out to said, ‘Oh well, this is too religious.’”

Smucker eventually found a publishing home at Revell, which also published Smucker’s latest book, Once We Were Strangers, a nonfiction account of his friendship with a Muslim Syrian refugee.

Reaching a mainstream audience continues to be a challenge for authors who write books that reflect their Christian faith.

“You want to reach as many people as possible with hope,” Doering says, “and so the desire to write something that’s going to be scripturally consistent, but that would reach beyond the borders of someone who is going to church and would reach someone who needs hope…I think that’s a challenge for authors. They would really love to keep the door open and reach those people.”
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Everyone involved in the making of “Mary Poppins Returns” felt the pressure to do justice to the original 1964 film.

 

Rob Marshall worked on it for three straight years. Animators came out of retirement to do hand-drawn animation in the style of the first. Sets were built. Cast members moved their family to London for a year. But perhaps no one short of Emily Blunt and Marshall were as heavy with responsibility as composer Marc Shaiman and his co-lyricist Scott Wittman. They had the Oscar-winning songwriting duo Robert and Richard Sherman to live up to, after all.

 

Shaiman, who composed the score and nine original songs for the new film, credits the Shermans for getting him interested in music to begin with. He remembers being four years old and listening to the “Mary Poppins” album and thinking, “This is what I want to do with my life.”

 

“He was a precocious 4-year-old,” added Wittman, who has known Shaiman for over four decades. The two are Broadway mainstays and have worked together on the “Hairspray” and “Catch Me if You Can” musicals.

 

As a framework, Marshall said he “didn’t want to reimagine the music and have it be a contemporary version of “Mary Poppins,” or Mary Poppins singing ‘Let It Go’ or something.” He wanted it in the style of the Sherman brothers and classic movie musicals, which became an opportunity for Shaiman and Wittman.

 

“We realized this was our chance to thank them via music and lyrics,” Shaiman said. “The whole movie is to say thank you, you’ve taught us all of these things, let us show you what you’ve given us by doing our take on the story.”

 

The process of writing the score and the songs was long and laborious, and a true team effort: Four months of twice-a-week sessions with Marshall and screenwriters David Magee and John DeLuca to hammer out the story, the script and the direction of the songs together, and decide which moments in the P.L. Travers books to musicalize.

 

“Very often we would say to David, can you write a monologue of what you think this should be?” Wittman said. “And then we’d say OK thanks we’re taking that and we’re going to write a lyric to it.”

 

They also were able to write specifically for Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda, playing to their strengths. The two men said Blunt has the rare gift of “perfect pitch.”

 

“I loved working with those two guys, they’re a rip,” Blunt said. “They’re just hilarious to be around.”

 

Wittman likes to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s summation of the music.

 

“He said this Mary Poppins rhymes with the first movie,” Wittman said. “We felt it was important that they both live in the same world. That influenced the writing.”

 

Wittman, the co-lyricist, had books upon books about London in the 30s, dictionaries of cockney rhyming slang and encyclopedias of odd Victorian words piled up in his studio that he studied and would go back to in crafting the new lyrics. He laughed that despite his extensive research, there were a few times he and Shaiman, both Americans, got caught with a rhyme that didn’t quite work with an English accent. One was pointed out by Miranda’s dialect coach, the other by the young actors portraying the Banks children.

 

The lyrics in question that the kids caught, “hand” and “command,” were to be sung by Meryl Streep, who, because of the “bizarre, bouillabaisse” of an accent she was affecting was able to make it work.

 

The whole experience has been something of a dream for Shaiman and Wittman. They got the rare privilege of getting to record the actors singing along with a 100-piece orchestra before filming began. They’ve also gotten to spend time with Richard Sherman (Robert Sherman died in 2012), and hear legends like Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury sing their songs.

 

“As someone who usually can’t shut up, I have yet to find the words to describe what it is to hear them,” Shaiman said.

 

Sherman has told them that he’s happy with what they’ve done. As is their director.

 

“Marc and Scott have written this very sophisticated, hummable, fun (piece),” Marshall said. “The lyrics are so clever and so smart. You feel like you’ve heard them and know them but they’re new.”

 

Wittman said they’re, “Just proud of the movie the way it came out. It could have gone wrong in so many ways.”

 

“My agent said that!” Sherman added. “He said there are so many ways this could have gone so terribly wrong. And it’s such a miracle that none of those things happened.”
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American actress and filmmaker Penny Marshall, known for the television comedy “Laverne & Shirley,” is fondly remembered by friends and fans. She died late Monday at the age of 75. A spokesperson for the family announced her death Tuesday, citing complications from diabetes as the cause. Zlatica Hoke has the story.
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When Salt Lake City pursued the Winter Olympics more than two decades ago, competition was so fierce that lavishing International Olympic Committee members with gifts and favors seemed commonplace. Salt Lake City got caught in a bribery scandal that nearly derailed the plans for the 2002 Winter Olympics. 

Two decades later, the script has flipped. 

The IOC is struggling to find cities willing to take on the financial and societal burden of hosting the Winter Olympics. The race to host the 2026 Winter Olympics is down to just two cities after several dropped out over a lack of local support. Beijing got the 2022 Winter Olympics by attrition, winning by four votes over Almaty, Kazakhstan, after a half-dozen European bidders dropped out, discouraged by soaring costs and taxpayer backlash. 

That’s why a city that, for a time, stood out as a pariah in the Olympic world is a serious contender again, this time for the 2030 Winter Games — decades sooner than anyone expected and despite that bid scandal. 

Venues are already built

Utah’s capital city is among an increasingly small group of cities worldwide that has the venues needed for winter sports and the willingness to take on the costly task of hosting Olympics that have lost some of their cache. The U.S. Olympic Committee last week chose Salt Lake City over Denver as a future bid city. The IOC will choose a 2030 host by 2023 at the latest. 

Jules Boykoff, a Pacific University professor who has written widely on the Olympics, said the bribery scandal is “a pretty big stain on the history of the games.” 

“But these days, the International Olympic Committee is not in a position to be overly picky,” Boykoff said. 

The scandal broke in 1998, three years after Salt Lake City was chosen over cities in Canada, Sweden and Switzerland. Salt Lake’s bid committee doled out $1 million in cash, scholarships, medical care, gifts and other favors to IOC members and their families. That included ski trips, NBA tickets, plastic surgery, knee replacements, violins and housing and salary for children of IOC members, according to report by an ethics panel. 

It led to the expulsion of six IOC members, the resignation of four others severe warnings for several others though none faced criminal charges. U.S. prosecutors brought criminal charges against two Salt Lake bid leaders, but both men were acquitted by a judge halfway through a federal trial. 

The IOC brought in outside experts to help reshape the organization. The IOC approved a 50-point reform package that included a ban on member visits to bid cities, creation of an independent ethics committee and term limits.

 Bribery scandal hasn’t been forgotten

Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said Salt Lake City’s current bid officials will have to talk about the scandal, but he doesn’t think it will impact their candidacy. The Salt Lake City bribery scandal capped off decades of cities trying to win the favor of IOC board members behind the scenes. 

“They learned from the corruption of other cities that beat them before,” Wallechinsky said. “It’s not like they invented the corruption . . . they just got caught.” 

Mitt Romney, who was brought in to steer the 2002 Games through the scandal, said the city selection process is a now a more transparent process than it was in the past.

“That’s good for Salt Lake City,” said Romney, elected last month to represent Utah in the U.S. Senate. “We will be judged on the merits.” 

Boykoff said it is naive for anyone to think corruption is a thing of the past at the IOC, citing the case of honorary member Carlos Nuzman of Brazil who headed the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. He was suspended on corruption allegations connected with vote-buying. 

Before the IOC picks a city for 2030, it will have to choose a host for 2026 between Stockholm and the duel bid of Milan and Cortina d’ Ampezzo, Italy. Calgary, Canada, host of the 1998 Winter Olympics, backed out after voters rejected a referendum. Three other cities withdrew earlier this year and Erzurum, Turkey, was eliminated last month by the IOC. 

Bid of $1.35 billion

Salt Lake City says it can host the Olympics for about $1.35 billion, not including additional security costs covered by the U.S. government, relying mainly on existing venues. Stockholm and Milan/Cortina d’ Ampezzo offer similar plans and similarly low estimates, $1.5 billion. 

Wallechinsky and Boykoff doubt any city can host the Olympics for that little. A 2016 study at Oxford University found the Olympics have the highest average cost overrun of any type of megaproject. 

Salt Lake City’s 2002 Olympics cost $2.52 billion, a 24 percent cost overrun, the Oxford report found. That was actually the second lowest cost overrun behind only the 2010 Vancouver Olympics among all Olympics held from 1960-2016. 

The lack of public opposition that helped make Utah appealing to the USOC could change as the real costs emerge, Boykoff said. 

“Right now, everything is kind of like unicorns and rainbows and low budgets,” Boykoff. “Almost inevitably the price tag tends to go up.” 
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