Nobody wants to host to 2022 Olympics

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They couldn’t find a single oligarch that needed their winter resort fixed up with taxpayer funds? The IOC is slacking.

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I’ll host it. My house doesn’t have most of the required facilities so we might have to improvise, and the accommodation might be a bit cramped, but we’ll make it work.

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I think in this context it is interesting what happened with the 2020 European Football Championship. It won’t be held in a single country but in 13 locations scattered throughout Europe. The official story is that this a one-off event to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the competition.

That sounds very reasonable. Unfortunately it is too reasonable and might set a painful precedent. As the article notes, sports associations, whether it is the IOC, FIFA or in this case UEFA, enjoy being a big deal. That means meetings with Governments, newly built stadiums and infrastructure etc. Finding 13 locations somewhere in all of Europe that are capable of hosting a group or a single knock-out match is a complete non-issue. Unfortunately that also means that they might as well compete for venues with the “Jon Bon Jovi Has Bills To Pay” tour on an equal footing.

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oh cool! they’re doing it Street Fighter style

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No surprise to me. I was in Atlanta during the only NOT “the best Olympics ever” as declared by IOC president. Talk about a con game! So many people thought they’d be getting rich off the games, and very few of the promises materialized. The people in the city were encouraged to leave to make room for all the tourists. The only really great part of it was a) Blimps! 4 blimps in town is the best! and b) The Olympic park fountain was fucking beautiful and perfect and innocent - before that guy brought the bomb in and made it scary.

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The MPs of the largest party in Norway’s coalition government turned down the bid for the 2022 olympics after the disclosure of the 7000 pages demands from the International Olympic Comittee. One of IOC’s demands that made it to the headlines of the tabloids was that the IOC invited themselves to a cocktail party with HRH the King of Norway which was (accoring to the contract) to be paid by the Royal Castle. The IOC also wanted their own highway lanes constructed exclusivly for themselves. Among other demands, which would claim incredible 6 billion USD to fulfill, these ridiculous IOC demands turned a large majority against the whole bid.

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For whatever reason the idiom “wither on the vine” comes to mind. What if they held an Olympics and no one came?

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Hearing a city I love is hosting the Olympics is like finding out a friend has been diagnosed with some awful illness.

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In the interest of helping you Danell I’ll help with the accommodations part. I’ll host, say perhaps, the Swedish Woman’s Ski Team at my house…

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Call me cynical, but I always thought the small number of people who profit from the Olympics made enough that they could buy enough local support in any venue that public outcry would be irrelevant. It’s not like the corruption and draining of public resources have ever been a secret. Has it just finally gotten so bad that things have finally reached a tipping point?

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At least in Norway, there was a referendum in Oslo at some point (that IIRC ended up with a very narrow “Yes”), and there’s been a stack of polls afterwards (the rest of the country are much more negative, and support in Oslo itself was evaporating).

The exact vote in parliament was “do we want to offer Oslo a guarantee that we’ll cover the costs beyond the specific amount they’ve set aside”. In the end, most of the parties couldn’t really vote to support it without looking very out of touch, and that’s notably bad for your popularity come the next elections. In short, it ended up being too public, and too political, for the IOC’s usual approach to change anything.

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You Norvegian Royalists just don’t “get” Democratic* Capitalism!

 * pronounced \ˌä-lə-ˈgär-kik, ˌō-\


You’ll never keep the Olympic-pin-collectors away.

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I would not be surprised to see an official Pyongyang Olympics in the future.

I mean before the fall of North Korea.

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It’s always been a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” kind of scenario, with the host country getting some prestige and screen time and tourism dollars and whatnot.The host country mostly benefited from being associated with the “brand.”

But then financial crisis. And tourism dries up. And people stop wanting to spend billions of dollars on pride.

So the IOC has effectively stopped scratching back, while demanding increasingly specific and elaborate scratching from the nations.

So countries are understandably saying. “Well. This was never a very good deal after all, was it?”

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I agree with most of the article, but saying Beijing isn’t close to mountains is a bit like saying Vancouver isn’t close to mountains… most of it happens up at a resort anyway.

The oligarchs will all wear these:

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Good. Fuck the IOC. Maybe now countries will follow through with the next step of invalidating their over-reaching trademarks on the term “olympics” which should not be trademarkable in this case anyway (it’s a descriptive term that refers to a type of sporting event, and as such is not supposed to be able to be TM’d for such sporting events).

Let’s just have the UN organize the hosting of the Olympics as a non-profit endeavor and get rid of the unbelievably corrupt IOC once and for all.

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The one-of-a-kind, $20,000 item […]

Well. That will certainly cut down on attendance, then.

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Lovely day for a run through Almaty.

(via wikipedia)

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