They couldnât find a single oligarch that needed their winter resort fixed up with taxpayer funds? The IOC is slacking.
Iâll host it. My house doesnât have most of the required facilities so we might have to improvise, and the accommodation might be a bit cramped, but weâll make it work.
I think in this context it is interesting what happened with the 2020 European Football Championship. It wonât 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 âJon Bon Jovi Has Bills To Payâ tour on an equal footing.
oh cool! theyâre doing it Street Fighter style
No surprise to me. I was in Atlanta during the only NOT âthe best Olympics everâ as declared by IOC president. Talk about a con game! So many people thought theyâd 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.
The MPs of the largest party in Norwayâs 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 IOCâs 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.
For whatever reason the idiom âwither on the vineâ comes to mind. What if they held an Olympics and no one came?
Hearing a city I love is hosting the Olympics is like finding out a friend has been diagnosed with some awful illness.
In the interest of helping you Danell Iâll help with the accommodations part. Iâll host, say perhaps, the Swedish Womanâs Ski Team at my houseâŚ
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. Itâs 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?
At least in Norway, there was a referendum in Oslo at some point (that IIRC ended up with a very narrow âYesâ), and thereâs 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 âdo we want to offer Oslo a guarantee that weâll cover the costs beyond the specific amount theyâve set asideâ. In the end, most of the parties couldnât really vote to support it without looking very out of touch, and thatâs notably bad for your popularity come the next elections. In short, it ended up being too public, and too political, for the IOCâs usual approach to change anything.
You Norvegian Royalists just donât âgetâ Democratic* Capitalism!
* pronounced \Ëä-lÉ-Ëgär-kik, ËĹ-\
Youâll never keep the Olympic-pin-collectors away.
I would not be surprised to see an official Pyongyang Olympics in the future.
I mean before the fall of North Korea.
Itâs always been a âYou scratch my back, Iâll scratch yoursâ 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 âbrand.â
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. âWell. This was never a very good deal after all, was it?â
I agree with most of the article, but saying Beijing isnât close to mountains is a bit like saying Vancouver isnât close to mountains⌠most of it happens up at a resort anyway.
The oligarchs will all wear these:
Good. Fuck the IOC. Maybe now countries will follow through with the next step of invalidating their over-reaching trademarks on the term âolympicsâ which should not be trademarkable in this case anyway (itâs a descriptive term that refers to a type of sporting event, and as such is not supposed to be able to be TMâd for such sporting events).
Letâs 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.
The one-of-a-kind, $20,000 item [âŚ]
Well. That will certainly cut down on attendance, then.
