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Would it negatively impact the Olympics if we stopped rotating them at this point? I mean, besides the IOC missing out on the opportunity compete with FIFA on

Would it negatively impact the Olympics if we stopped rotating them at this point? I mean, besides the IOC missing out on the opportunity compete with FIFA on graft? Let's just locate the Olympics in a permanent facility -- Greece, if they'll have them, for tradition. I think between "not rebuilding everything from scratch every four years" and the expectation of recurring events, the single host country could both run the games more efficiently and it would benefit the economy a lot more -- sure, it'd only benefit the one host country, but it would be going from "not benefiting a lot host countries (who go over-budget and never make back the money on tourism)" to "actually benefiting one host country". Let the IOC auction off the opening show if you want to give one country a chance to show off every four years.

pmarreck 10y ago
You could do that or you could just keep it at the same facility for, say, 20 years and THEN move it. So a country could get a 20-year economic boost (hopefully, at least long-term) and at least re-use the facilities a few times
- sandworm101 10y ago
  I think any boom would be short lived. The travel novelty would grow thin. The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. More fundimental is the question of any boom. London didnt see much, with some shops downtown instead seeing marked reductions. Vancouver barely broke even. China didnt do it for the money. And the less said about Sochi's costs the better.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    > London didnt see much Part of it is on the verge of being converted into a cement factory (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/11/olympic-park-london-plan-cement-concrete-plants-causes-uproar https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/11/olympic-park...) Honestly believe a world without the Olympic games is a better world, if London can't find much use for them and Rio is already letting them fall into disrepair. What on earth is the point in this.
    - ern 10y ago
      Reading your link, it seems that the cement factory land was always zoned industrial, and was intended to be used for industrial purposes after the Olympics.
    - somewhatoff 10y ago
      The Olympic park in London is bringing lots of new facilities - an innovation park, a university campus, a theatre etc and thousands of new homes. London is an exception to olympic abandonment to my mind - it's doing a lot of the success of east London on what was previously polluted industrial land.
  - Retric 10y ago
    > The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. If you where going to host 5 games then you could build a lot larger and more enduring facilities which would still be fairly new 20 years out. Importantly, you could also make some improvements after the first game when something did not work well. Worst case, I doubt maintaining unused buildings for 4 years then doing some renovation costs nearly as much as building them from scratch. So, I don't see how using the same buildings 5 times would be a major issue. Further, a 20 year stretch in a single city would bring a stronger connection to the games as visiting the future site of the games is far more interesting than seeing where there was once greatness.
  - jonknee 10y ago
    > The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. Doesn't seem to matter to the Cubs or Red Sox who both play in parks over 100 years old and are two of the most popular baseball teams. When you don't have to build them new every Olympics the facilities themselves could be much higher quality and actually be maintained.
    - sandworm101 10y ago
      Not age. Many events want slightly different venues each year. Marathons, sliding sports, even sailing. Adapting to the new venue is part of the sport.
      - mulmen 10y ago
        Marathons and sailing don't require purpose-built facilities so it's easy to maintain the variety there, just draw the route somewhere else. Sliding sports might present more of a challenge but a few corners can be changed to add variety without having to build an entirely new facility.
      - ctdonath 10y ago
        Without changing venues, other facilities will immediately attempt to duplicate the official Olympic venue in minute detail.
sizzzzlerz 10y ago
So Greece, for example, becomes responsible for the maintenance and updates to the facilities, which they obviously can't afford now? Having a single host country works only if all the participating countries chip in annually according to their GNP or some other measure of their financial worth. How, then, is that enforced? You can always exclude those countries who are in arrears but that only harms the athletes. For example, losing the Kenyan runners from the Olympics because their country won't or can't pay would be a travesty and cheapen the events. Either that or the world class athletes would relocate to a wealthy nation, sending yet another blow to their home country.
- untog 10y ago
  I'd be interested to know how the financial benefit of hosting the Olympics (tourism, etc) would compare to upkeep of permanent facilities. In theory the crowds coming to town every 4 years would be a big economic boost, though perhaps not enough of one.
  - nhaehnle 10y ago
    It depends a lot on whether the facilities can be put to good use and how big the tourism effect is in the interim. An interesting case to study here is the town of Oberammergau in Bavaria. Several centuries ago, the people there vowed to put on a passion play every ten years if they were spared by the plague. They stuck to that vow and have been doing it ever since, putting on an absolutely top quality production each time. The next one will be in 2020, and tickets tend to be sold out years in advance. Even though the town rakes in a lot of money during passion play years, they tended to be in financial dire straits all the time because of the enormous fluctuation, and (comparatively recently) started to use the rather large facilities that were built for the play also for other cultural events in off-years. 10 years gives you a bigger gap than the 4 years of the Olympics, but I'd expect similar issues to arise. BTW, the story of Oberammergau really is absolutely fascinating. One of the rules is that only people born there can participate in the play, with the consequence being that the town systematically produces a massive amount of talented musicians, actors, and other artists, considering how small it is. Really makes you think: if there's so much potential there, then how much human potential are we wasting almost everywhere else! Another fun fact is that one of the first electrified railways in Germany was built specifically to connect Munich to Oberammergau.
Shivetya 10y ago
Some cities did well with the Olympics because they had viable uses for the larger facilities in place before the game construction started. Atlanta spun off the stadium and dorms without issue. These events while bid on under the guise of improving the local economy or bringing pride to a host city and nation have for the longest time merely existed as puff pieces for the politicians involved. Green obviously cannot handle both Winter and Summer but there are countries who could and even a round robin system could be employed. Perhaps vetting should require demonstrating how a major percentage of facilities will be used post Olympics to better the host city and nation? IOC isn't the only issue, FIFA is just as bad if not worse and that is from abuse issues mostly
evan_ 10y ago
I love the idea of hosting in Greece with a "co-host" country that kicks in a bunch of money and gets to do the opening ceremony.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  All the athletes go to the opening ceremony, so it would be hard to do logistically, not to mention the jet lag.
cannonpr 10y ago
Let's say that I have some direct experience, both with working within the Olympics games and with Greece. I don't honestly want that cesspool anywhere near Greece, the level of corruption and incompetence I witnessed by the olympic organisations and committees is staggering. The best thing you could do at this point is to stop the games and distribute the funds to healthier or new organisations.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Well, they would fit right in, but you're right, we're trying to have less corruption. I wonder if we can force the IOC to rename the games to something else, maybe they can buy a private island somewhere and host them there in isolation, for whomever wants to attend.
  - cannonpr 10y ago
    I won't argue that they would fit right in with any government Greece has had since Kapodistrias. However there are a lot of good people in Greece right now trying to turn the situation around, the Olympic games of the past made things even harder for them, I would hate to see it land on their lap again... They seems to bring the worst out in people.
    - saalweachter 10y ago
      It's possible that, even though it'd be nice for historicity / tradition, the Games just aren't a good fit for Greece. But one of the things that turning the Games from a maybe-just-once event for a city/country to a recurring relationship does, is that it changes the nature of the profiteering. A one-time-only event encourages profiteers to cut as deeply as they can can and really screw their customers -- no repeat sales are possible. A recurring event still presents a large profit opportunity, but the recurrence encourages more cooperative profiteering. Contractors who don't come through or who overcharge beyond the pale don't get the repeat business. (Of course, this doesn't always happen, and long-term graft is definitely a thing, but at least there's a possibility things might be different with a permanent venue.)
guard-of-terra 10y ago
Olympics was about bringing the world together. I would say it fails today, because now most troubled countries don't care about sport. But anyway, permanent location for Olympics will defeat that idea for good and will turn Olympics into a completely worthless consumerism fest. Maybe just make them cheaper?
logfromblammo 10y ago
There's a Greek national park just southwest of Thessaloniki, which is just across the bay from the international airport. It seems like there ought to be somewhere between Thessaloniki and Litochoro that can support multiple permanent athletics venues--with the obvious exception of the marathon, which would have to start in Marathon and end in Athens. And if Sochi can do a Winter Games, so can a mountain resort in the Olympus Range. The IOC can definitely invest in their own danged facilities, instead of bankrupting local governments every 2 years and then skipping town for a generation.
seanalltogether 10y ago
The world is falling into 3 distinct time zones, Americas, Europe/Africa, East Asia. At the very least we would need 3 permanent hosts in those 3 regions to rotate between every 4 years.
user5994461 10y ago
> Let's just locate the Olympics in a permanent facility No. The Olympics is a political event, it needs to continue rotating location to assume its role. It is not about sports, it is not about efficiency.
jasonmclaren 10y ago
After the Vancouver Olympics, I half-jokingly proposed a Distributed Olympics: https://invisiblesummer.net/2012/08/12/towards-a-distributed-olympics/ https://invisiblesummer.net/2012/08/12/towards-a-distributed... Summary: 1. The host city gets it for 40 years, to amortize the cost of building the facilities and to improve through experience. 2. Distribute groups of sports (skiing events, swimming events, etc) to different host cities, to reduce the impact on each city and to foster a sense of international cooperation. 3. Stagger the events throughout the year, to avoid scheduling conflicts and viewer burnout.
johansch 10y ago
All of these comments are missing the entire point of the olympics. It's like watching engineers trying to solve business problems in entrenched markets. Hint: it's not a logistical/engineering problem. The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC. That's it. How are any of all of these brilliant suggestions going to enrich the IOC members? I have no idea on how solve this, besides first destroying the olympic brand that they are all hiding beneath.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  > The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC. There is no [citation needed] big enough for this claim.
  - johansch 10y ago
    I honestly don't understand what you are trying to say.
    - samirillian 10y ago
      S/he's saying you need to have strong evidence for such a strong claim.
      - johansch 10y ago
        The "strong claim" that the IOC is corrupt? Really? Have you been following IOC news for the past two decades? Everyone knows they're corrupt, but they do own the Olympic brand. The brand is doing great, but the organization that runs it is rotten to the core. If you really do need a URL, feel free to start here: http://google.com/search?q=olympic+corruption http://google.com/search?q=olympic+corruption How do we fix this? I really can't think of a way to do it besides abandoning the term "olympic".
        lazaroclapp 10y ago
        Strong claim that the parties necessary to hold the Olympics, namely the participating nations, chiefly care about enriching the IOC. If the countries and companies involved cared enough about it, or the public did, the brand could be bought or seized by decree and the Olympic Games modified. It is a very old term and a very old concept, so is not like it is that defensible as a trademark. Besides, at the scale of international institutions, trademarks are not particularly powerful. If the US, China, the EU and Russia wanted to change how the Olympics work, change it would.
craigvn 10y ago
A single permanent site will never happen. What I think would be better would be like The Open golf, they have half a dozen locations that are rotated between in a semi-random fashion. Other locations can be added to the rota if they prove themselves. And the locations should be country based rather than city to spread the load. But I think due to the corruption of the delegates that will never happen either, they get too many kickbacks from being part of the bidding process.

pmarreck 10y ago

You could do that or you could just keep it at the same facility for, say, 20 years and THEN move it. So a country could get a 20-year economic boost (hopefully, at least long-term) and at least re-use the facilities a few times

sandworm101 10y ago
I think any boom would be short lived. The travel novelty would grow thin. The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. More fundimental is the question of any boom. London didnt see much, with some shops downtown instead seeing marked reductions. Vancouver barely broke even. China didnt do it for the money. And the less said about Sochi's costs the better.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > London didnt see much Part of it is on the verge of being converted into a cement factory (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/11/olympic-park-london-plan-cement-concrete-plants-causes-uproar https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/11/olympic-park...) Honestly believe a world without the Olympic games is a better world, if London can't find much use for them and Rio is already letting them fall into disrepair. What on earth is the point in this.
  - ern 10y ago
    Reading your link, it seems that the cement factory land was always zoned industrial, and was intended to be used for industrial purposes after the Olympics.
  - somewhatoff 10y ago
    The Olympic park in London is bringing lots of new facilities - an innovation park, a university campus, a theatre etc and thousands of new homes. London is an exception to olympic abandonment to my mind - it's doing a lot of the success of east London on what was previously polluted industrial land.
- Retric 10y ago
  > The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. If you where going to host 5 games then you could build a lot larger and more enduring facilities which would still be fairly new 20 years out. Importantly, you could also make some improvements after the first game when something did not work well. Worst case, I doubt maintaining unused buildings for 4 years then doing some renovation costs nearly as much as building them from scratch. So, I don't see how using the same buildings 5 times would be a major issue. Further, a 20 year stretch in a single city would bring a stronger connection to the games as visiting the future site of the games is far more interesting than seeing where there was once greatness.
- jonknee 10y ago
  > The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports. Doesn't seem to matter to the Cubs or Red Sox who both play in parks over 100 years old and are two of the most popular baseball teams. When you don't have to build them new every Olympics the facilities themselves could be much higher quality and actually be maintained.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    Not age. Many events want slightly different venues each year. Marathons, sliding sports, even sailing. Adapting to the new venue is part of the sport.
    - mulmen 10y ago
      Marathons and sailing don't require purpose-built facilities so it's easy to maintain the variety there, just draw the route somewhere else. Sliding sports might present more of a challenge but a few corners can be changed to add variety without having to build an entirely new facility.
    - ctdonath 10y ago
      Without changing venues, other facilities will immediately attempt to duplicate the official Olympic venue in minute detail.

sizzzzlerz 10y ago

So Greece, for example, becomes responsible for the maintenance and updates to the facilities, which they obviously can't afford now? Having a single host country works only if all the participating countries chip in annually according to their GNP or some other measure of their financial worth. How, then, is that enforced? You can always exclude those countries who are in arrears but that only harms the athletes. For example, losing the Kenyan runners from the Olympics because their country won't or can't pay would be a travesty and cheapen the events. Either that or the world class athletes would relocate to a wealthy nation, sending yet another blow to their home country.

untog 10y ago
I'd be interested to know how the financial benefit of hosting the Olympics (tourism, etc) would compare to upkeep of permanent facilities. In theory the crowds coming to town every 4 years would be a big economic boost, though perhaps not enough of one.
- nhaehnle 10y ago
  It depends a lot on whether the facilities can be put to good use and how big the tourism effect is in the interim. An interesting case to study here is the town of Oberammergau in Bavaria. Several centuries ago, the people there vowed to put on a passion play every ten years if they were spared by the plague. They stuck to that vow and have been doing it ever since, putting on an absolutely top quality production each time. The next one will be in 2020, and tickets tend to be sold out years in advance. Even though the town rakes in a lot of money during passion play years, they tended to be in financial dire straits all the time because of the enormous fluctuation, and (comparatively recently) started to use the rather large facilities that were built for the play also for other cultural events in off-years. 10 years gives you a bigger gap than the 4 years of the Olympics, but I'd expect similar issues to arise. BTW, the story of Oberammergau really is absolutely fascinating. One of the rules is that only people born there can participate in the play, with the consequence being that the town systematically produces a massive amount of talented musicians, actors, and other artists, considering how small it is. Really makes you think: if there's so much potential there, then how much human potential are we wasting almost everywhere else! Another fun fact is that one of the first electrified railways in Germany was built specifically to connect Munich to Oberammergau.

Shivetya 10y ago

Some cities did well with the Olympics because they had viable uses for the larger facilities in place before the game construction started. Atlanta spun off the stadium and dorms without issue. These events while bid on under the guise of improving the local economy or bringing pride to a host city and nation have for the longest time merely existed as puff pieces for the politicians involved. Green obviously cannot handle both Winter and Summer but there are countries who could and even a round robin system could be employed. Perhaps vetting should require demonstrating how a major percentage of facilities will be used post Olympics to better the host city and nation? IOC isn't the only issue, FIFA is just as bad if not worse and that is from abuse issues mostly

evan_ 10y ago

I love the idea of hosting in Greece with a "co-host" country that kicks in a bunch of money and gets to do the opening ceremony.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
All the athletes go to the opening ceremony, so it would be hard to do logistically, not to mention the jet lag.

cannonpr 10y ago

Let's say that I have some direct experience, both with working within the Olympics games and with Greece. I don't honestly want that cesspool anywhere near Greece, the level of corruption and incompetence I witnessed by the olympic organisations and committees is staggering. The best thing you could do at this point is to stop the games and distribute the funds to healthier or new organisations.

StavrosK 10y ago
Well, they would fit right in, but you're right, we're trying to have less corruption. I wonder if we can force the IOC to rename the games to something else, maybe they can buy a private island somewhere and host them there in isolation, for whomever wants to attend.
- cannonpr 10y ago
  I won't argue that they would fit right in with any government Greece has had since Kapodistrias. However there are a lot of good people in Greece right now trying to turn the situation around, the Olympic games of the past made things even harder for them, I would hate to see it land on their lap again... They seems to bring the worst out in people.
  - saalweachter 10y ago
    It's possible that, even though it'd be nice for historicity / tradition, the Games just aren't a good fit for Greece. But one of the things that turning the Games from a maybe-just-once event for a city/country to a recurring relationship does, is that it changes the nature of the profiteering. A one-time-only event encourages profiteers to cut as deeply as they can can and really screw their customers -- no repeat sales are possible. A recurring event still presents a large profit opportunity, but the recurrence encourages more cooperative profiteering. Contractors who don't come through or who overcharge beyond the pale don't get the repeat business. (Of course, this doesn't always happen, and long-term graft is definitely a thing, but at least there's a possibility things might be different with a permanent venue.)

guard-of-terra 10y ago

Olympics was about bringing the world together. I would say it fails today, because now most troubled countries don't care about sport. But anyway, permanent location for Olympics will defeat that idea for good and will turn Olympics into a completely worthless consumerism fest. Maybe just make them cheaper?

logfromblammo 10y ago

There's a Greek national park just southwest of Thessaloniki, which is just across the bay from the international airport. It seems like there ought to be somewhere between Thessaloniki and Litochoro that can support multiple permanent athletics venues--with the obvious exception of the marathon, which would have to start in Marathon and end in Athens. And if Sochi can do a Winter Games, so can a mountain resort in the Olympus Range. The IOC can definitely invest in their own danged facilities, instead of bankrupting local governments every 2 years and then skipping town for a generation.

seanalltogether 10y ago

The world is falling into 3 distinct time zones, Americas, Europe/Africa, East Asia. At the very least we would need 3 permanent hosts in those 3 regions to rotate between every 4 years.

user5994461 10y ago

> Let's just locate the Olympics in a permanent facility No. The Olympics is a political event, it needs to continue rotating location to assume its role. It is not about sports, it is not about efficiency.

jasonmclaren 10y ago

After the Vancouver Olympics, I half-jokingly proposed a Distributed Olympics: https://invisiblesummer.net/2012/08/12/towards-a-distributed-olympics/ https://invisiblesummer.net/2012/08/12/towards-a-distributed... Summary: 1. The host city gets it for 40 years, to amortize the cost of building the facilities and to improve through experience. 2. Distribute groups of sports (skiing events, swimming events, etc) to different host cities, to reduce the impact on each city and to foster a sense of international cooperation. 3. Stagger the events throughout the year, to avoid scheduling conflicts and viewer burnout.

johansch 10y ago

All of these comments are missing the entire point of the olympics. It's like watching engineers trying to solve business problems in entrenched markets. Hint: it's not a logistical/engineering problem. The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC. That's it. How are any of all of these brilliant suggestions going to enrich the IOC members? I have no idea on how solve this, besides first destroying the olympic brand that they are all hiding beneath.

LeoPanthera 10y ago
> The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC. There is no [citation needed] big enough for this claim.
- johansch 10y ago
  I honestly don't understand what you are trying to say.
  - samirillian 10y ago
    S/he's saying you need to have strong evidence for such a strong claim.
    - johansch 10y ago
      The "strong claim" that the IOC is corrupt? Really? Have you been following IOC news for the past two decades? Everyone knows they're corrupt, but they do own the Olympic brand. The brand is doing great, but the organization that runs it is rotten to the core. If you really do need a URL, feel free to start here: http://google.com/search?q=olympic+corruption http://google.com/search?q=olympic+corruption How do we fix this? I really can't think of a way to do it besides abandoning the term "olympic".
      - lazaroclapp 10y ago
        Strong claim that the parties necessary to hold the Olympics, namely the participating nations, chiefly care about enriching the IOC. If the countries and companies involved cared enough about it, or the public did, the brand could be bought or seized by decree and the Olympic Games modified. It is a very old term and a very old concept, so is not like it is that defensible as a trademark. Besides, at the scale of international institutions, trademarks are not particularly powerful. If the US, China, the EU and Russia wanted to change how the Olympics work, change it would.

craigvn 10y ago

A single permanent site will never happen. What I think would be better would be like The Open golf, they have half a dozen locations that are rotated between in a semi-random fashion. Other locations can be added to the rota if they prove themselves. And the locations should be country based rather than city to spread the load. But I think due to the corruption of the delegates that will never happen either, they get too many kickbacks from being part of the bidding process.