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Why no one wants to host the 2022 olympics

220 points by tormeh 12y ago

Sambdala 12y ago
Good. The IOC has always rubbed me the wrong way as well as the fetishisation of the Olympics to the point where a country/city is willing to sink ungodly amounts of negative ROI money into a bunch of permanent infrastructure with a temporary purpose.
- electromagnetic 12y ago
  I think the biggest issue is big cities have most of this infrastructure in place this basically acts as an excuse to do city wide renovations. The problem is when it's dumped into smaller countries and into small cities where everything is built for no reason. Expanding a highway or improving subway systems in a major city like London or New York is shit the city governments fight over getting done. A small city building rail connections and expanding highways, building swathes of luxury condos, etc is destined to collapse the economy. When they have to sell off condos in the Olympic village for $0.10 on the dollar you have a cascade effect down the property market. Why by an ordinary condo when I can get this luxury one no ones buying because everyone who could is now buying in the Olympic village. Why buy a small house on the edge of town when I can buy a nice condo downtown that would've been double my price. The Olympics are an international event. I don't get why it can't be held internationally. Why do we need soccer in the same country as track and field? Do we have people doing high dive also doing shotput? Is it on a scale we should even care about if we prevent one Olympian? It would be more manageable, at less risk of failure and would actually benefit the cities its in by not overwhelming the infrastructure.
  - bojo 12y ago
    I really like the idea of hosting each event clear around the world, ideally in places extremely well suited for it as well.
    - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
      They do that. World championships.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    > for $0.10 on the dollar As a sidenote, i really wonder why people keep phrasing it like this. Why don't you just say: > for 10% or > with a 90% discount
    - JonFish85 12y ago
      I think it's an idiomatic phrase. At least for me, living in Boston, MA, USA, I wouldn't think twice about hearing it. To me, it's a more colorful way of expressing a loss of investment outside of percentages.
    - talmand 12y ago
      One person says six, the other says half-a-dozen.
      - pfortuny 12y ago
        You mean 50% say half-a-dozen and the other half say six?
    - satellitecat 12y ago
      I think that in the context, it conveys the fact that it's 10% of the original price better than saying 10%.
  - Retric 12y ago
    You are not going to get nearly as much news coverage if you separate smaller events internationally. However, I think you could easily justify using multiple cities in the same country to host the Olympics. The real problem is not generic infrastructure it's a massive oversupply of somewhat wacky infrastructure in one location that's the issue. You can easily host the gymnastics completion or track and field in a football stadium but most cities don't have redundant football stadiums.
    - harshreality 12y ago
      cities. Why would international scattering influence spectators? Flying between countries is only a little bit more annoying than flying between cities that are far apart in places like the USA. Whether scattered in one country or internationally, I think most spectators would pick their favorite event and only go there, catching the other events on the internet (if they were scattered, entry into one olympic venue would probably include live streaming access to other events). Even if scheduling would permit flying between locations, I don't think most people would. Scattering would also influence the social atmosphere in any one location. The olympics are almost more important as a social congregation than as a series of sporting events. Scattering them at all would disrupt that.
      - Retric 12y ago
        To use a US example. DC, Baltimore, and Richmond are all within 150 mile driving distance. However, I was more thinking of using 2 city's close to each other. So, for example São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil. However, Campinas is less than 60 miles away and it's #10. Together they avoid a lot of wasted construction and end up much better off in the long term.
        harshreality 12y ago
        While that makes a lot of sense, it would also limit the number of cities that could host the games, since they'd have to be part of a city cluster collectively willing to host all the events. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing. I don't know how many spectators would want to take bus or taxi rides between cities even if they were 1-2 hours apart. That increases logistics problems for everyone, travel plans, complexity of hotel bookings, etc. I think my last concern might be the most significant. Scattering the olympics between two or three cities means the energy of the olympics wouldn't be the same: multiple olympic villages, and less mingling of athletes and spectators there for different sports. Costs would be spread out between cities, but so would advantages, and the cost/benefit ratio might actually increase. It would be an interesting thing to study.
  - titanomachy 12y ago
    I agree with the point about hosting in major cities. The "Whistler" olympics were largely held in Vancouver and its local mountains, and the Olympic Village eventually came into its own as a nice place to live. Vancouver's always had housing shortages and plenty of people willing to move in. We were mostly able to use existing venues for the major events. Meanwhile, the previously treacherous two-lane highway to Whistler got a much-needed overhaul. A far cry from the billions of public dollars sunk into backwater Sochi.
    - electromagnetic 12y ago
      That was in my mind when I posted. I live in Ontario, so the news has kept positive about the Olympics influence, and with family from the UK I've heard similar on the Olympic Village in London. I mean London is trying to convert dockland into housing areas to meet the massive housing shortage. The images of the aftermath of Sochi are just terrible. Russia pumped and dumped the city. They knew reporters only stick around for the Olympics and within a week they can abandon the city.
    - tjradcliffe 12y ago
      Compared to other housing developments the Olympic Village in Vancouver has been an expensive failure that has only just recently (four years later) sold off the last of it's overpriced units. I think it's reasonable to compare that to other developments built at the same time, rather than simply saying "it's better than nothing" because "nothing" wasn't really the alternative. I can't knock the Skytrain line to the airport or the road improvements to Whistler, which are lovely conveniences for Vancouverites but which cost taxpayers in St John's a good deal of money (and which would have been done with federal money regardless) but it doesn't change the fact that the Olympics were a lousy way to get things done (the short platforms on the Canada Line are an example of the corners cut to meet the artificial deadline involved.) So what we can say is that in a country with an effective, robust democracy, the Olympics were still an expensive, inefficient way of promoting public infrastructure. Sadly, they may have been "better than nothing" given our ongoing neglect of that infrastructure, but surely the lesson there is to improve our democracy, not volunteer to have a gun held to our head by the IOC. The hosting of the Olympics by any city is prima facie evidence of democratic failure, and I would hope that no Canadian city will ever again act as host without a national vote posing the question, "Do we want to spend twice as much money on bribes and security as it would take to build a few useful infrastructure improvements, or do we want to give 1/3 the amount we would otherwise spend to the host city to build themselves a new LRT/highway/whatever if they promise to never put themselves forward as host for the five ring circus again?"
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > The Olympics are an international event. I don't get why it can't be held internationally. Why do we need soccer in the same country as track and field? Because its a money losing proposition for the host(s) in any case, and the payoff (such as it is) is the prestige of being the unique host. I suspect that splitting the events N ways would result in per-host costs of greater than 1/N times the single-host cost, and per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits, and even less willingness to host.
    - CWuestefeld 12y ago
      That may be true, but doesn't the theory of marginal utility tell us that an entity might be willing to pay $X for Y units of a good, but that they're less likely to be will to pay $NX for NY units. In concrete terms, I'll pay $1 for a liter of water, but I won't pay $1M for a megaliter.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        Sure, but when you are paying for visibility, exclusivity is a huge factor. Losing that, I think, is pretty hard to compensate for.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      > I suspect that splitting the events N ways would result in per-host costs of greater than 1/N times the single-host cost I suspect the opposite. Many cities and nations have the infrastructure to support a 1/N sized event with little to no investment. If events are hosted by cities that already have the facilities then costs consist of things like borrowing extra buses from nearby cities and paying overtime for police which seem negligible compared to current Olympic costs. > per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits This rings true for me and I would add that the total esteem of the Olympic games would diminish. I think that it would be in the interest of host nations to split up the games, but against the interest of the International Olympic Committee.
  - edias 12y ago
    For what it's worth, the village of Lake Placid currently has thriving tourist economy and the town is very well off. Without the 1932 and 1980 Olympics it would be a poor shit hole like the rest of the small towns in update New York. Similarly, Salt Lake City was hardly a city before 2002 and now has a big tech industry, great public transportation and incredibly progressive compared to the rest of Utah. Obviously it doesn't work out for everyone and costs have certainly gotten bloated in the last 20 years, but it's unfair to lump all the Olympic towns together like you do. And to your point of making it international it would destroy tourist numbers for the event as (at least in my experience) the point of going to the Olympics is to take in the event as a whole, not just individual sports which no one really cares about outside of the Olympics.
    - joshdance 12y ago
      >Similarly, Salt Lake City was hardly a city before 2002... What? Salt Lake City hardly changed with the Olympics. The ski resorts were already there, the hockey arena was already there, the Olympic stadium was already there. The main things that was added were some cool signage, a few Olympic monuments and some roadway improvements which were already in progress. One of the biggest things built, the Olympic Park - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park, isn't even in Salt Lake, it is in Park City. Attributing Salt Lake City becoming what it is today because of the Olympics is causation/correlation. Maybe the Olympics came to Salt Lake because of what it was?
- scrollaway 12y ago
  Not that I don't agree but you're exaggerating quite a bit. The Olympics brought the metro system to Athens, a city in dire need of less cars on the streets. It's not all bad.
  - rquirk 12y ago
    There was a lot of waste too, just look at the photos of what the site is like now http://desertedplaces.blogspot.com.es/2014/08/athens-olympic-games-sites-10-years.html http://desertedplaces.blogspot.com.es/2014/08/athens-olympic...
- ivraatiems 12y ago
  The issue is, none of this will actually change until countries that disapprove of the IOC (which the article strongly implies includes the US and most of Europe) start boycotting the Olympics, which they won't, because the Olympics are still a big source of national pride for many places (especially the US).
  - ecspike 12y ago
    Pride and income. If the USOC boycotts the Olympics, NBC loses because they fund about 25% of the IOC's budget and account for between 40-60% of the broadcast licensing fees the IOC collects. NBC partially funds the USOC as well. So as you stated, not gonna happen.
    - canvia 12y ago
      Don't forget that some of the biggest advertisers during the Olympics are American companies like McDonalds and Coca Cola that need broad exposure to survive.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  It's an excuse to award state contracts, which are massively profitable for the bureaucrats awarding them, and for the winning bidder selected (who has business connections with the bureaucrat.) Half of these companies that completely fail at not overrunning their budgets by 2-5x don't even exist before these contracts are awarded, and don't exist for long afterwards. The rest are deeply entrenched in government. It's only negative ROI for the taxpayer. The Olympics and the World Cup are just excuses for graft.
Shivetya 12y ago
They should have expanded beyond the jab at FIFA, I am not sure which is actually worse but FIFA is probably the worse of the two organizations simply for what they choose to ignore; namely slave labor in building event areas. Neither of these organizations would survive a concerted effort on the part of any larger nation investigating into their finances. Threaten their livelihood, throw their officials in jail, and/or prevent their movement across political boundaries. Just blocking TV rights alone may be sufficient to put neutral members on their boards.
- freehunter 12y ago
  I think the reason the IOC has set themselves up this way is so that it would create a political incident if anyone tried to hinder them in any way. All the IOC wants to do is foster peace and goodwill between nations and help these poor kids realize their dreams! But the lousy [insert country here] are trying to shut us down! The IOC thinks they're the UN, with diplomatic immunity and semi-royalty status. They wouldn't live up to scrutiny, but no one would challenge them anyway.
- TillE 12y ago
  The trouble with FIFA is that the national FAs aren't a whole lot better. If three or four of the top footballing nations withdraw and form their own organization, it's likely that FIFA would collapse into insignificance. If anything, FIFA's downfall may come from the fact that they're now funneling money to nations which are very much not part of that group, nations with little or no credibility in the sport.
Yizahi 12y ago
Good, maybe in future when Europe/US will host winter games they won't participate in "arms race" for most pompous ceremony. And maybe drop pseudo marathon altogether - either you can carry Olympic fire from Greece on foot, without using cars, planes and other interruptions or just don't do it at all.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  While I appreciate the sentiment, carrying " Olympic fire from Greece on foot" would be challenging for the Olympics held on land masses non-contiguous with Greece.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    A muscle-powered boat would be in keeping with the spirit, right?
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      If you're asking me, I think a sailing/wind-powered ship would be fine as well. But, I agree, it takes a bit away when you have all the planes, snowmobiles, etc...
  - pavlov 12y ago
    The flame carrier can board a ship but he/she has to keep moving on the deck. That is how the ancient Greeks intended.
    - Igglyboo 12y ago
      I don't think the ancient Greeks could have envisioned a world where the Olympics was played thousands of miles away from Greece and included every nation on the planet.
      - Paradigma11 12y ago
        Most likely Alexander thought of it.
julienchastang 12y ago
For all sorts of reasons (political, financial) the Olympics should be held in the same location, and that location is Switzerland. Here is a great and heartbreaking editorial from former rower Charles Banks-Altekruse as to why: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01altekruse.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01altekruse.html
- bluthru 12y ago
  I like the idea of using Greece every year (like we used to). Their economy needs the support more than a country that get by on seedy banking practices.
  - aikah 12y ago
    The olympics basically ruined Greece.That's not a good idea,unless someone else pays for it. Olympics were a financial distaster for that country,olympic installations are basically roting today.
    - seizethecheese 12y ago
      It ruined then because the infrastructure was only used once.
    - edias 12y ago
      That's as much their fault as it is the Olympics, plenty of other places (mostly smaller cities) are thriving because of the jump start the Olympics gave them.
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      If the same event was held there every 4 years, they could reuse much of the hard infrastructure and generate more return on not much more investment. That said, it will never happen because the IOC is effectively a PR firm at this point, they'll make much more money from a new country every 4 years than they will from Greece repeatedly.
- dfc 12y ago
danielweber 12y ago
"IOC members will be received with a smile on arrival at hotel" I thought this just descriptive, but (allowing for translation) it's the IOC's own words: http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-olympics.html#jiHbrqHoLOtYM5gx.99 http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-...
- Someone1234 12y ago
  What the heck did I just read? That list cannot be true, can it? What next no blue skittles in the bowl?
  - titanomachy 12y ago
    According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. Either way it seems that he was a bastion of reason and moderation compared to these IOC goons.
    - masklinn 12y ago
      > According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. And he provided the reasoning for that in his bio: > Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through. > The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." > So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
throw7 12y ago
I stopped watching the olympics a long time ago. I lied. I tuned in for the downhill skiing for a bit, but got tired of watching Bodi Miller's girlfriend.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
"got built in some muddy, bulldozed acreage south of Sochi, Russia, rather than in Salzburg, Austria, home to Mozart" You don't actually expect curling to be held directly on Heldenplatz either way?
notatoad 12y ago
I think the biggest and probably easiest change towards fixing the olympics is to move the ownership of TV rights from the IOC to the LOC (Local Organizing Committee). The LOC can pay a franchising fee to the IOC for the use of the olympic brand, and the IOC can continue to enforce standards and pick a venue and guide the whole process through, but if the money is actually coming in to the local organizer instead of getting skimmed off at the top, there's a lot less opportunity for corruption in the IOC.
dimitrideag 12y ago
This is interesting, however I was wondering if it is a topic for HN? "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Artemis2 12y ago
  > some interesting new phenomenon > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. This clearly applies to this, as votes have spoken.
  - seizethecheese 12y ago
    If votes alone can speak, why are guidelines needed?
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  A common topic (and an on-topic one at that) during the last olympics was the technological locking down of the media surrounding the event (e.g. NBC in the US). The interest in the IOC's corruption is probably connected to that.
billpg 12y ago
The end of the IOC can't happen soon enough. I just wish it could have happened before the embarrassment of my country licking the IOC boots two years ago. You want your own private road lanes in this busy city? Yessir!
HeXetic 12y ago
It's concerning that so few cities are left in the 2022 games bidding process, but this article seems to ignore that there are still plenty of interested bidders for the 2024 summer and 2026 winter games. While the author's conclusion is not necessarily wrong, this is very much a case of selective bias.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
fragsworth 12y ago
Here's a list of things that might make you question the good-will of the Olympics: http://www.businessinsider.com/finances-of-the-ioc-2012-8?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/finances-of-the-ioc-2012-8?op...
chaostheory 12y ago
If my memory is correct, historically the IOC seems to have always been really corrupt going as far back as before WWII or even earlier. The only thing that's interesting to me about this is what has prompted this change? The Internet (assuming it has created more aware citizens)? Dwindling budgets? A combination of several factors?
golemotron 12y ago
I really dislike this "catty" journalistic style. It reads more like celebrity gossip than news, and it's becoming more prevalent. >Oh, sure, president Thomas Bach said reform is needed for the bid process but this is a guy who spent his time in Sochi clinking champagne glasses with Vladimir Putin in an effort to help soften Vlad's global image. It worked for a week or so and Putin sent troops into the Ukraine. (How's that working out for you, Thomas?)
- tormeh 12y ago
  Maybe it can make more people read news instead of celebrity gossip? If so, I'm all for it.
_nullandnull_ 12y ago
> Aspen, Colo., (complete with bullet train from Denver which has no practical use post Olympics) I live in Colorado and I strongly disagree with this statement. The bullet train would be extremely practical. In the next couple of years DIA (Denver airport) will be connected via train to Union Station in downtown Denver. There is already talk about how easy it would be for tourist to fly into DIA , catch the train to Aspen, ski for the day, then catch the train back and stay in downtown Denver. This would help with traffic on I-70. In regards to the Olympics being hosted in Aspen or anywhere in Colorado, no thanks.
- jmagoon 12y ago
  Fellow Coloradan-- agreed on the practicality of a mountain train, agreed on the no Olympics here, ever. It was already voted down once (1976), and I'm sure it would happen again.
snowwrestler 12y ago
The Winter Olympics are in trouble in general. They have now grown so big that you need a city to support all the visitors, media, athletes, events, etc. But you also need big mountains with reliable snow. The combination is hard to find, and it's getting harder every 4 years, probably due in part to global warming. Across most mountain ranges, permanent snowpack is shrinking, anomalous warm spells are happening more frequently, and mountain glaciers are losing mass. Sochi had snow problems, which was not that surprising given the latitude, but so did Vancouver--and that was surprising. So did Turin. So that is 12 years of snow problems at the Winter Olympics. They need to either shrink the footprint small enough to fit into real high altitude mountain towns, or give up some snow events. Neither seems likely.
fleeno 12y ago
How about we just always have Summer in Athens, and Winter in say, Vancouver. There, all good.

220 points by tormeh 12y ago

Good. The IOC has always rubbed me the wrong way as well as the fetishisation of the Olympics to the point where a country/city is willing to sink ungodly amounts of negative ROI money into a bunch of permanent infrastructure with a temporary purpose.

electromagnetic 12y ago
I think the biggest issue is big cities have most of this infrastructure in place this basically acts as an excuse to do city wide renovations. The problem is when it's dumped into smaller countries and into small cities where everything is built for no reason. Expanding a highway or improving subway systems in a major city like London or New York is shit the city governments fight over getting done. A small city building rail connections and expanding highways, building swathes of luxury condos, etc is destined to collapse the economy. When they have to sell off condos in the Olympic village for $0.10 on the dollar you have a cascade effect down the property market. Why by an ordinary condo when I can get this luxury one no ones buying because everyone who could is now buying in the Olympic village. Why buy a small house on the edge of town when I can buy a nice condo downtown that would've been double my price. The Olympics are an international event. I don't get why it can't be held internationally. Why do we need soccer in the same country as track and field? Do we have people doing high dive also doing shotput? Is it on a scale we should even care about if we prevent one Olympian? It would be more manageable, at less risk of failure and would actually benefit the cities its in by not overwhelming the infrastructure.
- bojo 12y ago
  I really like the idea of hosting each event clear around the world, ideally in places extremely well suited for it as well.
  - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
    They do that. World championships.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  > for $0.10 on the dollar As a sidenote, i really wonder why people keep phrasing it like this. Why don't you just say: > for 10% or > with a 90% discount
  - JonFish85 12y ago
    I think it's an idiomatic phrase. At least for me, living in Boston, MA, USA, I wouldn't think twice about hearing it. To me, it's a more colorful way of expressing a loss of investment outside of percentages.
  - talmand 12y ago
    One person says six, the other says half-a-dozen.
    - pfortuny 12y ago
      You mean 50% say half-a-dozen and the other half say six?
  - satellitecat 12y ago
    I think that in the context, it conveys the fact that it's 10% of the original price better than saying 10%.
- Retric 12y ago
  You are not going to get nearly as much news coverage if you separate smaller events internationally. However, I think you could easily justify using multiple cities in the same country to host the Olympics. The real problem is not generic infrastructure it's a massive oversupply of somewhat wacky infrastructure in one location that's the issue. You can easily host the gymnastics completion or track and field in a football stadium but most cities don't have redundant football stadiums.
  - harshreality 12y ago
    cities. Why would international scattering influence spectators? Flying between countries is only a little bit more annoying than flying between cities that are far apart in places like the USA. Whether scattered in one country or internationally, I think most spectators would pick their favorite event and only go there, catching the other events on the internet (if they were scattered, entry into one olympic venue would probably include live streaming access to other events). Even if scheduling would permit flying between locations, I don't think most people would. Scattering would also influence the social atmosphere in any one location. The olympics are almost more important as a social congregation than as a series of sporting events. Scattering them at all would disrupt that.
    - Retric 12y ago
      To use a US example. DC, Baltimore, and Richmond are all within 150 mile driving distance. However, I was more thinking of using 2 city's close to each other. So, for example São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil. However, Campinas is less than 60 miles away and it's #10. Together they avoid a lot of wasted construction and end up much better off in the long term.
      - harshreality 12y ago
        While that makes a lot of sense, it would also limit the number of cities that could host the games, since they'd have to be part of a city cluster collectively willing to host all the events. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing. I don't know how many spectators would want to take bus or taxi rides between cities even if they were 1-2 hours apart. That increases logistics problems for everyone, travel plans, complexity of hotel bookings, etc. I think my last concern might be the most significant. Scattering the olympics between two or three cities means the energy of the olympics wouldn't be the same: multiple olympic villages, and less mingling of athletes and spectators there for different sports. Costs would be spread out between cities, but so would advantages, and the cost/benefit ratio might actually increase. It would be an interesting thing to study.
- titanomachy 12y ago
  I agree with the point about hosting in major cities. The "Whistler" olympics were largely held in Vancouver and its local mountains, and the Olympic Village eventually came into its own as a nice place to live. Vancouver's always had housing shortages and plenty of people willing to move in. We were mostly able to use existing venues for the major events. Meanwhile, the previously treacherous two-lane highway to Whistler got a much-needed overhaul. A far cry from the billions of public dollars sunk into backwater Sochi.
  - electromagnetic 12y ago
    That was in my mind when I posted. I live in Ontario, so the news has kept positive about the Olympics influence, and with family from the UK I've heard similar on the Olympic Village in London. I mean London is trying to convert dockland into housing areas to meet the massive housing shortage. The images of the aftermath of Sochi are just terrible. Russia pumped and dumped the city. They knew reporters only stick around for the Olympics and within a week they can abandon the city.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Compared to other housing developments the Olympic Village in Vancouver has been an expensive failure that has only just recently (four years later) sold off the last of it's overpriced units. I think it's reasonable to compare that to other developments built at the same time, rather than simply saying "it's better than nothing" because "nothing" wasn't really the alternative. I can't knock the Skytrain line to the airport or the road improvements to Whistler, which are lovely conveniences for Vancouverites but which cost taxpayers in St John's a good deal of money (and which would have been done with federal money regardless) but it doesn't change the fact that the Olympics were a lousy way to get things done (the short platforms on the Canada Line are an example of the corners cut to meet the artificial deadline involved.) So what we can say is that in a country with an effective, robust democracy, the Olympics were still an expensive, inefficient way of promoting public infrastructure. Sadly, they may have been "better than nothing" given our ongoing neglect of that infrastructure, but surely the lesson there is to improve our democracy, not volunteer to have a gun held to our head by the IOC. The hosting of the Olympics by any city is prima facie evidence of democratic failure, and I would hope that no Canadian city will ever again act as host without a national vote posing the question, "Do we want to spend twice as much money on bribes and security as it would take to build a few useful infrastructure improvements, or do we want to give 1/3 the amount we would otherwise spend to the host city to build themselves a new LRT/highway/whatever if they promise to never put themselves forward as host for the five ring circus again?"
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The Olympics are an international event. I don't get why it can't be held internationally. Why do we need soccer in the same country as track and field? Because its a money losing proposition for the host(s) in any case, and the payoff (such as it is) is the prestige of being the unique host. I suspect that splitting the events N ways would result in per-host costs of greater than 1/N times the single-host cost, and per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits, and even less willingness to host.
  - CWuestefeld 12y ago
    That may be true, but doesn't the theory of marginal utility tell us that an entity might be willing to pay $X for Y units of a good, but that they're less likely to be will to pay $NX for NY units. In concrete terms, I'll pay $1 for a liter of water, but I won't pay $1M for a megaliter.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      Sure, but when you are paying for visibility, exclusivity is a huge factor. Losing that, I think, is pretty hard to compensate for.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    > I suspect that splitting the events N ways would result in per-host costs of greater than 1/N times the single-host cost I suspect the opposite. Many cities and nations have the infrastructure to support a 1/N sized event with little to no investment. If events are hosted by cities that already have the facilities then costs consist of things like borrowing extra buses from nearby cities and paying overtime for police which seem negligible compared to current Olympic costs. > per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits This rings true for me and I would add that the total esteem of the Olympic games would diminish. I think that it would be in the interest of host nations to split up the games, but against the interest of the International Olympic Committee.
- edias 12y ago
  For what it's worth, the village of Lake Placid currently has thriving tourist economy and the town is very well off. Without the 1932 and 1980 Olympics it would be a poor shit hole like the rest of the small towns in update New York. Similarly, Salt Lake City was hardly a city before 2002 and now has a big tech industry, great public transportation and incredibly progressive compared to the rest of Utah. Obviously it doesn't work out for everyone and costs have certainly gotten bloated in the last 20 years, but it's unfair to lump all the Olympic towns together like you do. And to your point of making it international it would destroy tourist numbers for the event as (at least in my experience) the point of going to the Olympics is to take in the event as a whole, not just individual sports which no one really cares about outside of the Olympics.
  - joshdance 12y ago
    >Similarly, Salt Lake City was hardly a city before 2002... What? Salt Lake City hardly changed with the Olympics. The ski resorts were already there, the hockey arena was already there, the Olympic stadium was already there. The main things that was added were some cool signage, a few Olympic monuments and some roadway improvements which were already in progress. One of the biggest things built, the Olympic Park - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park, isn't even in Salt Lake, it is in Park City. Attributing Salt Lake City becoming what it is today because of the Olympics is causation/correlation. Maybe the Olympics came to Salt Lake because of what it was?
scrollaway 12y ago
Not that I don't agree but you're exaggerating quite a bit. The Olympics brought the metro system to Athens, a city in dire need of less cars on the streets. It's not all bad.
- rquirk 12y ago
  There was a lot of waste too, just look at the photos of what the site is like now http://desertedplaces.blogspot.com.es/2014/08/athens-olympic-games-sites-10-years.html http://desertedplaces.blogspot.com.es/2014/08/athens-olympic...
ivraatiems 12y ago
The issue is, none of this will actually change until countries that disapprove of the IOC (which the article strongly implies includes the US and most of Europe) start boycotting the Olympics, which they won't, because the Olympics are still a big source of national pride for many places (especially the US).
- ecspike 12y ago
  Pride and income. If the USOC boycotts the Olympics, NBC loses because they fund about 25% of the IOC's budget and account for between 40-60% of the broadcast licensing fees the IOC collects. NBC partially funds the USOC as well. So as you stated, not gonna happen.
  - canvia 12y ago
    Don't forget that some of the biggest advertisers during the Olympics are American companies like McDonalds and Coca Cola that need broad exposure to survive.
pessimizer 12y ago
It's an excuse to award state contracts, which are massively profitable for the bureaucrats awarding them, and for the winning bidder selected (who has business connections with the bureaucrat.) Half of these companies that completely fail at not overrunning their budgets by 2-5x don't even exist before these contracts are awarded, and don't exist for long afterwards. The rest are deeply entrenched in government. It's only negative ROI for the taxpayer. The Olympics and the World Cup are just excuses for graft.

Shivetya 12y ago

They should have expanded beyond the jab at FIFA, I am not sure which is actually worse but FIFA is probably the worse of the two organizations simply for what they choose to ignore; namely slave labor in building event areas. Neither of these organizations would survive a concerted effort on the part of any larger nation investigating into their finances. Threaten their livelihood, throw their officials in jail, and/or prevent their movement across political boundaries. Just blocking TV rights alone may be sufficient to put neutral members on their boards.

freehunter 12y ago
I think the reason the IOC has set themselves up this way is so that it would create a political incident if anyone tried to hinder them in any way. All the IOC wants to do is foster peace and goodwill between nations and help these poor kids realize their dreams! But the lousy [insert country here] are trying to shut us down! The IOC thinks they're the UN, with diplomatic immunity and semi-royalty status. They wouldn't live up to scrutiny, but no one would challenge them anyway.
TillE 12y ago
The trouble with FIFA is that the national FAs aren't a whole lot better. If three or four of the top footballing nations withdraw and form their own organization, it's likely that FIFA would collapse into insignificance. If anything, FIFA's downfall may come from the fact that they're now funneling money to nations which are very much not part of that group, nations with little or no credibility in the sport.

Yizahi 12y ago

Good, maybe in future when Europe/US will host winter games they won't participate in "arms race" for most pompous ceremony. And maybe drop pseudo marathon altogether - either you can carry Olympic fire from Greece on foot, without using cars, planes and other interruptions or just don't do it at all.

ghshephard 12y ago
While I appreciate the sentiment, carrying " Olympic fire from Greece on foot" would be challenging for the Olympics held on land masses non-contiguous with Greece.
- tormeh 12y ago
  A muscle-powered boat would be in keeping with the spirit, right?
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    If you're asking me, I think a sailing/wind-powered ship would be fine as well. But, I agree, it takes a bit away when you have all the planes, snowmobiles, etc...
- pavlov 12y ago
  The flame carrier can board a ship but he/she has to keep moving on the deck. That is how the ancient Greeks intended.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    I don't think the ancient Greeks could have envisioned a world where the Olympics was played thousands of miles away from Greece and included every nation on the planet.
    - Paradigma11 12y ago
      Most likely Alexander thought of it.

julienchastang 12y ago

For all sorts of reasons (political, financial) the Olympics should be held in the same location, and that location is Switzerland. Here is a great and heartbreaking editorial from former rower Charles Banks-Altekruse as to why: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01altekruse.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01altekruse.html

bluthru 12y ago
I like the idea of using Greece every year (like we used to). Their economy needs the support more than a country that get by on seedy banking practices.
- aikah 12y ago
  The olympics basically ruined Greece.That's not a good idea,unless someone else pays for it. Olympics were a financial distaster for that country,olympic installations are basically roting today.
  - seizethecheese 12y ago
    It ruined then because the infrastructure was only used once.
  - edias 12y ago
    That's as much their fault as it is the Olympics, plenty of other places (mostly smaller cities) are thriving because of the jump start the Olympics gave them.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    If the same event was held there every 4 years, they could reuse much of the hard infrastructure and generate more return on not much more investment. That said, it will never happen because the IOC is effectively a PR firm at this point, they'll make much more money from a new country every 4 years than they will from Greece repeatedly.
dfc 12y ago

danielweber 12y ago

"IOC members will be received with a smile on arrival at hotel" I thought this just descriptive, but (allowing for translation) it's the IOC's own words: http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-olympics.html#jiHbrqHoLOtYM5gx.99 http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-...

Someone1234 12y ago
What the heck did I just read? That list cannot be true, can it? What next no blue skittles in the bowl?
- titanomachy 12y ago
  According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. Either way it seems that he was a bastion of reason and moderation compared to these IOC goons.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. And he provided the reasoning for that in his bio: > Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through. > The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." > So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

throw7 12y ago

I stopped watching the olympics a long time ago. I lied. I tuned in for the downhill skiing for a bit, but got tired of watching Bodi Miller's girlfriend.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

"got built in some muddy, bulldozed acreage south of Sochi, Russia, rather than in Salzburg, Austria, home to Mozart" You don't actually expect curling to be held directly on Heldenplatz either way?

notatoad 12y ago

I think the biggest and probably easiest change towards fixing the olympics is to move the ownership of TV rights from the IOC to the LOC (Local Organizing Committee). The LOC can pay a franchising fee to the IOC for the use of the olympic brand, and the IOC can continue to enforce standards and pick a venue and guide the whole process through, but if the money is actually coming in to the local organizer instead of getting skimmed off at the top, there's a lot less opportunity for corruption in the IOC.

dimitrideag 12y ago

This is interesting, however I was wondering if it is a topic for HN? "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Artemis2 12y ago
> some interesting new phenomenon > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. This clearly applies to this, as votes have spoken.
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  If votes alone can speak, why are guidelines needed?
TallGuyShort 12y ago
A common topic (and an on-topic one at that) during the last olympics was the technological locking down of the media surrounding the event (e.g. NBC in the US). The interest in the IOC's corruption is probably connected to that.

billpg 12y ago

The end of the IOC can't happen soon enough. I just wish it could have happened before the embarrassment of my country licking the IOC boots two years ago. You want your own private road lanes in this busy city? Yessir!

HeXetic 12y ago

It's concerning that so few cities are left in the 2022 games bidding process, but this article seems to ignore that there are still plenty of interested bidders for the 2024 summer and 2026 winter games. While the author's conclusion is not necessarily wrong, this is very much a case of selective bias.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

fragsworth 12y ago

Here's a list of things that might make you question the good-will of the Olympics: http://www.businessinsider.com/finances-of-the-ioc-2012-8?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/finances-of-the-ioc-2012-8?op...

chaostheory 12y ago

If my memory is correct, historically the IOC seems to have always been really corrupt going as far back as before WWII or even earlier. The only thing that's interesting to me about this is what has prompted this change? The Internet (assuming it has created more aware citizens)? Dwindling budgets? A combination of several factors?

golemotron 12y ago

I really dislike this "catty" journalistic style. It reads more like celebrity gossip than news, and it's becoming more prevalent. >Oh, sure, president Thomas Bach said reform is needed for the bid process but this is a guy who spent his time in Sochi clinking champagne glasses with Vladimir Putin in an effort to help soften Vlad's global image. It worked for a week or so and Putin sent troops into the Ukraine. (How's that working out for you, Thomas?)

tormeh 12y ago
Maybe it can make more people read news instead of celebrity gossip? If so, I'm all for it.

_nullandnull_ 12y ago

> Aspen, Colo., (complete with bullet train from Denver which has no practical use post Olympics) I live in Colorado and I strongly disagree with this statement. The bullet train would be extremely practical. In the next couple of years DIA (Denver airport) will be connected via train to Union Station in downtown Denver. There is already talk about how easy it would be for tourist to fly into DIA , catch the train to Aspen, ski for the day, then catch the train back and stay in downtown Denver. This would help with traffic on I-70. In regards to the Olympics being hosted in Aspen or anywhere in Colorado, no thanks.

jmagoon 12y ago
Fellow Coloradan-- agreed on the practicality of a mountain train, agreed on the no Olympics here, ever. It was already voted down once (1976), and I'm sure it would happen again.

snowwrestler 12y ago

The Winter Olympics are in trouble in general. They have now grown so big that you need a city to support all the visitors, media, athletes, events, etc. But you also need big mountains with reliable snow. The combination is hard to find, and it's getting harder every 4 years, probably due in part to global warming. Across most mountain ranges, permanent snowpack is shrinking, anomalous warm spells are happening more frequently, and mountain glaciers are losing mass. Sochi had snow problems, which was not that surprising given the latitude, but so did Vancouver--and that was surprising. So did Turin. So that is 12 years of snow problems at the Winter Olympics. They need to either shrink the footprint small enough to fit into real high altitude mountain towns, or give up some snow events. Neither seems likely.

fleeno 12y ago

How about we just always have Summer in Athens, and Winter in say, Vancouver. There, all good.