I could go on about the Vancouver Olympics. The muck slinging before which especially hurt as a proud Canadian.
Now we’re being told that Brazil is going to be a Zika-filled poopswim through the dead bodies of tourists caught up in the war in the Favelas. Not to mention that the country is going through an impeachment.
What do you think will happen? Standard media scaremongering before an Olympics, or is it for real this time?
Every Olympics in modern history has proven to be a fiscal and political disaster for whomever has the misfortune to do it. I have no idea how the IOC keeps conning cities and countries into this nonsense.
Wait, what? Muck-slinging wasn’t that year’s demonstration event? I really thought it had a good chance to push out one of the really weak winter competitions, like curling.
I’m going to play the question like a forecaster and give rough percentage odds.
Los Angeles in 1984 made a profit, largely by using existing stadia and commercializing everything in sight. London, Beijing and Sydney weren’t too disastrous either at least politically.
Personally I think the Rio games will go just fine, but the fiscal fall out will make Athens look like a well run enterprise.
Rio has some huge problems beyond the Olympics. It’s now looking like things will be OK from a Games infrastructure perspective, but the shit will really hit the fan after the Olympics are over and the state still has no money.
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Public workers have been working with delayed salaries since the start of the year; teachers and other workers have been striking for months. The Rio state security budget has been cut by 30 percent this year. Hospitals are in crisis and have been running out of essential supplies like syringes. Welfare programs like the Bolsa Familia, a Lula-era project that gives cash transfers to low-income families that send their kids to school, are being suspended. On Wednesday, the credit rating agency Fitch dropped the state’s rating by two notches. Standard & Poor’s did the same in May.
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I don’t think the Games themselves will be a disaster. I do think the sailing and outdoor swimming events are taking place in some nasty water, and the issue has been under-reported if anything. People will get sick from that, but probably after their event is over.
Atlanta went well for the city as well, mostly by having the newly made structures be created with future usage in mind (so the swim center became Georgia Tech’s swim facility, the Olympic Stadium became Turner Field, etc). Of course that also resulted in a very spread out Games, which hurt its reputation, and it was overwhelmingly funded by private organizations and heavily commercialized in order to realize a profit which really hurt politically - but in the end was incredibly intelligent and benefited the city immensely.
I think the Olympics should be discontinued. They might have been as of 1984, had Los Angeles not been the only serious bid. They are a concept whose time has long since come and gone.
No way. The Olympics are the pinnacle event for many athletes and respective fans.
Many Olympic sports don’t have regular professional seasons, and even for those that do, you generally can’t go see the best players from a passel of different countries competing against each other in one place.
It will be interesting to see how it develops, for sure.
Places like the UK and Canada have money–threats of strikes and such are mostly just bargaining chips. Brazil may not have that capability, it seems closer to 2015 Greece than 1999 Greece.
China and Russia are more autocratic–things get done or else. Worried about pollution in Bejing? China can order the factories shut down a month beforetime if they need to. Brazil can’t go that. Organized crime in Russia pretty much is the government, while I don’t believe Brazil has that luxury.
Could all of it be overblown? Sure. Even though Brazil is having problems, any government still has a lot of resources it can throw at it to make sure that things run OK for the two weeks the cameras are rolling. But I think there’s a notably larger chance of bad things happening this time.
The viewing numbers are still high so I don’t think you have anything to worry about. And if their going to have a refugee team then can a microcephaly team be far behind?
Both of these didn’t really make a profit. They were effectively subsidized by the US taxpayer. All that private organizations & commercial funding? – that was almost all ‘tax deductible’ by them, so the rest of us taxpayers funded it. But that subsidy wasn’t reported on their books, so on paper they can shoe a ‘profit’.
