This is some Bond level villainy. These fuckers are complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses while supporting the some of the most evil authoritarian regimes. The entire organization is rife with corruption. If there was ever a group of bastards who needed killing in their sleep, these fuckers are certainly among them.
Yeah, I watched Bryant Gumbel’s report on the IOC last night.
Fuck the IOC. :mad:
1/10
Obviously a Russian judge.
They do seem to be corrupt, but sports in general is such a minor issue that I just can’t get worked up about it. Other than the actual athletes, does this really affect anybody?
The Olympics has had a hugely negative impact on many cities/countries where it has been held. Many of the locales cannot afford to build the gigantic venues that have been common and expected since the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. In the case of Rio, large numbers of citizens live lives of abject poverty in the favelas, the country’s economy is in the toilet, and the toilets empty into the bay. Yet, the IOC requires the host city to spend hundreds of millions on facilities that will likely never be used again.
The fine tradition of corruption started by Avery Brundage continues unabated, and we won’t be watching the games.
Another problem is the venues aren’t needed after the games. You can do a Google search and see photos of the crumbling stadiums and other facilities left over after the Beijing Games or the Athens Games or the Barcelona Games. What city really needs a purpose-built stadium for bicycle racing, or one for whitewater canoeing? The big stadium built for the opening and closing ceremonies can probably be reused for soccer or some such thing (and one hopes the infrastructure improvements are useful for the locals), but no city needs the variety of specialized stadiums that need to built.
Yes. Million of people in fact. I thought that was the whole point of the pitting…
Return the games to Greece, permanently, and spend every olympiad building and improving literally world-class peak venues for each of these specialized sports. They can use the revenue and the glory, and we can be spared this cycle of greed and waste - if not outright potlatch.
At least, the summer games. Maybe the winter games could still move from site to site.
Never mind the fact that Socchi Winter games in Russia cost $51B. Never mind the environmental impact of building a winter sporting event in a sub-tropic climate. Never mind the foreign worker abuses that would make Trump business practices of not paying workers look positively benign.
Consider that the 2022 winter olympics will be in Beijing. A place where the closest mountains are hours away and are in the middle of a desert. Then consider the human rights abuses that took place during the last olympics in China and that the IOC seems determined to sign up for more of the same.
Another example of how these things affect people; Qatar is scheduled to host the FIFA World Cup (admittedly not the Olympics, but FIFA is just as corrupt) in 2022. They’re currently building stadiums for this and hundreds of migrant workers have been mistreated and exploited in the process. Many (as much as a thousand or more) have died in the process.
Similarly in Socchi where hundreds workers fell to their death due to lack of safety equipment. Only to subsequently be blamed by the russian authorities for not properly following safety regulations and equipment, which they were never provided.
No kidding! Starting right from the '36 Games. I think he thought Herr Hitler was a swell guy, and Jews weren’t being discriminated against in Germany. Hey, they had one Jewish person on their team! There’s no problem!
Maybe holding the winter games in places that actually have winter should be considered. Or just put them in Norway, where they belong.
Last fall there was a big push for the city of Toronto to bid for the 2024 summer Olympics, spearheaded naturally enough by the Canadian Olympic Committee. As always, the vast amounts of money that would be available for infrastructure improvements was touted as a major draw.
I was gratified that the mayor, supported by many city councilors, told the IOC that the city wasn’t interested. The mayor stated that money must be spent where it’s needed, on infrastructure, transit, and housing to benefit the people of the city and not to put on a spectacle for someone else. Let someone else waste billions, like Rio is doing now. He tried to leave the door open for a bid in some distant future, but I think that was just politics, as in “Call us again later. Much later. Better still, don’t call us, we’ll call you.” 
I think the spirit of the Olympics is admirable, but it’s grown into an ostentatious display of unsustainable extravagance. The fact that much of the organization is mired in corruption just makes it even worse.
Boston was going to try for the 2020 Games, but the local populace voted it down. The thing is that Boston could have done as Los Angeles did in 1984 and mostly used existing facilities, such as those at the universities. So a Boston Games would have required only a very few new facilities.
Hey, I didn’t hear any of those workers disputing the findings, so they must have been correct.
I would vote against anything like the Olympics for my area too. We have enough people, tourists, and traffic as it is.
Don’t forget the sexual abuse by the coaches.
We never got a chance to vote, the bid was pulled before that even came up. It was clear that a vote would not gone in favor of the bid.
Boston doesn’t have existing facilities to use for the bid. We would have had to build a new stadium (that isn’t needed after the games) and many other venues. Transportation would have been the killer, as the Boston roads wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic requirements. The only thing we would have had a leg up on is the Athlete’s Village, but it would scattered about the city in college dorms. IMO, the idea that Boston wouldn’t have had to build facilities is false, we would have spent a fortune on new facilities.
