More than ten percent of the population of South Africa are rapists. Calling the country the pits of hell would be an undeserved compliment.
Bravo! 
Wow. Ok. More Cape Town for me!
I like how you’ve completely invented complaints about language and food, neither of which were being discussed in this thread.
That hotels aren’t even complete? The IOC released a statement a couple days ago stating they were shooting for all the hotels to be finished today. So, yes, it is true.
But I guess the entire world media could have lied and made up an IOC statement, too. :rolleyes:
Of course, that’s a minor issue compared to all the construction worker deaths. The extreme delays, deaths, and high cost due to massive corruption aren’t exactly something cooked up at the last minute.
Lots of the reporters are taking this in good humor, but it’s not like they’re sensationalizing minor issues. There’s no need for sensationalism when the truth is bad enough.
Russian mafia and systemic corruption?
Do you have a cite for that?
Here’s one from the Guardian:
Quarter of men in South Africa admit rape, survey finds
That is one damned scary cite.
Goddammit. 
It’s hard for me to believe Lake Placid didn’t have problems. Maybe not weird second-world things like toilets that advise you to put the paper in the wastebasket (a very, very common thing in many countries) but really, how prepared could a place with hardly any town at all have been? Answer; Not well. Transportation was absolutely horrible, and the athletes’ accommodations were so dank they were turned into a prison (no, really.) The ticketing system was seriously screwed up, making it hard for people to buy tickets even when they were available. The result was in other words precisely what you’d expect in holding an Olympics in the middle of Asshump, Nowhere. But they had little choice, because Lake Placid was the only place in the world that went through the bidding process.
Sochi will have its problems but in time they’ll be forgotten in the glow of athletic glory. People just like piling onto them because Vladimir Putin is such a major league asshole.
This post is just straight-up dumb as shit.
As has been pointed out, it was a complete non sequitur in this thread.
So, will Sochi accomplish what Pussy Riot couldn’t?
Meh… I’m with even sven. I can’t remember the last time a big event was about to start, without these doomsday stories popping up. Interestingly enough, the large majority of these reports on Sochi are from US media. Not saying it isn’t true, but I haven’t read anything in the Dutch media (except for reports on the reports in the US). If anything, the athletes have been shown to be satisfied with conditions in the Olympic village and at the venues (except for slope style, where the jumps are deemed too big… the reason White decided not to participate). After the Worldcup in South Africa, I won’t dismiss an event until I’ve seen it implode ;).
For those here who are dismissing the Olympics in general, maybe that’s an American perspective n the games. Except maybe for Ice Hockey, I think the games are the most important event for all the other sports (although I’m not sure how the X-games compare for free style events). Some of these sports are very popular in certain countries and this is the absolute highlight (ski jumping in Austria, Germany, Nordic countries; skiing in Austria, Switserland, Slovenia, Nordic countries; cross country skiing in the Nordic countries; speed skating in the Netherlands; short track in Korea; luge and bobsled in Germany). Many ‘big name’ athletes have been working for 4 years for the games to start and it is an big thing.
I also don’t recognize the ‘commercialization’ of the whole thing. The whole olympics are shown on the public network here (as is the case in most of the other countries I know of) and everything can be watched for free online; live that is. Except for the occasional commercial break between events, there aren’t that many ‘commercial aspects’ to the Olympic broadcasts. Also far less fluff, as the public actually knows the athletes already.
For one recent example that comes to mind, remember how the UK government tried to ban anyone except McDonalds from selling chips anywhere near the Olympics? Or the one that particularly annoyed me, the time that the IOC went after a game named after the 17th century treatise The Book of the Five Rings, because these goat fuckers were given exclusive rights to every symbol using five interlocking rings?
I think the real ire is being directed at Russia because they have flat out bought the IOC, spent more on a Winter Olympics THAN ALL OTHER WINTER OLYMPICS COMBINED…and still are managing to capture headlines on simple stuff that should never in a million years be a problem.
It is a vanity project for Putin, so very obviously so. That sticks in the throat of people because he is an utter arsehole, a snake of the highest order and head of a criminal gang rather than democratic country.
The billion dollar project contracts have been given to his friends (as was predicted) and the overspend has gone straight into the pockets of the mafia and political associates.( as was predicted).
I love my sport and I want the games to go well for the sake of the athletes involved but I also admit that schadenfreude comes into play should massive embarrassment come to Putin.
(please rinse and repeat the above for the upcoming 2018 world cup in Russia, it’ll be no different)
The number is no differentin the Asia-Pacific region, and one-in-five in America…basically, we’re all pretty rape-y.
Wrong. The research was conducted in only six countries, not the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, and only two of which were equal to or higher than the rate in South Africa - Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Bangladesh has a population twenty times larger than Papua New Guinea, but you are weighting them almost equally.
And I wouldn’t want the Olympics held in Indonesia or Papua New Guinea either.
Not true. From your own cite:
I thinks it’s worth considering what Putin will do to save face once the Olympic failure makes Russia look like a corrupt, backwards third-world shit-hole?
This was all supposed to make him look more awesome-er (one journalist posted a pic of a photo of Putin positioned in his/her hotel room) and it quite clearly is going to be a billions dollar failure.
How does Putin react/overreact to try to recover from looking like a failure?