All the infrastructure?
I cracked open the box set recently and have been thoroughly enjoying the parallels of The Games and real life Rio preparations.
“A long-necked waddle for peace?”
In four years I’m confident you’ll be able to watch it again and see the parallels with the Tokyo preparations.
Can you elaborate?
The obvious solution is to choose a permanent Olympic site. With all the countries contributing to maintaining it.
It could be used to host many amateur and pretrial Olympic events too.
Where? Doesn’t matter too me. Any stable country that’s willing to do it works for me.
Unlike the World Cup, the Olympics are hosted by a single City not by a Country. The US could convert a handful of football stadia into soccer fields and slap together a World Cup at the last minute, but for a single city to be able to piece together a LARGE track & field stadium, swimming/diving, cycling, gymnastics, handball, archery, kayaking, etc with their spectator areas is impossible without considerable time.
Plus you would need thousands of hotel rooms (10,000 athletes, 5,000 judges, referees and so forth, and thousands of spectators from all over the world). The media need a lot of space and the time to set up their equipment. Plus a month later you have to host the Paralympics.
I think you’d find that with the requirements listed by the OP for a country to qualify for the Olympics you’d only have half a dozen countries that could actually host, Heck if “abusive police force” was a show stopper I’m sure many would say the USA couldn’t host any.
Has any Olympic host city actually made a profit from the Olympics. Rio is shelling out a hell of a lot more than it’s making. But that aside I do understand the prestige attached to being selected. I’m not even sure Rio laid all its cards on the table when it applied. All cities probably fudge a little. Did the IOC just want to give it to a S. A country? How much does bias play a role? What are IOC criteria?
I think you’ll find things are far worse in Brazil.
Death squads comprising off-duty police officers and other members of the state security forces have long been a feature of the criminal ecosystems of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
There is increasing evidence that such groups operate elsewhere in Brazil - and it’s only getting worse.
Newspaper reports indicate that the bullets used in many of the weekend killings in Manaus were the same calibre used by the police. The attorney general of the state of Amazonas (MPE-AM), Fabio Monteiro, said the evidence pointed to the existence of a death squad.
"Los Angeles was the first city to gain a profit from the Olympics in 1984. "
Very revealing article and video
"Things were very different in Brazil in October 2009, when Rio beat Tokyo, Madrid and Chicago to win the right to host the 2016 Summer Games.
“There was absolutely no flaw in the bid,” then-IOC president Jacques Rogge said at the time.
Brazil made a convincing, emotional case for its right to hold the Games – the world’s premier sporting event had never been held in South America – and its economy showed plenty of promise. The country had emerged from recession and was on its climb back to the 7.5 percent economic growth it recorded in 2010; inflation was below the central bank’s target; and the real was strong, which helped Brazil’s Índice Bovespa become the world’s best performing stock market in 2009, surging a gravity-defying 145 percent in dollar terms.
Yeah, it was too late.
Brazil was a substantially different place in 2009 than it is today, and you can’t change this decision once you’ve gone down the road a good distance. No one in 2009 predicted Brazil would be a basket base by 2016. The country was on an upswing.
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Did the IOC just want to give it to a S. A country? How much does bias play a role? What are IOC criteria?
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The IOC has few clear or unambiguous criteria; scheduling is a big deal though, as the Games will ideally always take place in the Northern summer (Doha wanted to big for this Olymics but were shot down because they wanted to hold them in October.)
The host city is who it is, based on a wide range of factors, and some of the factors are, without any doubt or question, bribes.
Obviously, it is the general desire of the IOC to move the Games around, which is why they’ve not held them on the same continent twice in a row since and having South America finally host a Games was a big deal.
IF you look at the voting for who was going to honst the 2016 Games, you see the antipathy towards having it on the same continent twice in a row:
Round 1: Madrid 28, Rio de Janiero 26, Tokyo 22, Chicago 18
Round 2: Rio de Janiero 46, Madrid 29, Tokyo 20
Round 3: Rio de Janiero 66, Madrid 32
In the first round there is really no favourite at all. But in every subsequent round all the Tokyo and Chicago supported move into the Rio camp. Madrid is a lovely city but it’s in Europe, which is where the 2012 Games were about to be held. Holding two straight Summer Games on the same continent has not happened since 1952 and it is unlikely it’ll ever happen.
But then you’ve got the problem of having cities to choose from. The 2022 Winter Games will be on the same continent as the 2018 Winter Games because no one else wanted them. The same problem may someday beset the Summer Games. It has before - the 1984 Summer Games were held is Los Angeles because it was the only city that bothered to do so, which is one of the reasons they made money off it.
I don’t know about the NPR report and never heard of this site, but here is an article about some of the problems they had in Ancient Greece.
In 67 AD the Emperor Nero bribed officials to bring home the gold and show the Greeks that Rome was still number one.
Los Angeles claims to have also made a profit off the 1932 games, 1932 Summer Olympics - Wikipedia. I came a Wikipedia article that lists the financials for most of the olympics held since 1948, Cost of the Olympic Games - Wikipedia. However, besides being incomplete I think the profit-loss figures in particular should be taken with a grain of salt, since they may not account for some of the infrastructure spending or other indirect expenses. By the way, the Russian government claims that the Sochi games made a profit, https://www.rt.com/business/sochi-olympics-income-exceed-908/, though I don’t give that claim much credibility.
I would think if you were to choose two cities to be permanent hosts Salt Lake would need to be the place for the winter Olympics and possibly LA or Atlanta for Summer
Actually Charlotte would be perfect for the Summer games.