This is essentially what killed the bid here in Norway, those outrageous demands.
The interesting thing is that these were the IOC's demands before negotiations. So they obviously didn't expect all of this to actually happen, and perhaps even many of them to be dropped. But instead, what happened was that they fucked themselves over (the Oslo bid was supposedly the preferred one) by driving such a hard initial bargain that their negotiation partner just went "Nope, nope, nope".
Yeah, cities bidding is like investors bidding. They're looking at ROI's in more than just the monetary terms. However, if you walk into a board room and ask for a billion dollars they're going to tell you yo get out.
I think they are being tarred with the same brush as FIFA, or caught up in the — perhaps anachronistic — view of Switzerland as a haven for tax evaders.
What's anachronistic about it ? it's STILL a haven for tax evaders.
What's changing these days is rich people are renouncing en masse their US citizenship to escape the long arm of the IRS. I find it disgraceful & immoral that people elect to abandon their responsibilities as citzien to save a few pennies.
Switzerland buckled under US pressure, but what applies to the US doesn't apply to other -smaller- countries around the world , where funds of dubious origins continue to originate from & the money-laundering , let's call it what is is, business keeps on trucking as usual.
I find it disgraceful & immoral that IRS still wants you to pay income tax on your income abroad, even if your only tie with the motherland is "America" on the passport.
This one particularly stuck out "Traffic rules and traffic lights must be adjusted so that the Olympic traffic is prioritised. Meanwhile other traffic should be limited; IOC proposes closing schools and encouraging the local people to take holidays."
who do they think they are? the pope? Obama doesn't get schools closed for him. Does Putin?
Most ridiculous Putin's requirement is to weld all manhole covers.
In 2013 Putin decided that he dislikes drivers' booing and started to fly to Kremlin by helicopter. To build new landing site he removed huge part of Taynitsky Garden.
Interesting. For traffic/congestion reasons, Manila, Philippines had (has?) this on a permanent basis, not just for a special event. Your license was coded so that police could easily see if you were allowed to be on the roads that day (otherwise, it was public transit for you).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?"
I would argue that regardless of the democracy's functioning, informed investment in long-term infrastructure projects is unlikely without an adjustment in incentives. People (of which voters are a subset) value short-term payoffs much more than long-term ones. Politicians hope to be re-elected, so projects which will not mature before the end of their term are unattractive.
Neither group has great incentives for good long-term investment in infrastructure. The Olympics are desirable for emotional/patriotic reasons, and at the same time happen to set up an incentive structure which supports infrastructure investment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the last Olympics in the Americas are precedent, they are willing. Some events in Atlanta and Vancouver were an hour away.
Baltimore and DC tried to do a joint bid. Between the two of them they have very fast and efficient public transportation links (DC to Balto. in about 45 mins) but the IOC said no. It was really sad because between the two of us, many of the venues for a summer games already exist. Maybe that was the bigger problem, the IOC and FIFA want brand new venues and don't care if the cities will use them afterwards.
There is only one official Olympic Village and several unofficial ones. Because the alpine events were 60 miles away from downtown Vancouver, those athletes stayed in accommodations on the mountain.
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.
>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, 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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
"In 1980, I was supposed to compete with the United States rowing team in Moscow, but instead, like 466 other American athletes, I stayed home. Eventually we were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in appreciation for our role in the boycott. Thirty years later, I would still rather have earned the Olympic medal that our team was favored to win."
I read this editorial four years ago, and I think of it often. It speaks of broken dreams (i.e., "I coulda been a contender"), what could have been, and the human experience.
When I look back on the consequences of the cold war, the fact that this gentleman did not get the gold medal (that he assumes he would have won) is not even close to making the list of heartbreaking episodes. Furthermore, one has lived a charmed life if the biggest "heartbreak" you experience is not competing for a gold medal that you were "favored to win." The 12 people that died in the Munich Massacre[^1] are a poignant reminder of this simple truth.
[^1]: It was not clear to me why the author offered the Munich Massacre among the political costs of rotating the venue for the Olympics. It seems rather absurd to suggest that hosting the games in Switzerland would have prevented anything. Simply being in Switzerland did not prevent the Zug massacre.
Sure, not being able to a compete for a gold medal is not as bad as being locked in a gulag for a decade, in the same way your startup failing is not as bad as Ebola, and your fiance saying "it's not you, it's me" and running off to the other side of the world is not as bad watching your entire family being massacred by ISIS. Human emotion isn't based on a sense of perspective.
Earlier today the flesh on my index finger was torn asunder by a sheet of paper. Do you find that heartbreaking? If I told you that the paper cut was the worst thing that ever happened to me, would you consider it to be heartbreaking?
If said papercut permanently ruined your chances of completing the work of art you had dedicated the last few years of your life too I might have some sympathy...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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-...