Big Fat Story
The Beijing Olympics came with a hefty price tag—$40 billion—but what’s the future upside? Despite claims that attracting the Games to a city is a boon for the local economy, most economists see any Olympics leaving behind a mountain of debt. It took Montreal, the site of 1976 Summer Games, 30 years to pay off its debt. And promises of future gains in tourism also can turn out bogus: After the Sydney Games, visitors came to the city at a rate slower than to Australia as a whole. Lillehammer, Norway, home to the 1994 Winter Olympics, saw two out of five of its full-service hotels go under.
Everyone wants their city to appear shiny and clean when the world comes to visit for the Olympics. In Beijing, that meant forcibly closing the shops of workers who sold their wares in locations inconvenient to the Olympic organizers. Both Atlanta and Sydney organizers faced critics who challenged how they treated the homeless before the Games. Activists are already clamoring about the possible threats to civil liberties that the upcoming Vancouver Games hold. Even the threat of the coming Games has some Chicago residents up in arms.
With the world’s attention on a city, the host town of the Olympic Games has to prepare for the possibility of violence. The most frightening attack occurred in Munich in 1972 when Black September, a Palestinian militant group, took members of the Israeli team hostage. Eleven Israelis and one German police officer were killed. The Atlanta Games were disrupted by a bombing which killed four and injured 111. Last summer in Beijing, two American tourists and their Chinese tour guide were killed in an attack that seemed to lack any political motivation.
The Agony of the Olympics
The Obamas are in Denmark to the nab the Games for Chicago in 2016. The Daily Beast looks at the violent crime, red ink, and—yes—orgies that will inevitably follow.
Remember Beijing’s glorious Water Cube? Michael Phelps picked up a neckful of medals there, and architecture fans cooed over its cutting-edge design. But what do you do with a 17,000-seat swimming hole when the Olympians have toweled off and left town? Not much, it turns out. According the Los Angeles Times, the space is now destined to become a rental hall for weddings and corporate functions—a boondoggle on the Beijing skyline. The even more eye-catching Bird’s Nest has seen greater neglect, as organizers shy away from hosting events that they think will not fill the 100,000-seat stadium.
Whoever hosts the world’s athletes in 2016 will have to put up with a lot of runners and ballplayers who have come for the world championships of lust. One Olympic athlete described his first experience in competition as “as much about sex as it was about sport.” While others have stressed that the Games are a time of focus and abstinence, some athletes remember them as their horizontal glory days. Apparently, there were so many used condoms discovered on the roof of the British team’s residential block in 1988 that the Olympic committee sent out a notice banning sex. One competitor recalled, “It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti.”
Games present a million ways for prez to stumble.
Everyone’s already talking about Obama holding court in Chicago in 2016, in the waning days of a second term. But presidents don’t always leave the games with their dignity intact. While war rumbled between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, George W. Bush jetted off to Beijing. The president visited with the American volleyball duo of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh. May-Treanor offered her backside to the president, asking if he wanted to give it a slap. “Mr. President, want to?” she said, according to an A.P. report. Obama already got a taste of the perils of mixing the presidency and sport, appearing as world’s biggest dork last week when he unveiled a Jedi light saber to take on an American fencer on the White House lawn. Others worry that he’s forsaking health care to win the Games for Chicago.
Partner Sites: Expedia| Hotels| Hotwire| Urbanspoon| Vimeo
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.