There is no better metaphor for the hubris of those in power than the Olympic Games.

The vaunted Olympic ideal is was that the best sportspeople in the world come together in fun and fellowship to test their extraordinary skills and talents against each other. Winning is good, but not everything. Spectators come to cheer, to marvel at athletic achievements, and to support their favourites.

Nearly everything about this seems to have got lost in the last decade.

The 2000 Sydney summer Olympics was (one of) the last to hold close that Olympic ideal. It was widely regarded as the pinnacle. The IOC was urged to quit whilst ahead in it’s ever growing campaign to always better the last Olympiad.

It cost about $6 billion. But that was before 9/11.

The Sochi winter Olympics (for less than half the number of participants) is reported to be costing more than $50 billion!

Here’s the Guardian last week:

[These] modern mega-events … are just bombastic, statist, commercial, nationalistic conventions, ones that nowadays are so inviting to terrorism as to be choked with military impedimenta.

Particularly after the Volgograd bombings, security is a huge issue (and cost). The Guardian again:

An army of 30,000 is deployed. A further 40,000 police and internal security troops lie in reserve. Missile launchers and tracking devices are commissioned. Air and naval units stand ready. [After Volgograd] this entire force was put on “combat alert” … local civil liberties are suspended and hundreds of “suspects” rounded up.

Not exactly an environment that would induce the average tourist to buy tickets!

Why Sochi? It’s not a big place. It’s remote from an international tourist point of view. There’s not even much snow by the looks of it. Much of the infrastructure and sports venues and tourists will be vastly under-utilised after the event.

So, of course, it’s all about the money!

Just like FIFA’s bizarre decision to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was probably about the money: $200+ billion, apparently???

The Guardian wonders where all this leads:

The athletico-military-industrial complex seems to have a mesmeric appeal to world leaders, an appeal expertly exploited by bodies like the IOC and FIFA … The politics of host nations are of no concern to them. No one calls these bodies to account, because they claim a higher licence from the great god sport.

The bankrupting of Athens and the impending bankrupting (if nothing worse) of Rio de Janeiro shows the horrific cost of these events to less than wealthy cities. The money is generated not by sport but unaccountable bodies making demands on national exchequers in return for prestige. This is what obviates the simple remedy to all this cost, which is to hold these events each year in the same place. They would swiftly revert to sport.

One day the worm will turn. In Rio, the poor (and not so poor) are already rioting against the extravagance. In Sochi, Putin’s gamble with international terrorism is already proving lethal. As so far planned, Qatar will have footballers dying of heat and stadiums left decaying in the desert like Ozymandias’s ruins. It will one day go horribly wrong. Perhaps then a brave ruler will have the guts to walk away from this nonsense.

Nice sentiment (with which I totally agree), but from whence will come that “brave ruler”? It will require things to go very “horribly wrong” for a politician to have such “guts”.

Meantime, let’s see if there’s some good sport to enjoy on TV next month …