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chris selley: the allegedly newer, cleaner olympics is still dirtier than the seine
the ioc's glory days are long over, and thank goodness for that
jul 26 2024
5 minute read
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if you blur your eyes and don’t listen too hard, you can almost convince yourself we’re back in the glory days of the international olympic committee (ioc), when cities and countries hurled themselves and many expensive gifts at fat-and-happy delegates to secure the games.
on friday, more than 10,000 athletes will parade down the seine in unique and frankly very cool-looking opening ceremonies to the 2024 olympics in paris. and if paris still wants the olympics, well, maybe things aren’t as bad as you’ve heard for the “olympic movement,” as the ioc calls its thoroughly grotesque moneymaking enterprise.
results of recent games have been decidedly mixed for the host cities, but the ioc is on a pretty impressive streak of rock-star metropolises lining up to host, and most of them are even in semi-functional democracies: sydney, athens, beijing, london, rio de janeiro, tokyo, paris, los angeles (host of the 2028 games) and brisbane (host in 2032).
even as a fan of the games themselves, as opposed to the ioc, it’s far from clear to me why paris would want the olympics. its place on the international tourism map is quite well established. neither parisians nor the french in general are particularly known for craving outside validation of their ways of life. and indeed many parisians, as you would expect, have no time for this nonsense: in a magnificent display of frenchness , anti-olympic types encouraged people to defecate in the seine upstream of the 1st arrondissement, in order to thwart olympic swimming events being held in the river.
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it’s not clear how many actually took up the offer, but paris mayor anne hidalgo is still alive after taking a long-delayed swim in the grey-green, uh, water , with e. coli levels having ebbed to acceptable risk levels . everything’s coming up aces.
look a little closer, though, and the ioc’s problems remain self-evident.
this week, the committee used the opportunity of the kickoff in paris to award the 2030 and 2034 winter olympic games.
the former will be based in the french alps and in nearby nice, which is a very pleasant city on france’s mediterranean coast. can’t really argue with the winter olympics in the alps, can you? jean-claude killy, peggy fleming, croques-madames, all that good stuff.
the latter will be held in salt lake city, which is another good choice on its face, being the only place in north america and one of few in the world with even the most esoteric winter olympic venues currently operating: bobsleigh and luge track, speed-skating oval, ski-jumping complex.
one might quibble with the fact that salt lake city’s first crack at the can in 2002, while generally regarded as a successful games, also tore the lid off the most cartoonish corruption imaginable at the ioc .
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that was supposed to have been dealt with, at least to some extent. but this time, olympic officials are making alarmingly few bones about the fact utah’s second olympics come with a mission: the big bosses at ioc hq in lausanne want the games organizers in the u.s. to try to convince the fbi to drop its investigation into doping at the 2020 olympics in tokyo.
i’m just going to quote the reliably po-faced pbs news here , lest i be accused of exaggerating the insanity: “the (ioc) formally awarded the 2034 winter games to salt lake in an 83-6 vote, but only after a contingent of utah politicians and u.s. olympic leaders signed an agreement that pressures them to lobby the federal government.”
the ioc is angry that the fbi thinks it’s any of its business that chinese swimmers competed in tokyo having failed drug tests, the explanations for which the world anti-doping agency (wada) accepted but the fbi (evidently) has not, or not yet. both the ioc and (naturally) wada wish wada to be the one true voice when it comes to deciding who doped and who didn’t.
“that was the only way that we could guarantee that we would get the games,” utah gov. spencer cox said. if utah disrespects the “supreme authority of wada,” cox warned, “they can withdraw the games from us.”
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this is the newer, cleaner olympic movement we’ve been hearing so much about, is it?
i’m also amused by the six votes against salt lake city. no one else was in the running!
and that’s where the rubber still hits the road for the ioc. yes, great cities are still lining up to host the summer olympics. but they’re not doing it in multiples anymore. there were no official alternative bids to brisbane. paris and los angeles were awarded the 2024 and 2028 games, respectively, at the same time … because no one else was in the running to host either of them — hamburg, rome and budapest having withdrawn earlier in the process.
then there’s the winter games. how many cities would be willing to abase themselves the way salt lake city did, simply to “win” something the ioc really should be handing them every 20 years or so at least, simply on account of having all the facilities up and running? how many would be willing when it would cost them gazillions to build new facilities?
one thing i will say for the modern olympics: for sports fans, it’s a delight. looking at the schedule, it seems you can essentially stream or watch virtually every single event from the paris olympics, no matter how obscure — and “for free,” or, rather, for your share of what cbc paid for the broadcast rights. if you ever wanted to get into european handball, now is the time.
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mind you, really, that’s the minimum you should expect from a sporting event in 2024. you wouldn’t sign up for a package that showed you half the games at the soccer world cup, or every third game in the stanley cup playoffs.
when that game is on your tv or your computer or your tablet, mind you, that european handball game could be anywhere. the eiffel tower in the background could be a green screen. it remains very difficult to see how this “movement” survives in anything like its current, obscenely expensive form.
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cselley@postmedia.com
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