OT: What To Do About the Olympics?
The rolling disaster that is the Olympic Games continues to escalate in Rio, as the burgeoning Zika virus has prompted 200 doctors to urge the postponement or relocation of the Olympic Games this August. This is on top of widespread turmoil in Brazil.
I've grown increasingly weary with the politics and corruption involved in the Olympics, and it is increasingly clear that no city should ever subject themselves to them again.
But they are two months away. At this point, what would you do? Brazil has already spent basically all of the money to produce the massive infrastructure the IOC requires (which is a huge part of the problem, because bids are built upon systematic mega-dollar kickbacks the promise of massive and expensive building programs to make the host city a showcase for the Games, making this an absurd proposition for most locations). Traveling and television production plans have been made. The tickets have been purchased.
But even beside all this, where would you put them on short notice? I sometimes speculate that the World Cup should be moved from Qatar to the US, because that's obviously smart and logical. But that works because the US has so much sports infrastructure that the only question would be which $500 million stadiums would lose out in a bid. Everything is there.
But the Summer Olympics require an infrastructure that is virtually impossible to find in existence anywhere, let alone produce on short notice. Obviously, logical options would include previous hosts of the games, but even many of those cities can no longer hold them on short notice. Just finding a stadium with an Olympic-sized track is a chore, because stadiums that size have very poor sightlines for other sports and are often modified or destroyed. Atlanta, for example, turned theirs into a now-about-to-be-defunct baseball stadium. The LA Colisseum has been modified for football. Turin built a brand new stadium with track for World Cup 90, and it was such a disaster that local team Juventus eventually bought the thing just to demolish it.
This is not even considering the many other sports that need to be held. Gymnastics needs at least half of a basketball arena, and there aren't many Olympic swimming/diving complexes that also have a lot of seating available.
There's always a delay... but how long would it last? Zika might not cease to be a problem in 12 months.
Feel free to drift here and discuss other Olympic "issues."
What country will NOT have a Zika outbreak by August of this year?
The best Korea
Didn't they repurpose the stadium? I don't think it is ready to hold both track and people.
London certainly isn't.
Two off-path ideas that crossed my mind were Paris, whose Stade de France would work great and which has a lot of other infrastructure, assuming the Siene drops back down; and Montreal of all places.
The problem with the US is that there are a lot of cities with sizable fractions of the needed infrastructure, but to the best of my knowledge there is no large stadium anywhere in the country that can host track and field (one of the most in-demand tickets) on two months' notice. Maybe a completely temporary type of arrangement? But I don't think you can build enough temporary grandstands safely to hold the anticipated crowds.
a lot of high schools combine track with football, so just add some temporary bleachers and you're good to go
Most high school tracks are measured in yards rather than meters, if I recall my dimensions correctly. Olympic tracks are much larger.
Regardless, the issue would be how many temporary bleachers you could set up safely, I think.
Huh? No they're not. Well not in any I've seen. 400M is 1 loop around a track. Pretty sure that is universal.
I could be wrong. Old tracks were certainly shorter. Anyway, no major existing stadiums are built with that kind of space available, that I know of.
Old tracks were 440 yards. They've almost all been replaced.
New tracks are 400 meters.
Old tracks were LONGER: 440 yards = 402.3 meters.
About Beijing's infrastructure, sadly much of it has not been retained:
http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/07/beijings-olympic-ruins/2499/
This is the thing they do with Olympic structures now, right? Even the ridiculously overspending host cities recognize that a lot of these buildings will be useless in their initial form after the Games have left, and so plan a second life for them to recoup some of the value invested in them.
It occurs to me that I haven't even considered Sydney, which is solidly 16 years in the past and, I believe, can still use its stadium for track.
Yes, doctors affiliated with the Games have said that. It passes muster with the WHO, which has a significant financial arrangement with the IOC whose value is not disclosed. Not positive we have reliable factors here.
My first inclination with the Zika thing was to shrug it off. Most of these would-be pandemics (bird flu, ebola, etc) wind up fizzling, and my wife and I are finished having kids, so it's not something I have to personally worry about. So I'm not positive how much I should think about it. But it clearly concerns a fair number of people, enough to think about hypothetical alternatives.
It's weird to me that Americans are so deathly worried about Zika in traveling to central/south America... given that yellow fever, dengue, and chikungunya are all pretty endemic.
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It will be poorly attended and Brazil will lose a massve amount of money. The US could certainly host on short notice if it was spread across the US but I don't know that we'd even accept if asked
I was supposed to go on a cruise in the Caribbean in March. my wife found out she was pregnant the week we were supposed to leave. Even though I had purchased trip insurance Royal Caribbean would not refund my money despite having a doctors note including diagnoses code saying to not travel because of Zika. I ate the $3500 on the cruise because my childs future was more important than a week in the sun. I personally don't know why they haven't moved this or postponed it as the risks to unborn is large and a huge gathering of people will only increase the chance of it becoming a much larger widespread outbreak. Granted a normal person getting this isn't the end of the world, but the unknowns and indications that the virus can live in the sperm for up to 2 years should make changing this common sense.
So constant masturbation is the cure for guys with Zika?
Admirable to eat that.
However, I have been on roughly a half dozen cruises and dont recall mosquitoes ever being an issue ON THE BOAT.
However, once off the boat, obviously there are concerns.
You probably would have been fine should you have chosen to stay on the boat, however, like you said - perhaps not worth the risk.
and this is a massive bummer.
Nevertheless, we have a shot at the college football national championship this year. That's some consolation. Right?
The IOC and FIFA's collective hate for the US trumps human rights and civil liberties apparently as we have seen with Qatar and Brazil.
And when you say that we would have had the Olympics in our back yard, I say fuck that because I refuse to go to that shithole of a city and pay hundreds of dollars for 1 event. When those athletes come and cheer me on while I swim in my pool or when I go for a run down the street, then I will come see them.
I'm usually in favor of tweaking Boston, but the city choosing to decline to attempt an Olympic bid is incredibly smart, and they should be proud of themselves for it. Yeah, they miss out on two weeks of indulgent camera pans and history infomercials, but if they already have a great city they get to keep it great and enjoy it themselves this way.
Triple post!
The posts that repeat three times are always the ones too pitiful to call "an Epic Triple Post."
Go fuck yourself you fucking turd
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is there some reason we have to have international events that are vastly different all in one location? How many people actually attend mutliple events? So my thinking is have swimming in the atlantic ocean, badminton in a chinese backyard, gymnastics in an australian high school gym, track in some dirt field in senegal
which brings me to my 2nd point of why we need to make a 'spectacle' of what is essentially the same physical activity no matter what the surroundings
Spreading it out to locations that can handle the specific events without having to build infrastructure. Could even spread it out so there are events on each continent so it is a true world event.
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It's not an "Olympic Games" event, then, but merely a series of parallel competitions. Part of the idea behind the Olympics is to gather all competitors and nations together; this has traditionally been done in one city, with of course some limited exceptions for sports that require venues a bit of a hike away.
The idea of competitions spread out over multiple regions is pretty much what happens now with the various world championships in each discipline. But people don't watch those very much; it is the centralization that makes the Olympics what it is.
There are places like Los Angeles that could host the Games with only a relatively moderate investment in a track-capable facility and perhaps one or two other upgrades, but that wouldn't be spectacular enough for the IOC. The IOC and its bid incentive structure (both above and below the table) is a huge, huge part of the problem here.
Honestly, they'd be better off bidding out the Olympics just two years in advance; if a city wants to invest in infrastructure without a guaranteed bid, they are welcome to, but the cities that win would be the ones that were basically already prepared.
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Capacity: 40,000+
Local team draws 5,000 on a good night
Winter season will help exposure. I plan to attend. Zika, Brazil economy, questions about major subway station being finished has dampened enthusiasm. London had issues too but in the end 2012 went well.
Brazil is a hell hole full of horrible people. It's the 15th most violent country in the world and has 21 of the top 50 most violent cities in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide…
take that St. Louis and Baltimore.
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