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The sleaze that preceded the Rio Olympics

Lafayette

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From The Guardian, here: Fifa is awful, but the Olympics takes the gold medal for sleaze, Marina Hyde

Excerpt:
One year ago, while watching Fifa bigwigs being escorted to police cars by hotel staff literally shielding them with their own dirty linen, I remember thinking that the IOC couldn’t have matched this. There were $29m (£22m) Amex bills, there was the hilariously timed release of a vanity movie, there was the stop-motion implosion of Sepp Blatter. The IOC, for all their baroque scandals and malevolence down the years, were at least not this bad.

My apologies. Once again I hear Michael Corleone [The Godfather] just managing to keep a lid on his frustration as he asks me: “Who’s being naive, Kay?”

Nobody can hate sport as much as the IOC – not even your average UK government sports minister. Not even the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), whose president Craig Reedie took so much trouble reassuring the Russian sports minister that “there is no intention in Wada to do anything to affect [our] relationship.” So the revelations of the past few weeks that centred on (but are far from limited to) the Russian state doping programme are not, in one sense, a shock. Wada’s budget is $27m, making it marginally more expensive than the IOC’s bar tab in an Olympic cycle, but dwarfed, perhaps, by its prostitute bill.

This week the former chief investigator for Wada detailed how his efforts to investigate Russian doping were frustrated – frequently by Wada, he alleges – and offered his take on the fact that despite all the revelations and all the IOC’s power, 271 Russian athletes will be competing in Rio. “The action the IOC took has forever set a bar for how the most outrageous doping and cover-up and corruption possible will be treated in the future.”

The rest of the article elaborates the sickening culpability behind mega-sports today.

Money corrupts, and absolute money corrupts absolutely (attributed to Lord Acton) ...
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I love the Olympics but the Olympics had no place in Russia and it had no place in Brazil.

Brazil has loads of problems that could have been sorted with the money these games are going to cost. The water for crying out loud is not safe to swim in or to sail in. A corrupt, badly organized backward country like Brazil was not in a position to hold the games because it has cost them an arm and a leg to get it up and running and it will cost even more money when the athletes are gone but the problems are still there (even made worse with stadiums and other things that will either never be used again or will cost millions to keep them afloat).

It is time that the IOC starts thinking about making games more affordable rather than bankrupting cities/provinces/countries who have held them (and the same goes for FIFA).
 
I love the Olympics but the Olympics had no place in Russia and it had no place in Brazil.

Brazil has loads of problems that could have been sorted with the money these games are going to cost. The water for crying out loud is not safe to swim in or to sail in. A corrupt, badly organized backward country like Brazil was not in a position to hold the games because it has cost them an arm and a leg to get it up and running and it will cost even more money when the athletes are gone but the problems are still there (even made worse with stadiums and other things that will either never be used again or will cost millions to keep them afloat).

It is time that the IOC starts thinking about making games more affordable rather than bankrupting cities/provinces/countries who have held them (and the same goes for FIFA).

If people think the U.S. government, the UN or even FIFA are irredeemably corrupt, they'd **** their pants if they took a look at the IOC.
 
the olympics are a ridiculous antiquated tradition, that should be abolished.
 
Los Angeles is probably the last Olympics where sleaze and corruption was kept at arms length.

With Sochi and now Rio, the IOC and Russia have joined forces to destroy any façade of Olympic Games integrity.
 
the olympics are a ridiculous antiquated tradition, that should be abolished.

Certainly in its present form it has outstayed its welcome. And frankly it might be said that it is hard to see how reconstruction could impress on young people's minds and embed in their hearts a set of standards and goals less appealing.
 
... it had no place in Brazil. Brazil has loads of problems that could have been sorted with the money these games are going to cost. The water for crying out loud is not safe to swim in or to sail in. A corrupt, badly organized backward country like Brazil was not in a position to hold the games ... It is time that the IOC starts thinking about making games more affordable rather than bankrupting cities/provinces/countries who have held them (and the same goes for FIFA).

You are judging the event much to quickly. The event had done, before the present crisis, a world of good to a poor(ish) country that could use badly growth to even out the Income Disparity.

Its GDP per person historically:
Country - Brazil GDP per capita.jpg

A comeback on that performance does not seem like Mission Impossible to me. Brazil is already the richest country in South America.

Yes, so it got the water pollution problem unfixed. Let's see how the rest of the Olympics goes before judging.
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the olympics are a ridiculous antiquated tradition, that should be abolished.

Oh ye of little faith - you're strapped into a wheelchair?

It's doing a world of good to some very nice, but very poor Brazilian people. They deserve their hour of glory as well as anybody on this planet ...
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Last edited:
Simpleχity;1066171511 said:
Los Angeles is probably the last Olympics where sleaze and corruption was kept at arms length.

With Sochi and now Rio, the IOC and Russia have joined forces to destroy any façade of Olympic Games integrity.

Vancouver? No. Doesn't exist?
 
the olympics are a ridiculous antiquated tradition, that should be abolished.

Why, because you don't like them? Let's come up with a compromise: Ban Olympic games to satisfy you and ban May Day celebrations to satisfy me. Deal?
 
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