SHOULD WE MOVE THE OLYMPICS TO GREECE PERMANENTLY?
a woman in traditional ancient greek clothing lights a flame on a greek column with a torch.

The IOC may be taking advantage of the bidding process.
SBS.com.au
16/08/2016

Last night on The Feed Australia’s former Immigration Minister and Ambassador to Italy, Amanda Vanstone, called for an end to the international rotation of the Olympic Games.

They should be permanently based in Greece, she said.   

“I suspect – and I don’t think I’m in a very small club here – that there’s a bit of corruption that goes on when the IOC are looking around the world to decide which capital will next host the Olympics,” Vanstone said.


“You could get rid of the whiff of corruption – some would say even the stench – if you just gave it back to its ancestral home, Greece,” she said.

Vanstone also questioned the money spent on the Olympics, at the expense of other government priorities. 

When the World Cup was announced this cartoon was made. 2016 Olympics it came true pic.twitter.com/GxMCVsp0qj


The former Ambassador's 'not very small' club includes head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde.

“To the extent that it’s going to create demand – which is what this economy absolutely needs – it would be great,” Lagarde said in June.

Brazilians might have been happy to have this year’s games held in Greece. As many as 60% say they expect the Olympics to do more harm than good.

“I am so upset,”  64-year-old Rio native Marie Auxiliadora told the New York Times in an article last week.

“I have not gotten my retirement check for a month. Our hospitals and schools are broken. Shooting every day, and they spend all of our money on this Olympics,” she said.   

“The rich play, and we die.”  –  Marie Auxiliadora

Economists at the University of Oxford have estimated the cost of this year’s games in Rio to be $6 billion, in a country suffering a severe recession, unemployment levels above 11% and declining wages.

The cost overrun – estimated at just above 50% – is in line with the usual cost over-runs for countries holding the Olympics, economists said.

To make things worse, there’s a lot of research to show that the money will likely be a bad investment.   

A 2004 study Matheson was involved with found that the promised economic benefits of mega-sporting events such as the Olympics often failed to materialise.

“Supporters of mega-sporting events such as the World Cup and Olympics claim that these events attract hoards of wealthy visitors and lead to lasting economic benefits for the host regions,” the report said.


Where are all our Olympic medals?

“Independent researchers nearly unanimously find that boosters’ projections of the economic impact of sporting events exaggerate the true economic impact of these competitions by a wide margin,” it found.

In a 2007 report, researchers at Monash University in Australia found that the 2000 Sydney Olympics also failed to deliver on promised gains.

“[In] terms of purely measurable economic variables […] the Sydney Olympics has had a negative effect on New South Wales and Australia as a whole,” the report found. “In present value terms the loss in Australian real private and public consumption […] is $2.1 billion.”

Professor Victor Matheson, an economist who specialises in ‘mega sports events’, says the culprit for runaway spending is the International Olympic Committee.

Given the fierce competition among cities to hold the games, the IOC is in a position to make exorbitant demands, he says

In October 2014, Norway withdrew its bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Oslo after the IOC’s demands were leaked.

Officials wanted schools to be closed to minimise traffic, a cocktail party with the King before the opening ceremony, complete control over all public advertising spaces in the city, free Samsung phones, and 50 luxury cars with drivers.   

“Cities not only have to worry about accommodating all of the events but also presenting a lavish enough bid to beat out the competition,” Matheson wrote last week.

Amanda Vanstone agrees, telling The Feed that the IOC should focus on running a good, clean Olympics, not the side-issue of selecting a new host every two years.

While she suggested Athens as a permanent host, like it was in ancient times, she wasn’t exactly singing Greece’s praises.

“They don’t have a lot of natural resources like we do, they’re not industrious people like the Chinese, or with a work ethic like the Germans – so giving them the Olympics would give them something to make a buck out of,” she said.

“And they need that.”

Surely it's cultural appropriation to have it anywhere but Greece.

A better idea would be to choose the best 5 submissions then draw the winner out of a hat.

A very good idea.  As it stands only the very wealthy nations can afford (or not) to host an Olympics and the  corruption that accompanies every bid gets worse each time.  Every host tries outdo the one before leading to waste on a vast scale. Holding the games permanently in Greece will go a long way to bringing them back from the excesses we have seen over the past decades. 

Every nation could contribute to building first class facilities and could take turns at acting as host.  This would allow nations who could never hope to hold an Olympics under the current system a chance to show what they can do with an opening ceremony and general organisation of the games. 

Also, the athletes would be competing under the same conditions at the same venues each time so records would all be subject to the same conditions.

what about the WINTER  OLYMPICS....they all need to be treated the same     after all the OLYMPICS is about the athletes   the  countries just feed  off their efforts...



I agree about the cheating  I believe its has turned a lot of people off which kind of gives the whole thing    less interest .. I have been turned right off the cycling since all that doping came out...and when a  yank wins the 100 meters I kinda go ho hum.

Years ago I suggested the exact same thing.

Rather than thrusting countries into poverty for their people to put on an event simply to placate the egos of a bunch of pointless athletes running around in circles.

We should do it in Greece.

Every country participating could contribute and have the best Olympic venue in the world.

It would ensure that all countries had a standard and functional venue to waste their time running around in circles and the rest of the world could get on with advancing technology instead of wasting it on sport.

Even better, the athletes could all live in Greece and train there, keep them away from real people who actually work for a living.

It would save a fortune on pointless venues taking up space that could be better used.

The likelihood of Australia hosting the Winter Olympics is gaining ground. There only needs to be a few facilities to be built. And if it does not snow as well as hoped, then the organisers will use artificial snow.

For now, Qld might not be able to afford to host a 2024 Olympics (destined for Paris, France). But, if Qld cannot host an Olympics by 2032, then there is obviously something wrong with our economy. Because of the bullshit covid hysteria, many countries around the world will probably be unable to host the games in 11 years time because they want to milk the international aid for all its worth. But, Brisbane may actually be able to host the Olympics as a best resort to any country in the world. And because the 2018 Commonwealth Games were a success (not the opening and closing ceremonies, though), it is reasonable that Brisbane will host an excellent summer games.