Dropping Like Flies
I’ve written on more than one occasion about the disastrously bad idea it would be for the Olympics to come to the Baltimore-Washington region. But there are some places which have gotten the memo and decided to pull out of the process before suffering the inevitable consequences:
The $51 billion spent by Russia to host this year’s Winter Olympics — along with the steadily growing worldwide view that the International Olympic Committee is rivaled only by FIFA in terms of corruption — has seemingly had a chilling (ha!) affect on other nations’ desires to host future Winter Games.
On Wednesday, the Norwegian government announced it would no longer fund Oslo’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, ending that city’s chances of landing the Games. That leaves Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, as the only two contenders.
Oslo is merely the latest prospective host city to flee in terror from the Olympics after a nationwide poll, taken in January, found that 58 percent of Norwegians said they didn’t want to use public funds to pay for the Games. Both Stockholm and Krakow, Poland, also submitted bids for the 2022 Games but withdrew because they lacked popular or political support, while the bid from Lviv, Ukraine was doomed by that country’s political unrest. Munich and Davos/St. Moritz in Switzerland aborted their bids at an early stage after gauging the public’s disinterest.
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That leaves Beijing and Almaty. Neither of which is ideal.
While this is for the Winter Games and not the Summer, it just shows the fact that host cities and host governments are starting to wise up abotu the impact of hosting the Olympics, the costs to governments, the cost to taxpayers, and the excessive spending that is required to host the Olympic Games.
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo does a great job in bringing light to what it really means to host the Olympics:
It’s down to these two cities not because the IOC narrowed the field, but because every other city in the entire world said no.
Seriously, every other city said no.
That even includes cities that previously said yes and made it deep into the bidding process only to stare directly into the corrupt, humiliating voting system, not to mention eventual unnecessary construction costs, environmental effects, blown resources and white elephants built to opulent IOC code. They promptly high-tailed it the other way.
Russia said it spent $51 billion hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics. What, no one else is interested in footing that bill?
Read the whole thing.
Why anybody in the Baltimore-Washington Area would want to deal with the logistical, corrupt nightmare that is the International Olympic Committee is anybody’s guess, though I suppose that having to deal with the racket that Martin O’Malley here in the Banana Republic of Maryland may have given them a cynical familiarity with the process. But once again, we need to hold our Government Officials accountable and ensure that the Maryland taxpayers are not forced to foot the bill for such a ridiculous idea.
