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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there should be an Olympic nation. Some country just gives up the land, their claim of sovereignty over it, hand it over the U.N. (certainly not the IOC) and wealth redistribute without all of this stupid waste. Billions of dollars spent with a moving olympics and all the infrastructure ends up not being used for pretty much anything ever again. It's one of the most idiotic things on the planet. I like the olympics, sorta, but how we make them work is immensely wasteful. The very possibility it would be canceled and the infrastructure never used for its intended purpose even once makes that all the more apparent.

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Or just hand it to states/cities that can manage it - I.e. has ALL arenas already built, has enough hotels and so on.

It would then pretty much be the last 5 mega-venues (Beijing, London, ...) that could tanke turns re-doing it. Which would be a good thing.

Next option is not having it in one place. It can be a global event. It wouldn't matter if athletics is in Berlin while all the cycling is in Madrid. Would only be worse for on-site fans.

Unfortunately, that reduces opportunities for graft and corruption in the cities that host them, as well as eliminates the main source of bribes that IOC leaders thrive on. Simply won't happen.

... and on-site athletes. A lot of the buzz in the sports community is the dream of sharing the Olympic Village, with all that it entails.

A distributed Olympic would just be a synchronised "World Championship" (events that would then lose all significance, btw, further shrinking budgets). Not gonna happen.

Security gets harder the more locations you have. But, even just splitting in half within the same country could save a lot of pointless waste.

It seems Greece would be a good candidate.

In fact there was a proposal done exactly like that last year, in a WP piece:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/28/...

The wastefulness is a designed feature, not a bug. The IOC is a corrupt organization, working hand-in-hand with corrupt governments, to put public money into private pockets in a plausibly deniable way.

As such, any proposal based upon rational analysis and sound engineering must be rejected out of hand, because it does not account for kickbacks, baksheesh, palm-greasing, boondoggles, junkets, tribute, or straight bribery.

Once you adopt this view, the Olympics work perfectly, year after year, without fail. The public still benefits, because ordinarily corruption and profiteering of that magnitude requires a war, which can at times get out of hand.

Or you know, we could just cancel olympics. I'm hoping that it will come to this eventually as countries lose interest in hosting them.

The only sensible thing to do in this case. Olympics should have been a showcase of cooperation and participation of all countries in the world.

What will it become if confined to one city? An experiment in finding boundaries of vanity?

Wouldn't countries just adjust their olympic spend such that it becomes profitable to host them rather than lose interest altogether?

There's a reason the locations are trending towards being hosted in corrupt places where the leaders don't care if they're profitable so long as they get their piece.

Such as London and Tokyo?

Tokyo, yeah. It's former governor Ishihara's prestige play that he pushed for years and years. I don't know any normal people that actually wanted it. And since it was decided there's been scandal after scandal about the logo, about the new stadium, about $2M in mysterious wire payments, etc.

Almost every logo had its scandal - London with Lisa giving Bart head, Beijing with its begging peasant, Sydney with the Chicken Head.

I remember the lead up to the Sydney Olympics and no-one seemed to want it - then it arrived and it was an amazing 2 weeks long party and everyone loved it.

Beijing on the other hand was the converse - everyone was expecting it and looking forward to it and then it came and the city went in to virtual lockdown.

You never know which way it's going to go.

No, like Beijing, Sochi, and Rio.

Your proposal would never work: the Olympics need to be decentralized for it to feel "fair."

Or instead of one plot of land, build a sufficiently large seafaring vessel and host it at sea?

According to the Internets, which are never wrong, the largest ship ever was this one:

http://maritime-connector.com/worlds-largest-ships/

How do you think this compares with a typical land-based Olympic venue? What other challenges make this idea absurd and ridiculous?

Shell's new Prelude FLNG vessel is even bigger [1], if you call that a ship. It's about five football fields in area IIRC. So still absolutely tiny compared to anything you could host the olympics on.

Fun story: I was talking to some Shell people a few years back, about the potential troubles with LNG sloshing in process equipment due to waves. I asked them, why not just make the ship big enough that waves don't affect it as much? They looked at me very strangely for a few seconds before explaining just how big it already is.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10...

Do you know why they don't make the ship more square? Seems like that would help fight tipping due to sloshing (or any other reason...)

Water resistance. Same reason as planes aren't intended to fly sideways.

Maybe one vessel will not be big enough. But a fleet should be able to support every competition but the marathon and have quarters for all the athletes.

I'm sure they can get more ad revenue if the contestants are forced to compete above shark-infested waters, too!

Swimming competitions can even be in them!

Or something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

They already hosted sports events (see the "sport" section of that wikipedia page).

Haha I love this idea

Because when they were held on Olympia for how many hundreds of years it didn't work and were considered unfair?

The United States has hosted eight olympics and there are about that many countries that never have. London has hosted it three times, Madrid ever has. And so on. The current method is already distinctly unfair. So I don't see how centralizing it into its own nation, like it once was, makes it worse than now.

> Because when they were held on Olympia for how many hundreds of years it didn't work and were considered unfair?

Probably because there were three other games--Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian--that were held at other sites around the Hellenic world? And the "world" was small enough that the sites of each didn't feel inaccessible to (much of) the citizenry of the competing states?

(I find the Olympics generally disappointing and I have no love for them as an event, but a partial view of history doesn't really help anyone.)

Umm... what? You realize that those Olympics were not remotely global, right? That holds as much value as suggesting that England host it because "they host the EPL every year and no one thinks it's unfair"

And if there was a Scottish, Welsh, and Irish league right next door of roughly (though not quite completely) equivalent stature.

If countries freely choose to pay the bill in exchange for the prestige, who cares about the waste?

The citizens of those countries. There are many better things Brazil should be spending their money on, and many people living in terrible conditions who they should be helping.

Many countries and cities who have actually asked their people whether they want an Olympics in the last few years have voted no, for example Oslo in Norway and Stockholm in Sweden.

IOC would make a fortune if citizen could bribe to avoid hosting the Olympics.

You can make the argument at a lot of places, but Brazil is a democracy. They voted for the candidates who pitched the idea of hosting the Olympics, and it had a mass of popular support.

If the IOC runs out of countries willing to host it, then perhaps the host cities will be able to temper how much they want to spend on it. The Olympics don't have to be so elaborate.

I did not down vote this or the other comment, but I disagree that Brazil is a democracy. It's at best a polyarchy, and is probably just an oligarchy. The voting component is a veneer of democracy to make enough of the citizenry seem essentially complicit with the bad ideas of the leaders.

Be it in a democracy or a dictatorship, consent for a special interest is relatively easy to manufacture.

The IOC won't run out of countries who want to host it so long as countries with rampant corruption exist. The timeline of the Olympics is a corrupt developers wet dream.

You think these countries freely chose this? The rampant bribery involved in the olympics is the one sure sport that'll not go away any time soon, despite being illegal. At this point it's become the necessary lubricant to keep the machination of this particular scam going.

Not for one moment do I think the Russian people freely chose to host the recent winter Olympics at a summer beach resort, where metric tons of ice and snow were trucked in, creating the Olympics equivalent of Kleenex in the most obvious one time use venue in recent memory. And the IOC went in on this total scam artistry too instead of having a WTF moment, so they are not just implicated, they're the ones who facilitate this nonsense. I refuse to believe Russians are proud of the abject stupidity that was the Sochi Olympics, even setting aside the rampant bribery and cheating.

Because these countries are made up of humans who are not freely choosing to waste scarce resources on such waste.

Citizens of every country have virtually no control over how their tax revenue is spent.

Brazil is a Democracy, and the Olympics had broad public support when Rio won the right to host them.

Yes. And that nation should be Switzerland: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01altekruse.html.

Good idea, but good lucking finding wide enough support for it. I think national and commercial interest will fight fiercely to keep the event moving because otherwise how would they "keep fostering investment" (producing lots of waste)?

It's not viewed as waste, though. It's viewed as investment. The infrastructure being built employs a lot of people in the lead-up, the public transport of the host city gets upgraded, it's an opportunity for the host city to become more well-known internationally and boost tourism for years afterward. Local businesses ought to do quite well out of it.

I'm not particularly a fan of the Olympics, but I can see why cities bid against each other to host it.

Just permanently assign it to Greece. After all....

Arguably, the appeal is how much money it brings in, and the economic benefits of people being paid to build all this and all of the tourists traveling in? Beyond the general prestige, of course.

Except that it usually isn't a net positive for the host country. The host country gets zero percent of the signage revenue, tv revenues, ticket sales, or merchandising revenue from the Olympics.

The only way the host country makes money from the Olympics is if tourists spend enough money on lodging, food, etc. That pipe dream hasn't worked out well for several countries who've recently hosted the games. The deal is so bad for the winter games that few countries are bidding it anymore.

There are similar parallels with professional sport leagues in the US. Maybe the whole thing is a combination of government officials looking for prestige, and a couple of mediocre economists rattling off numbers to back it up?

Absolutely. There are plenty of elected officials who want the prestige bestowed by hosting a big international event (e.g. Formula 1, World Cup, the Olympics), and I think many of them believe the idea that the potential tourism revenue justifies the expense. Many citizens fully believe the same thing.

It's only recently that more people are realizing that the numbers don't usually add up. Even then, lots of people are so passionate about sports that they simply don't care about how much public money is poured into a black hole to host these events (or build stadiums). And that's not even getting into the corruption.

What, like the London Olympics in 2012? Did that bring in £20+ billion? Funny - I didn't notice my taxes being reduced or anything; just a few weeks of roadworks and unpopular sports being shown on TV.

Mostly because £20 billion is about 4-5% of the budget in 2014 and that year there ware a deficit of £84 Billion.

If the infrastructure being built isn't disposable, then it makes a lot of sense. For example, building a new transit line to the airport would make a lot of sense.

Building a gigantic temporary stadium does not.

I call dibs on Winter Olympics in Antarctica!

Or, how can we have a moveable infrastructure that probably isn't worth investing in.

Certainly not the UN either, though.

I nominate a portion of the Midwestern United States. It'd be great for the economies of that area to have business every 4 years.

The midwestern states host 60 million Americans and such cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha, St. Louis, and Wichita.

Surely you aren't serious in suggesting that no economic activity of note occurs there and that these 12 states need the Olympics as a quadrennial boost to business?

> "Billions of dollars spent with a moving olympics and all the infrastructure ends up not being used for pretty much anything ever again."

I disagree. Most of the stadiums built for olympics are bringing kids to sports and introducing them to sport activities that nobody even heard before. And every national championship is held at those venues for many years after olympics.

More like vacant white elephants that continue to suck down millions in maintenance fees for years later. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/aug/22/birds-nes...

Oh, well, the Olympics are more than just a single stadium, though. If you do a quick google search for "Abandoned Olympic Venues" you'll discover that although some infrastructure can be reused, a great deal is not.

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