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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Would it negatively impact the Olympics if we stopped rotating them at this point? I mean, besides the IOC missing out on the opportunity compete with FIFA on graft?

Let's just locate the Olympics in a permanent facility -- Greece, if they'll have them, for tradition. I think between "not rebuilding everything from scratch every four years" and the expectation of recurring events, the single host country could both run the games more efficiently and it would benefit the economy a lot more -- sure, it'd only benefit the one host country, but it would be going from "not benefiting a lot host countries (who go over-budget and never make back the money on tourism)" to "actually benefiting one host country".

Let the IOC auction off the opening show if you want to give one country a chance to show off every four years.

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All of these comments are missing the entire point of the olympics. It's like watching engineers trying to solve business problems in entrenched markets. Hint: it's not a logistical/engineering problem.

The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC. That's it. How are any of all of these brilliant suggestions going to enrich the IOC members?

I have no idea on how solve this, besides first destroying the olympic brand that they are all hiding beneath.

> The olympics as they exist today are there to enrich the members of the IOC.

There is no [citation needed] big enough for this claim.

I honestly don't understand what you are trying to say.

S/he's saying you need to have strong evidence for such a strong claim.

The "strong claim" that the IOC is corrupt?

Really? Have you been following IOC news for the past two decades? Everyone knows they're corrupt, but they do own the Olympic brand. The brand is doing great, but the organization that runs it is rotten to the core.

If you really do need a URL, feel free to start here: http://google.com/search?q=olympic+corruption

How do we fix this? I really can't think of a way to do it besides abandoning the term "olympic".

Strong claim that the parties necessary to hold the Olympics, namely the participating nations, chiefly care about enriching the IOC. If the countries and companies involved cared enough about it, or the public did, the brand could be bought or seized by decree and the Olympic Games modified. It is a very old term and a very old concept, so is not like it is that defensible as a trademark. Besides, at the scale of international institutions, trademarks are not particularly powerful. If the US, China, the EU and Russia wanted to change how the Olympics work, change it would.

> If the US, China, the EU and Russia wanted to change how the Olympics work, change it would.

Yeah, that's so likely to happen!

US/China/EU/Russia caring so deeply about the health of the olympics that they collectively strike a deal to negate trademark agreements for the olympics, and together make something fair and enabled for a long life.

Really? Are you at all following global politics? These power houses can't really agree on anything besides ISIS being evil. (And that's a historic breakthrough!)

They agree when their interests agree, and they have plenty of treaties and rules between them when it comes to this sort of minutia. The question is, is any of them better served by a rotating Olympics than a fixed one? If the answer is yes. Say, because it gives them a chance to gain soft power via a PR demonstration of hosting the Olympics, then it will clearly not change. But my point is not that it will change, my point is that what the IOC wants doesn't decide that, what the governments involved want does.

One possible way to explain the current situation is that there is a big incentive for both the EU and, in a lesser degree, the US, to have the Olympics fixed in Greece, a country inside the western system of alliances. Conversely, there is a big incentive for China and Russia to be able to compete for hosting the Olympics themselves or have them hosted in states that are more closely aligned with them, even with the economic cost involved. Smaller countries have incentives to both host or avoid hosting the Olympics. But none of this, none, depends on petty corruption from the IOC. This is not an engineering problem, but it is also not a business problem. As you pointed out just now, it is a geopolitics problem.

(Sorry, I'm getting tired; it's well past my bed time here. Only replying to one of your points.)

> There is a big incentive for both the EU and, in a lesser degree, the US, to have the Olympics fixed in Greece,

I think you have misunderstood the current dynamics in the EU. There would be a very, very, very big resistance towards giving Greece a gift like that, after their giant national financial fraud towards the rest of the EU during the past decade.

Well then lets do the Summer Olympics in Greece, and the Winter Olympics in St. Petersburg.

number of search results for "q=X+corruption" where X =

- New York: 68M

- Washington: 55.5M

- Trump: 54.3M

- Russia: 39M

- Chicago: 32.6M

- Football: 22.4M

- Putin: 10.5M

- Soccer: 9.0M

- Olympic: 1.9M

- NFL: 0.73M

- MLB: 0.58M

- FIFA: 0.63M

- Mafia: 0.58M

- Scientology: 0.41M

- Berlusconi: 0.41M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don't_need_to_ci... :)

That's overly simplistic. Other influences include the geo-political power play and prestige, the marketing opportunities for global brands, athlete and sport fans wishes, etc.

You are just talking about the side-benefits that cause nations and companies to feed money into a corrupt system.

Let's say that I have some direct experience, both with working within the Olympics games and with Greece. I don't honestly want that cesspool anywhere near Greece, the level of corruption and incompetence I witnessed by the olympic organisations and committees is staggering. The best thing you could do at this point is to stop the games and distribute the funds to healthier or new organisations.

Well, they would fit right in, but you're right, we're trying to have less corruption. I wonder if we can force the IOC to rename the games to something else, maybe they can buy a private island somewhere and host them there in isolation, for whomever wants to attend.

I won't argue that they would fit right in with any government Greece has had since Kapodistrias. However there are a lot of good people in Greece right now trying to turn the situation around, the Olympic games of the past made things even harder for them, I would hate to see it land on their lap again... They seems to bring the worst out in people.

It's possible that, even though it'd be nice for historicity / tradition, the Games just aren't a good fit for Greece.

But one of the things that turning the Games from a maybe-just-once event for a city/country to a recurring relationship does, is that it changes the nature of the profiteering.

A one-time-only event encourages profiteers to cut as deeply as they can can and really screw their customers -- no repeat sales are possible.

A recurring event still presents a large profit opportunity, but the recurrence encourages more cooperative profiteering. Contractors who don't come through or who overcharge beyond the pale don't get the repeat business.

(Of course, this doesn't always happen, and long-term graft is definitely a thing, but at least there's a possibility things might be different with a permanent venue.)

Even for tradition, the games in antiquity were much different from today's games. They used to be about the sport, whereas today they're about money (which is hard not to do when they're this popular, granted).

Who organised the original games and provided the infrastructure for them and how much were they paid vs whipped?

Original games were organised by the city states and were primarily a means of showing off their best potential soldiers, though it served several other reasons as well, like most things it got complex. Fun fact, even though there was meant to be an Olympic truce, it was a much favored time to backstab your neighbour since lots of cities didn't expect it and as usual the victors wrote the books.

Build stadiums on a couple of old oil tankers and accompanying cruise ships?

Is there any country that matters that doesn't have easy water access? Russia?

Also same deal for Winter Olympics since there's a lot of water up there?

You could do that or you could just keep it at the same facility for, say, 20 years and THEN move it. So a country could get a 20-year economic boost (hopefully, at least long-term) and at least re-use the facilities a few times

I think any boom would be short lived. The travel novelty would grow thin. The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports.

More fundimental is the question of any boom. London didnt see much, with some shops downtown instead seeing marked reductions. Vancouver barely broke even. China didnt do it for the money. And the less said about Sochi's costs the better.

> London didnt see much

Part of it is on the verge of being converted into a cement factory (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/11/olympic-park...)

Honestly believe a world without the Olympic games is a better world, if London can't find much use for them and Rio is already letting them fall into disrepair. What on earth is the point in this.

Reading your link, it seems that the cement factory land was always zoned industrial, and was intended to be used for industrial purposes after the Olympics.

The Olympic park in London is bringing lots of new facilities - an innovation park, a university campus, a theatre etc and thousands of new homes.

London is an exception to olympic abandonment to my mind - it's doing a lot of the success of east London on what was previously polluted industrial land.

> The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports.

If you where going to host 5 games then you could build a lot larger and more enduring facilities which would still be fairly new 20 years out. Importantly, you could also make some improvements after the first game when something did not work well. Worst case, I doubt maintaining unused buildings for 4 years then doing some renovation costs nearly as much as building them from scratch.

So, I don't see how using the same buildings 5 times would be a major issue. Further, a 20 year stretch in a single city would bring a stronger connection to the games as visiting the future site of the games is far more interesting than seeing where there was once greatness.

> The repeated use of the same facilities would also impact the sports.

Doesn't seem to matter to the Cubs or Red Sox who both play in parks over 100 years old and are two of the most popular baseball teams. When you don't have to build them new every Olympics the facilities themselves could be much higher quality and actually be maintained.

Not age. Many events want slightly different venues each year. Marathons, sliding sports, even sailing. Adapting to the new venue is part of the sport.

Marathons and sailing don't require purpose-built facilities so it's easy to maintain the variety there, just draw the route somewhere else. Sliding sports might present more of a challenge but a few corners can be changed to add variety without having to build an entirely new facility.

Without changing venues, other facilities will immediately attempt to duplicate the official Olympic venue in minute detail.

So Greece, for example, becomes responsible for the maintenance and updates to the facilities, which they obviously can't afford now? Having a single host country works only if all the participating countries chip in annually according to their GNP or some other measure of their financial worth. How, then, is that enforced? You can always exclude those countries who are in arrears but that only harms the athletes. For example, losing the Kenyan runners from the Olympics because their country won't or can't pay would be a travesty and cheapen the events. Either that or the world class athletes would relocate to a wealthy nation, sending yet another blow to their home country.

I'd be interested to know how the financial benefit of hosting the Olympics (tourism, etc) would compare to upkeep of permanent facilities. In theory the crowds coming to town every 4 years would be a big economic boost, though perhaps not enough of one.

It depends a lot on whether the facilities can be put to good use and how big the tourism effect is in the interim.

An interesting case to study here is the town of Oberammergau in Bavaria. Several centuries ago, the people there vowed to put on a passion play every ten years if they were spared by the plague. They stuck to that vow and have been doing it ever since, putting on an absolutely top quality production each time. The next one will be in 2020, and tickets tend to be sold out years in advance.

Even though the town rakes in a lot of money during passion play years, they tended to be in financial dire straits all the time because of the enormous fluctuation, and (comparatively recently) started to use the rather large facilities that were built for the play also for other cultural events in off-years.

10 years gives you a bigger gap than the 4 years of the Olympics, but I'd expect similar issues to arise.

BTW, the story of Oberammergau really is absolutely fascinating. One of the rules is that only people born there can participate in the play, with the consequence being that the town systematically produces a massive amount of talented musicians, actors, and other artists, considering how small it is. Really makes you think: if there's so much potential there, then how much human potential are we wasting almost everywhere else!

Another fun fact is that one of the first electrified railways in Germany was built specifically to connect Munich to Oberammergau.

I think previous commenters have suggested this but what about splitting the Olympics up into four years of competitions. So 1/4 of the the events are played every year. There would be "premiere" events to draw people in but the less-viewed sports could actually get more attention because there is less competition for viewership.

No, whoever received the billions in TV rights money pays for that. Obviously.

How long will 'TV right' be worth billions?

Well, "streaming and broadcast".

So far the content owner has been super aggressive about policing their intellectual property they paid for the exclusive right to distribute. Of course, geography keeps interfering with the ideal case for consumers. So we all lose as usual.

I'm getting really tired of losing that way, over and over and over with no end in sight. It's so tiring when every conceivable entity has an interest, and it so often conflicts with your own. It's like living your life mobbed by children desperately trying to sell you chiclets or little toys, while others are picking your pockets.

I was quite delighted with the Rio Olympics in terms of accessibility: streaming gave on-demand largely/completely commercial-free to some 6,000 hours of content (live & replay). Only quirk was having to AirPlay it from my iPhone to my Apple TV, and it may have leveraged some rights with AT&T/U-verse for otherwise free viewing.

No idea, but after the initial expense you can pretty much fund ongoing maintenance from the leftovers you have wisely invested instead of embezzled.

> Either that or the world class athletes would relocate to a wealthy nation, sending yet another blow to their home country.

This already happens but for other reasons. Some athletes will move to a country that underperforms in the Olympics for their sport so they can qualify easier.

Heh heh. I used to work with a guy who came from a country which doesn't (or didn't at the time, anyway) send a team to every sport in the winter Olympics. As a lark the office was pushing to get him into the games in one of the skiing events (he didn't ski).

Sadly, the country in question wanted to see some evidence he could ski well, since they didn't want to be embarrassed.

Some cities did well with the Olympics because they had viable uses for the larger facilities in place before the game construction started. Atlanta spun off the stadium and dorms without issue.

These events while bid on under the guise of improving the local economy or bringing pride to a host city and nation have for the longest time merely existed as puff pieces for the politicians involved.

Green obviously cannot handle both Winter and Summer but there are countries who could and even a round robin system could be employed. Perhaps vetting should require demonstrating how a major percentage of facilities will be used post Olympics to better the host city and nation?

IOC isn't the only issue, FIFA is just as bad if not worse and that is from abuse issues mostly

After the Vancouver Olympics, I half-jokingly proposed a Distributed Olympics:

https://invisiblesummer.net/2012/08/12/towards-a-distributed...

Summary:

1. The host city gets it for 40 years, to amortize the cost of building the facilities and to improve through experience.

2. Distribute groups of sports (skiing events, swimming events, etc) to different host cities, to reduce the impact on each city and to foster a sense of international cooperation.

3. Stagger the events throughout the year, to avoid scheduling conflicts and viewer burnout.

I love the idea of hosting in Greece with a "co-host" country that kicks in a bunch of money and gets to do the opening ceremony.

All the athletes go to the opening ceremony, so it would be hard to do logistically, not to mention the jet lag.

There's a Greek national park just southwest of Thessaloniki, which is just across the bay from the international airport. It seems like there ought to be somewhere between Thessaloniki and Litochoro that can support multiple permanent athletics venues--with the obvious exception of the marathon, which would have to start in Marathon and end in Athens.

And if Sochi can do a Winter Games, so can a mountain resort in the Olympus Range.

The IOC can definitely invest in their own danged facilities, instead of bankrupting local governments every 2 years and then skipping town for a generation.

A single permanent site will never happen. What I think would be better would be like The Open golf, they have half a dozen locations that are rotated between in a semi-random fashion. Other locations can be added to the rota if they prove themselves. And the locations should be country based rather than city to spread the load.

But I think due to the corruption of the delegates that will never happen either, they get too many kickbacks from being part of the bidding process.

> Let's just locate the Olympics in a permanent facility

No.

The Olympics is a political event, it needs to continue rotating location to assume its role.

It is not about sports, it is not about efficiency.

The world is falling into 3 distinct time zones, Americas, Europe/Africa, East Asia. At the very least we would need 3 permanent hosts in those 3 regions to rotate between every 4 years.

Olympics was about bringing the world together.

I would say it fails today, because now most troubled countries don't care about sport. But anyway, permanent location for Olympics will defeat that idea for good and will turn Olympics into a completely worthless consumerism fest.

Maybe just make them cheaper?

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