Why no one wants to host the 2022 olympics

And he provided the reasoning for that in his bio:

> Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

> The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

> So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

At least in the past, welding manhole covers closed for the presidential motorcade was standard procedure in the US.

But that was when the Secret Service had a clue...

Why would international scattering influence spectators? Flying between countries is only a little bit more annoying than flying between cities that are far apart in places like the USA.

Whether scattered in one country or internationally, I think most spectators would pick their favorite event and only go there, catching the other events on the internet (if they were scattered, entry into one olympic venue would probably include live streaming access to other events). Even if scheduling would permit flying between locations, I don't think most people would.

Scattering would also influence the social atmosphere in any one location. The olympics are almost more important as a social congregation than as a series of sporting events. Scattering them at all would disrupt that.

The images of the aftermath of Sochi are just terrible. Russia pumped and dumped the city. They knew reporters only stick around for the Olympics and within a week they can abandon the city.

I can't knock the Skytrain line to the airport or the road improvements to Whistler, which are lovely conveniences for Vancouverites but which cost taxpayers in St John's a good deal of money (and which would have been done with federal money regardless) but it doesn't change the fact that the Olympics were a lousy way to get things done (the short platforms on the Canada Line are an example of the corners cut to meet the artificial deadline involved.)

So what we can say is that in a country with an effective, robust democracy, the Olympics were still an expensive, inefficient way of promoting public infrastructure. Sadly, they may have been "better than nothing" given our ongoing neglect of that infrastructure, but surely the lesson there is to improve our democracy, not volunteer to have a gun held to our head by the IOC.

The hosting of the Olympics by any city is prima facie evidence of democratic failure, and I would hope that no Canadian city will ever again act as host without a national vote posing the question, "Do we want to spend twice as much money on bribes and security as it would take to build a few useful infrastructure improvements, or do we want to give 1/3 the amount we would otherwise spend to the host city to build themselves a new LRT/highway/whatever if they promise to never put themselves forward as host for the five ring circus again?"

In concrete terms, I'll pay $1 for a liter of water, but I won't pay $1M for a megaliter.

I suspect the opposite. Many cities and nations have the infrastructure to support a 1/N sized event with little to no investment. If events are hosted by cities that already have the facilities then costs consist of things like borrowing extra buses from nearby cities and paying overtime for police which seem negligible compared to current Olympic costs.

> per-host perceived benefits of less than 1/N times the single-host benefits

This rings true for me and I would add that the total esteem of the Olympic games would diminish. I think that it would be in the interest of host nations to split up the games, but against the interest of the International Olympic Committee.

What? Salt Lake City hardly changed with the Olympics. The ski resorts were already there, the hockey arena was already there, the Olympic stadium was already there. The main things that was added were some cool signage, a few Olympic monuments and some roadway improvements which were already in progress. One of the biggest things built, the Olympic Park - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Olympic_Park, isn't even in Salt Lake, it is in Park City.

Attributing Salt Lake City becoming what it is today because of the Olympics is causation/correlation. Maybe the Olympics came to Salt Lake because of what it was?

That said, it will never happen because the IOC is effectively a PR firm at this point, they'll make much more money from a new country every 4 years than they will from Greece repeatedly.

[^1]: It was not clear to me why the author offered the Munich Massacre among the political costs of rotating the venue for the Olympics. It seems rather absurd to suggest that hosting the games in Switzerland would have prevented anything. Simply being in Switzerland did not prevent the Zug massacre.

But, I agree, it takes a bit away when you have all the planes, snowmobiles, etc...