It seems like there are news articles about how Rio isn’t ready to host the Olympics coming out weekly. There are bodies washing up on the beaches to be used for volleyball and chlorine-resistant parasites in the pools and severe pollution in the rowing waters in addition to the Zika virus we’ve been hearing about since January. There are also the long-standing issues of the generally unsafe and murder-prone nature of the city and rampant, largely-unchecked corruption.
The IOC should be ashamed of themselves.
Rio should not be hosting the Olympics, and while I don’t mean to exempt them from blame for this, the buck ultimately stops at the IOC. Sure, it was short-sighted and self-serving for Rio to bid to host the Games, but I can understand the desire to bring more international spotlight to your country, especially after infrastructure investments had been made for the 2014 World Cup. But the IOC made a mistake in picking Rio.
Banking on Promises
The IOC seems to constantly award games to developing countries on credit. “No,” these countries say, “we don’t have infrastructure in place yet to move millions of people around the city simultaneously for three weeks, and no, we haven’t fixed the issues with air and/or water pollution, and no, we don’t even have potential venues that already exist for the games, but we promise all that will be taken care of by the time the Olympics roll around.”
I cannot imagine deciding to host a company retreat in Rio right now, much less the most-watched international sporting competition in the world. Logistically, there aren’t enough ways for people to move around the city. But that’s pretty much the case for any Olympic event, so despite the fact that they were awarded the games in 2009 and have had approximately seven years to get everything in order, I will give them a pass on that. But that still leaves the body parts floating around in waters to be used for competition, parasites in the pools that has developed a resistance to chlorine, the local WADA-approved drug testing center getting closed down for “nonconformity” with international standards, shootouts, insane budgetary shortfalls leading to a lack of supplies for locals and potential strikes from public sector employees.
Can the IOC tell the future? No. It couldn’t know for certain that corruption at the highest level would bankrupt the country over the course of the run-up to the games. But it probably could have made a pretty educated guess that corruption would be an issue, based off of past experience with the country. Could it have known that crime, particularly in the form of violent drug trafficking, muggings, and murders would cause the safety of the participants and spectators to be questioned? No, but they probably could have looked at crime rates in Rio and other large Brazilian cities and taken a gander at how it would probably play out. What it can do to prevent these serious issues in the lead-up to the Olympic games is stop awarding games to countries with severe human welfare issues. More than just planning needs to be done before a country should be able to bid for the games.
Developing Countries Deserve a Chance Too – If They Really Want It
This is not to say that I am opposed to giving the games to developing countries, or even just to non-Western countries. I think that if they really want them, they should be able to bid for them and win them. I just think that three of the last five games have been ridiculous for both athletes and spectators. Looking back to Beijing in 2008, we had the problematic air pollution in a addition to my general, albeit political, objection to allowing a country with an invasive, totalitarian government with no respect for basic human rights to host an Olympic games. Then in 2014, the IOC decided to award a winter Olympic games to one of the only parts of Russia that has a sub-tropical climate, drawing into question whether many of the events were taking place under reasonably optimal–or safe–conditions. We saw journalists and regular people alike get their electronics rifled through, hotels with no floors, stray dogs getting shot to keep them away from tourists, and brown drinking and bathing water for all in attendance.
The pollution in Beijing and the soft snow in Sochi made competition sub-optimal at best. These quadrennial games are the biggest sporting events in the world. The IOC have a duty to make sure that the athletes are given the best possible conditions in which to compete.
This means that they need to prohibit bidding from countries that suffer from severe air or water pollution, at least in the areas where competition will be taking place. They need to ensure that countries either have violent crime under control or will be holding the games in areas that do not have a history of violent crime. They need to be willing to have contingencies in the agreements that allow the IOC to pull out if there are serious public health concerns like Zika that threaten to break out of confinement in the region and spread worldwide as a result of travel to and from the games.
Just as important is the ability of countries to host the games without suffering severe economic hardship and putting the lives and livelihoods of the people that will still live in the country after the games have moved on at risk. It is well known that most host sites do not benefit economically in either the short or long term from hosting the Olympic games. It’s effectively the same as when a city uses tax dollars to build a public stadium with the promise that the new stadium (and sometimes the team that will come with it) will be an economic boon to the area. It almost never is. The increased tax revenues are rarely enough to cover the bonds used to finance construction, and before long, the team is threatening to leave if they don’t get upgrades to the stadium that’s not even paid off yet.
But now imagine that the city builds five or ten new stadiums to lure teams for three weeks before they leave. How does that make economic sense? Most venues built for Olympic competition go unused or are repurposed for something that could have taken place in a much less costly venue. So hosting the Olympics is rarely a smart economic decision, and research has shown that it generally doesn’t increase tourism on the whole for that period, it just concentrates it. Do the residents of Rio (or Sochi or Beijing or hell, even Los Angeles or Vancouver or London, where the costs for hosting aren’t as steep) even want to host the Olympics? I would advocate that the IOC require some method of appraising the desire of the citizens of finalist cities to host the Olympics before awarding them.
If all of these conditions are met–appropriate competition conditions, human safety and welfare standards, and public approval in affected areas–then by all means, let cities host the games. If not, find somewhere else. Why would the IOC want to host games in cities that don’t meet these standards anyway?
Money Talks (Or the IOC Walks)
It should surprise no one with any experience with humanity that large organizations comprised of lots of humans that decide where multi-billion dollar events are held would be susceptible to corruption. (See: FIFA, any government that has ever existed, or Enron for further reading.) The IOC is unfortunately no exception. As someone who has always gotten starry-eyed for the Olympics, this pains me to say. I am so disappointed in the IOC. Call it naïve, but until this Olympic cycle, I hadn’t realized how widespread bribes and other methods of persuasion were.
I know well enough that there are no laws and no rules that will keep people from accepting bribes. You cannot legislate people into being moral. You can attempt to incentivize better behavior, or you can create a system in which it is difficult for any individual to influence the outcome of an important decision. I think the second of those two options is the best option. I am by no means an absolute expert on how the process works, but implementing strict, precise minimum standards for host sites would go a long way to ensuring that substandard host sites don’t manage to win the bid and put athletes and spectators at risk, no matter how deep their pockets are.
I love the Olympics. I want desperately to believe in the purity of the greatest sporting competition in the world. But the IOC needs to get its act together before the reputation of the Olympic games is damaged beyond repair.
