Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Cities Flee Winter Games 2022: Only Borat and the Red Chinese Want it

Well its seems that the honor of wasting $51 billion so people can watch a bunch of sports that are either relevant to one country or only relevant every 4 years is wearing off.

Residents of Krakow, Poland overwhelmingly rejected the idea of hosting the 2022 Games, leading city officials to withdraw Krakow's bid on Monday. This follows Stockholm, Sweden's leaders' decision to withdraw; Munich, Germany's voters' rejection of an Olympic chase; and Davos/St. Moritz, Switzerland's defeat of a referendum on hosting the Games. For those keeping count, that's four of an original eight host cities which had considered hosting the Games.Two more cities' bids, while not technically dead, may as well be: Lviv, Ukraine is having real military issues and can't afford to waste time thinking about the Olympics, while Oslo, Norway's bid is floundering politically.

So who is left in the running for this coveted prize?

It's no surprise, then, that the only two cities seriously still in the running for the 2022 Winter Games are Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China: two locales where the people don't get a choice in whether the Games come or not.

So only Borat or the Red Chinese want it? I guess the "honor" of wasting a pile of money for a bunch of sports that are not relevant to most of the world is taking a hit. Maybe they should get rid of the bobsled course where you have to build a track that will probably never get used again. That would mean that all of the sledding type stuff get axed (skeleton, luge, whatever.)

They could also ditch the ski-jumping as well so you don't have to build something that gets used once and sits idle. You might also want to dump all the X-games stuff as well. I mean the US dominates that stuff and the IOC hates the US so that would crimp our medal count.

So what would be left are the skiing events and things that are indoors like speed and figure skating and hockey. So the host nation would need a mountain for skiing and an indoor skating track or two that can be converted into a basketball stadium when the games are done. In fact what would be awesome is to have the hockey be outdoors. Maybe an alpine lake or an existing soccer stadium that could double as the place for the opening ceremonies. That will bring the price way down and maybe make for a budget Winter Olympics that Krakow or someone doesn't have to go into debt for 30 years to pay off.

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