As I have said before, the Olympics 2012 were a waste of money, with no legacy – http://lordsoftheblog.net/2014/12/31/i-told-you-so/ and no increase in young people playing sport – http://lordsoftheblog.net/2014/02/09/the-olympic-outrage/. Now we find the awards were vitiated by drugs. See Lawson in the Sunday Times today: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/dominiclawson/article1632918.ece
The revelations are hardly surprising, and the response is pretty lacklustre. Whether it is Sep Blatter’s reluctance to let go, or the far from vigilant oversight by our Olympic and sporting lords, it seems to be a question of what did you expect when it comes to international sport. The pursuit of medals at all costs was a cost to this country of £11bn, money that could be so useful now for, say, the NHS. And frankly I hardly remember the names of any of our winners except the one whose face I see in large posters on London underground station platforms advertising, I think, insurance.
Olympics 2016 is set to be ruinous to Rio. The cost is at least £13bn for a country with a very poor population and a struggling economy. Many of the venues are not yet ready, and the scramble to finish in time will no doubt push up the price, because the only way to ensure the effective start on Aug 5 will be to throw more money at the half finished projects. 10,000 slum dwellers have been evicted from their homes to make way for infrastructure.
The only solution to this gross expenditure every four years is to keep the Olympics in Greece. That is where they started, and Greece needs the money. If the venues have been built they should be used again and again, updated if necessary, but not wasted.
Settle the Games in Greece.
But the real human-race catastrophe is the utter neglect of worldwide generic health-building.
The “fittest” and “richest” and most militarily-politically and academicly “powerful” are, as classes and individuals, calamitous failures –
in that they are incapable of, and anti-socially unwilling to support themselves upon just one basicly sufficient human-living.
It is both the “topmost” and the “7 billion “bottom-most” who need human-body self-move-abilities budgetings and infrastructures;
not the few already over-privilieged, over-powered, and over-paid career-ladder-workplace professionals and athletes..
The baroness is right “make the Games permanent in Greece”:
makes better sense for worldwide security and general sustainworthy costs, too.
Lord Bates’s Olympics focus could be said to be
[“]peace for and by everybody sitting on their butts viewing the peak-expertise “Olympics Fitness – only-one-gold-medal”
promotion[“].
What do the wholistic-experts say about having a generic foundation-self-fitnessing “Guidance” [qua “rule”} :-
“Begin and continually return to dwelling in your own innermost core state-of-being, sensations or ‘nons’, and safe easy move-abilities” ?
[JSDM’s sketch-wording today]
The Olympic Games are a con. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the power of the body and the God like achievement of the human condition. They are simply a money maker. And the athletes used for fodder by a debauched government, the kind we like to pretend was contrived by the Greeks or Romans.
The drugs are supplied and pushed by coaches who are primed for it by the various sections in government who want to win the race of pretence. These power driven heads of state, willing to hide behind ‘we had no idea,’ when the world has had every idea, from the moment they saw muscular male like women and men with a monster abnormal form turning out to compete the way gentically modified plants do at an agricultural show.
Again the money supplied by the tax payer, who constantly subsidise the wealthy, who then cream off any private profit to be made from the despicable charade. Once over, they laugh loudly at the the distorted and simple minded gladiator, set up to be used as their champions. A few being paid well by the advertising liars.