The agony of defeat
The Olympics is nothing more than a boondoggle for the taxpayers of any country that ‘wins’ the hosting of the games. It’s crony capitalism (read = fake free market enterprise) in full blown action, where welfare business types win big contracts in exchange for future favors to politicians.
NOTE: The games have more corruption power than any supposed influence in fostering peaceful relations between the competing states.
WHY THE SOCHI OLYMPICS ARE AN EPIC FAIL
The Winter Olympics have not lived up to the hype. NBC’s primetime numbers are down dramatically from the Olympics coverage four years ago. That was down 29% from the first Wednesday broadcast in Vancouver. The average of 20.8 million viewers represented a drop of more than 8 million viewers.
Why have this year’s Winter Olympics been such a bomb? There are multiple reasons: lack of any big name stars chasing any big name records (there is no Michael Phelps), lack of live events in the age of the internet (Vancouver is in North America), mediocre coverage starring a red-eyed Bob Costas.
But there’s something else, too: a lack of geopolitical drama.
In the past, classic Olympic Games have acted as a sort of cathartic battle of nations, in which geopolitical foes duke it out on the playing fields, ice, or slopes. The Lake Placid Olympic Games, for example, married great hockey with high political drama: coming in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and at the low ebb of American power, the Miracle on Ice inspired a nation as a group of college boys took on the mighty Soviet hockey machine. Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.
This year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi could have provided similar drama. After all, it pits the United States against its chief geopolitical foe, the host country, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.
