Good or bad? Discuss
Traffic and terrorists.
#Bad
The Paris one was the most shocking for me. That city has been probably the hardest hit by terrorist attacks and is really pretty unstable. I know it’s a long time away but why not just give it to another city.
Maybe the spirit of the Olympics can bring the muslin immigrants together for France, finally.
we already got the infrastructure. so GREAT!
Why does any developed country still want to host this expensive boondogle? It’s not like this will enhance LA’s reputation on the world stage - if they wanted more global PR, they should just incentivize Hollywood studios to set more movies in LA.
Paris has lost out a couple of times in the recent past and 2024 will be the 100th anniversary of the other time they hosted, so makes sense in that regard. Paris and LA were also the only cities still bidding for 2024.
i thought it was expensive because they create shit from scratch then its becomes underutilized.
Although expensive and over budget, you could make an argument that London was a success. LA has most of the necessary venues already, so it’s not like they need to build a bunch of useless stuff like Rio did. Not sure how they’ll deal with the traffic though.
Sounds good.
Yeah traffic will be brutal. Like worse than normal, which means ants walking will probably be passing cars.
Mandatory vacation and re-homing to the desert for all LA residents for the duration of the games?
As for good or bad, I really don’t care, I’m just glad that where I live has no apparent interest in hosting things like this. We had the Super Bowl this year and that’s enough for me as it was easy enough to avoid most of the disruptions.
They will probably have to take over the left lanes / HOV lane for Olympic traffic only
France has so many domestic and financial issues that I can’t imagine why they would want to host this event, other than to provide a distraction from those issues. Plus, there must be so many terrorist sleepers who are just waiting to blow up the city during this event - I’m not saying you should ever cancel your plans due to threat of terrorists, but there are so many other places with lower threats and that have superior security response.
It seems that IOC needs to offer a better package and more funding to host cities. It has gotten to the point that only two or three serious candidates put their names forward for each event. If the event was more desirable and attractive to host cities, then there would be a much broader choice of locations.
Traffic during the 1984 Olympic was a dream. Employers got on board with alternative schedules and people made an effort to make it smooth. I wish the traffic here was always like that.
I like the idea of the Olympics being back in the US. I was hoping Philly would bid for 2024 (in fairness, I live 40 miles from Center City, so wouldn’t have negatively affected my daily life).
I wanted the US to host the World Cup as well, although not really comparable since the WC venues would have been spread around the country.
How do we quantify a “successful” event, relative to other efforts the city could have pursued instead? Even if “successful”, do the cultural and economic returns justify the financial risk of the event? IOC has sold the event down to the point of zero marginal benefit - every dollar lost by the host city is taken by the committee to provide extra funding to the event. This is the reason why potential cities are indifferent towards the Olympics.
When was it last in the US? Atlanta? How did Atlanta get it anyway?
Atlanta was the last summer games in the US. Salt Lake City had the winter games after that. I assume both paid the highest bribes to the IOC.
If you consider Paris unsuitable to host the games then you might as well pack up and go home. It is Europe’s largest city and is currently more stable than London (Brexit, many terrorist attacks of its own) which successfully hosted the games recently.
Plus the French economy is on the up again (albeit modestly). GDP growth in H1 2017 ahead of the US and UK.
Vive la France!