Rio Olympics
With the Olympics just 78 days away -- and with June and July featuring the U.S. Olympic trials for swimming, gymnastics, and track & field, and the showcase and exhibition tour for the U.S. men's basketball team -- I figured it was time to start an Olympics thread.
So, is anyone else quietly dreading that these Olympics could be just an unmitigated disaster? I mean, between: (a) Zika, (b) venues with toxic water pollution, (c) other venues that may not be finished on time (or may be finished, but held together with duct tape, chewing gum, and baling wire), (d) the usual graft and corruption that occurs any time the IOC* is involved, and (e) the fact that the country just had a freakin' coup d'etat -- what could possibly go wrong?
I guess Brazil did manage to pull off the World Cup without any major calamities, so maybe they'll get it together in time for the Olympics, too. I remember that Athens had lots of problems in the run-up to the 2004 Olympics, but they ended up coming off OK. (That is, the Games themselves went OK. The country since then...not so much.)
* My all-time favorite one-sentence take on the IOC comes from Charles Pierce, who wrote:
And then, of course, there is the simple fact that nobody except authoritarian billionaires ever would get into business with the IOC, which, if it weren’t for the horror show at FIFA, would be recognized as the world’s worst and most entitled group of defrocked royalty and international swindlers since the demise of the Romanovs.
"I swear Roy must redeem extra timeouts at McDonald's the day after the game for free hamburgers." --Posted on InsideCarolina, 2/18/2015