Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
When I was a kid, we use to look forward to the Olympics. It was a big deal. The whole family would gather around the TV to watch the events live regardless of timezone. We use to follow the stories of the atheletes and it was constantly the talk of the town.
Nowadays, it kind of feels like Olympics are just annoying. Propaganda fest for authoritarian regimes. No one cares. Heck, some people don’t even know that the Olympics are even happening.
How did it go so wrong?
150 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/the-elite-and-...
Edit: I just found a fascinating detail on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Olympic_broadcasts#Mike_Ti... which points out that NBC doesn't want Olympics coverage to cannibalize their Super Bowl viewership, which is more profitable.
That makes it hard for a city in a free society to want to be the host. The costs are very real but the benefits are elusive. Probably the last time the Olympics were profitable to the host city was the 1984 Los Angeles games and that was because Los Angeles was able to drive a hard bargain because nobody wanted to host the Olympics after the terrorism at the 1972 games.
Some people have suggested we might be better off if the Olympics were held in the same place(s) every year, maybe in Greece.
Now it seems like even the authoritarian nations are deciding it's to expensive and you see responsible democracies getting back in with more realistic bids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_Games_host_cit...
Now, most normal people in France would have like the thing to be cancelled instead of having their taxes being wasted with that
The event had commercial sponsors such as Coke and McDonald's plastered everywhere, which was derided at the time. The opening ceremony even prominently featured Chevy pickup trucks [1].
Nearly all of the newly built facilities were then reused as Georgia Tech dormitories, professional sporting stadiums, local high school facilities, etc.
It was a huge inflection point for the city's growth.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=26m16s&v=4n0a-yNO8fE up to the "How Y'all Doin'!" at 30:04
It was used as the Atlanta Braves stadium from 1997 to 2016, then converted into Georgia State University's football stadium when the Braves moved outside the city to Cobb County to follow the tax incentives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Field
Each conversion took lots of money, but the original structure is still there.
What a wonderful city! And amazing port / beach transformation.
The 1994 winter olympics in Norway did make a profit.[0]
[0] https://www.nrk.no/ytring/mytene-og-sannheten-om-ol-1.111989...
The question is why those locations don't win? I'm sure it's due to corruption within the Olympic organization, but who am I to judge. I just stop watching the crap.
Partially it is corruption, partially it is that most democratic places want to limit IOC's powers and then many areas try, but are held back by the population by large campaigns against it.
I think this is first worlders thinking "democracy = the West".
As noted in another comment NBC is an absolutely terrible steward of the broadcasts in the US, but they spent the money to help prop up their football investment.
The second is that the IOC is driven by greed, and dictatorships have money while craving any legitimacy they can get on the world stage. It’s been shown in multiple studies (sorry I don’t have time to look them up offhand) that only a few cities have managed to pivot the Olympics required investment into a profit by any measure (including public good, which is where I recall the few that are considered successes hinge their measurements, i.e. LA). That drives the actual Olympics into those countries arms.
Look up the Berlin, Moscow and the following LA Olympics as examples of propaganda and politics.
I've never felt like Olympics were big deal
I'd say that football big events felt bigger than Olympics itself
The advent of the Internet made it much more widely known that the athletes are being badly exploited and forced to risk getting permanently injured or killed in order to make more money for the corporations that run the Olympics, so it no longer seems ethical to prop it up by paying attention. Especially since several do die each year while training.
Also the fact that they're getting rid of all the real sports in favor of events that have better TV ratings.
And also the fact that many of the events are so badly run that luck plays just as much a factor as talent in determining who wins. The whole thing is just meh.
This is all high-level sports. You just get paid less for sports no one cares about.
I am not sure where you are getting your death rate statistics, but based on https://www.olympedia.org/lists/59/manual it does not look like 'several' die each year.
The Olympics have discontinued only a handful number of sports in both the winter and summer segments. I am not sure what you mean by a 'real' sport, but if anything the olympics are adding sports that have gained popularity over time.
And you boiling down the victories for Olympians down to 'luck' reeks of a schmuck that is on their couch being a keyboard warrior. There people train their whole lives, but I doubt you think of that.
> High level training brings many inherent risks that the athletes are presented with
In the sense that most swimmers eventually injure their shoulders, or most rowers eventually injure their lower backs, then sure. But the IOC is purposely making the sports more dangerous to make them more exciting, which is completely different than overuse injuries -- which often don't even have any consequences in every day life, beyond that the person can no longer do their sport at an elite level.
In the 21st century, we interact with the rest of the world on a daily basis. You can learn more about any destination online (heck, on Wikipedia alone) than you would from traveling there for a few days to watch some random assortment of sporting activities.
And I think to some extent we're so used to having everything at our fingertips that sometimes actually going to the destination is less rewarding than one would expect--spend a ton of money (vs. going on the internet 'for free'), deal with customs, deal with the occasional crying kid on the plane, maybe forget to bring an item you really needed, maybe get mugged or lose your passport, have issues with your hotel reservation...
Not to mention the opportunity cost. Compare the number of, say, Summer activities one could consider instead of going to the Olympics in 1952 vs 2022. If anything we suffer from too many alternatives today
Plus there's no Cold War to raise the stakes to the point where anything but the gold medal wins utter defeat.
And frankly I'd wager most people aren't that into nationalism anymore, except maybe the alt-right and its equivalents elsewhere. "I'm just trying to get through the week" trumps all else for most people.
I have to disagree here.
The amount of politics and rivalry between authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian regimes is the same as it was in the past
Now I think I’ve had enough of it, and would rather have familiarity and harmony. I began to resent diversity actually.
I don’t resent the UK and US for becoming like this though: I feel you can have the best of both worlds. London for instance is a very international city, but even if you venture even half an hour out of the M25 you’ll find very homogenous neighbourhoods (in fact, this is even true within London now that I think about it).
I was tuned into mens figure skating last night in time to see an incredible flawless performance from a young 19 year old man from Japan.
Some time later they were doing snowboarding slope style which was really fun to watch.
There might be less energy with less people in the crowd due to the pandemic, but the performances from the athletes are nonetheless fantastic.
Maybe I'm having a different experience as I'm in Canada and its broadcast differently. The CBC is essentially playing all olympics all the time, of course at various prime times compiling the gold medal finals (especially if a Canadian is in any sorts of contention).
CBC's streaming service Gem will be streaming everything, so with that in mind, if you're a fan of something niche (ie. in a canadian context: not-hockey, not-curling) you have more ability than ever before to watch an entire event.
Yes, far different. Where I use to live, I use to be able to get one of the Montreal Stations. Even though I could not speak French, their coverage was far above what the US would offer. So when I could, I would watch that station. I moved away from there are years ago, and the US coverage is so bad I no longer care about the Olympics.
The Olympics aren't environmentally sustainable.
It's also a tragedy. Tens of thousands of talented people who dedicate their lives to an event. Then they return from the Olympics to... get a job as a Wallmart greeter? It's a global waste of human potential
The final one really takes the cake, simultaneously repeating the right wing propaganda that Black Lives Matter protests were are all riots when less than 5% had any violence, and also implying countries that don’t allow protests about equality are a better place, and specifically a country known to abuse minorities.
It can be tricky looking back to younger years and wondering "what changed." Sometimes it's you that changed.
Consider that Nazi Germany hosted an olympics. During the cold war, the olympics was a very lively proxy for soviet-nato competition... with a lot of nationalist propaganda.
Does no one care, or no one in your immediate circle? Did it become more of a propaganda op, or do you just see it more like that today than as a child. I think the olympics are still quite big, generally.
Sometimes it's us that changed.
They've always been annoying propaganda for authoritarian regimes, the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is the prime example of that, and there have always been people oblivious to them.
> Propaganda fest for authoritarian regimes
This hasn't changed though. Rather than a celebration of sport and achievements, the modern Olympic quickly become ultra-chauvinistic, and not just for authoritarian regimes.
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Also, NBC seems to be working for the State Department in trashing China at every turn. Yes, China commits human rights abused, but this is a gold standard case of the pot calling the kettle black. The US is one of the biggest human rights abusers out there. The Olympics is about setting that aside for a moment. The US should have either boycotted the olympics or shut up about the politics.
You're assuming there's some sneaky stuff going on with the State Department pulling the strings, but in this case the simplest explanation seems more likely - NBC recognizes the strong anti-China sentiment around human rights abuses in the viewing public, so they know that catering to that sentiment will be best from a business perspective.
Also, it's extremely naive to think the US government has no influence over US media. First, there is significant overlap and connectivity in the ruling class that runs the government and runs media companies. Second, there are many examples of the media and the government working together to craft a message. I can provide several references to examples if you were unaware of this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
Ah.. just set it aside for just a moment..
But yeah, China is the one who needs to be pointed out. How is it not obvious that this is an intentional campaign by the US government to attack China's image? They said nothing about Saudi Arabia or Israel when they marched out during the opening ceremony. And Israel is a rogue nuclear nation and apartheid state with millions in lockdown, which is not even hidden, and finally acknowledged by Amnesty International in the last few days. NBC's comments were to fawn over the first orthodox jewish woman in the Olympics. What's next? To fawn over the first evangelical christian doing whatever? The hypocrisy is frustrating in the extreme.
I tend to think there are countries which have reached the "no-win" stage of public relations. It sort of reminds me of when the UN sent inspectors to Iraq looking for the legendary WMDs-- even transparency wasn't good enough. The fix is in, and there's no reasonable sequence of definite actions they can perform that would get China on the West's good side. They could walk Joe Biden personally through the length of Xinjiang and someone would still say "they must have hidden the prisoners!"
Every positive story about China is always tempered with "but but Tibet/the Uighurs/social case-celebree of the week."
That slant, in particular, is particularly annoying. It's dehumanizing because we're treating a country of over one billion people as a single undifferentiated unit.
Did any of the tens of thousands of people who worked to deliver this event get up in the morning and think "Gosh, if I just paint these bleachers just right, they'll let people I don't know, 5000km away, get away with a genocide! Can't wait!" I doubt it. On the ground level, this is the work of ordinary people with ordinary motivations-- and the concept of "If we're going to be on a global stage for two weeks, let's do the best possible presentation we can." is not some malicious whitewashing conspiracy. They don't deserve the slander.
I have to wonder if we're in a situation where we're looking for an enemy. The Cold War was great for business-- it justified eternal defense spending and trade restrictions against a major economy. What a coup if they could pull it off against China!
Who is talking about the people who delivered the event, and who is slandering them in this conversation?
You say "5000km away" but it is the same government.
Have a read through this https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037
Maybe we can say that once in a while without having to frame it in the context of "TeH cCp EvIl AnD fAiLiNg"
Saying "it's the same government" is rather a broad-brush. When there's a new library or stadium built in Phoenix, do we belittle the hard work of the contractors and architects over what ICE is going with immigrant children?
You see that sort of coverage on a lot of news about China. "20,000 km of high speed rail built in a year" or "space program is proceeding smoothly" inevitably pivots to human-rights potshots, even when the actions in the story have only the most gossamer links to it.
Hold on, _you_ introduced the point about scale and then argued against it.
> and they aren't any worse than the human rights abuses the US commits
Your whole comment reads like a joke
> But yeah, China is the one who needs to be pointed out.
The Olympics is hosted in China, you know that right?
> How is it not obvious that this is an intentional campaign by the US government to attack China's image?
I posted a link to the BBC. Is your next conspiracy theory that the US government runs the BBC?
I know I have asked a few questions in this post but please don't bother replying. Any conversation with you is beyond worthless.
Yeah China has a record of harvesting organs and running concentration camps for the purposes of ethnic cleansing. People probably aren't going to stop repeating that fact any time soon.
The only evidence for everything you are saying is from CIA contractors and documents of questionable provenance. The US has obvious conflict of interest when reporting on the misdeeds of their biggest competitor. It's an obvious smear campaign.
There is evidence of abuse and mistreatment of Uighurs yes, but not a full scale genocide and jailing of millions. It's a lie, or at most, a gross exaggeration.
But that wasn't my point. My point is why is China specifically picked on? Why didn't the US detail their own human rights abuses when they hosted the Olympics? They are easily argued to be as bad or worse. As mentioned, the US has far more minorities in actual prison, and prisoners in the US are LEGALLY subject to unpaid labor, basically slaves. This is 100% true and easily verifiable, not hidden or a conspiracy.
This doesn't even get into the millions killed overseas by the US military. But I guess that's not human rights abuse, because those brown middle easterners arent human in your eyes. Or, they aren't human unless abused by china.