Circus Maximus by Andrew Zimbalist review – an Olympic-sized rip-off
A remarkable study that exposes the extraordinary chicanery and dodgy dealing behind staging the Olympics and the World Cup
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Vladimir Putin poses with volunteers at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
Apart from war, nothing so deranges the political mind as national sports rivalry. It stirs patriotism, ostentation and group hysteria. In Britain, its participants are accorded the status of quasi-military heroes. At the apex of this derangement stand two so-called mega-events, the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. Politicians will beg, bribe, cheat, lie and spend
unlimited sums of taxpayers’ money to “win” a hosting of these contests.
Andrew Zimbalist is a sports economist, though I wonder if he has not abandoned that profession, in despair, for behavioural psychology. The focus of his interest is not so much the host countries, which he portrays as desperate victims of some curse, gripped by lust for glory and immune to debt. Rather, he is mesmerised by their oppressors, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Fifa, self-perpetuating cabals of Swiss-based bureaucrats, who live fat on
six-figure salaries, colossal expenses and unbounded arrogance. They travel the world like princes, playing on the weakness of democrats and dictators alike. With each event, they demand more venues and more costs. The IOC’s boss Juan Antonio Samaranch was understandably addressed as “your excellency”.
When London was awarded the 2012 Games, it paid $500,000 in fees to the IOC just to bid. The British government then increased a customarily understated budget of £3bn to more than £9bn. The IOC demanded London build a new, fortified city at Stratford, despite the new Wembley having been designed for the purpose. The so-called Olympic “family” required five-star hotels and fleets of limousines, roads to be cordoned designated for their private use, including a “Zil lane” past Harrods, and traffic lights that turned green on their approach.
Parliament had to pass a law placing the police and regulators at the IOC’s disposal. The IOC was excused all local taxes and its sponsors were not to suffer rival products advertised anywhere within sight – not so much as the name of a loo seat. The army was put on standby, with missile launchers and submarines at the ready. London’s mayor,
Boris Johnson, told his citizens to stay off the tube lest they impeded Games visitors. Tourist sites emptied. Such nonsense is not even offered to a visiting head of state. Yet the government dared deny the IOC nothing.
Britain, like other host nations, went into banana republic mode. The BBC turned soft in the head, its presenters screaming at every medal like Stalinist sycophants. Newspapers abandoned all news judgment for the duration. Critics were treated like conscientious objectors during the Great War, wimps who could not stand the sight of weapons of mass expenditure.
When the IOC and its grubby younger sister
Fifa were founded in 1894 and 1904 respectively, they were dedicated to international concord and amateurism (not yet a term of abuse). They went along with Hitler’s transformation of the 1936 Olympics from the cause of internationalism to that of nationalism, and never looked back.
...continued on:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/22/circus-maximus-andrew-zimbalist-review