To JJ an excellent post, I was informed and entertained. A few comments:

---If a sporting event unifies a country, it will only do it superficially and for a very short time.

---DZ deplores the use host countries' money to sponsor the terrible sportmanship of the IOC. If the Olympics(summer or winter) foment this then abandon them or at least have a referendum in the potential host country.

---Is it just me or is DZ picking only on the Winter Olympics and giving a pass to the Summer Olympics and even the World Cup?

Thank you for writing this column David.
I was a street medic during the confrontation with the police during these Olympics and was one of the 26 that was finally held in the police kettle to end the demonstration. My motivation for demonstrating against this corporate hubris is two-fold. Academic because I am a university professor who studies/participates with poor people’s resistance movements and secondly because of the horrible impact these games have had on the most desperate and damaged poor of Vancouver. The change from 2005 when I was last in Vancouver to the present conditions under the hosting of the Olympics is shocking. The most desperate poor now stay in a Church and sleep on bunk beds in the middle of the building, on the pews and mostly all over the floor. I spent several hours inside this room and tried to sleep on the pews. No easy task. Turns out the Mayor of Vancouver called the Church a few months before the start of the games and asked if they would not mind being a temporary shelter leading up to the Olympics. I know, I asked one of the Directors of the Church. The housing provided in the Church is not acceptable nor is this an acceptable solution for homelessness on the part of the municipal, provincial and federal governments who give this Church money to operate as a shelter (a refuge they prefer to be called). Many of these people are severely damaged through substance abuse and this form of housing them is nothing short of cruel. I was also one of the people who blocked the apparent right of corporations to drive advertisements on the streets under the guise of the Olympic torch relay. We remember that the torch relay was initiated under the direction Hitler's fascists sports officials for the 1936 Berlin games. We sat on the road to block the police and their horses from entering Canada’s poorest neighbourhood outside of First Nation reserves because some people don't accept that Coca Cola, the Royal Bank of Canada and the IOC own the roads. There is a huge security apparatus in place in Vancouver to contain and intimidate community activists and the ‘rabble’ should they get out of control. In support of David's article, the Olympic games are not actively being covered by any sports journalists. The current bevy of reporters covering the Olmpics in the Canadian media do not display any journalistic standards that would differentiate them from business or political spin doctors. They are pathetic cheerleaders for the Olympic corporation and nothing more. My only complaint is that David’s commentary on the IOC and Vancouver is too constrained. People need to get beyond the huge PR machine of the IOC that these are noble ‘games,’ and understand that the Olympics is a corporate brand. People understand that the NFL, NHL etc are all corporate entities but have some sort of blinders when it comes to the IOC. This is probably because the IOC is fierce when defending its corporate brand. Ask the question “Would it be acceptable to allow other sports corporations to have control over communities and media coverage to the degree the IOC is permitted?”

Dave,

you write the best weekly sports articles i've come across and i thank you for your work.

Still, you've been railing on the Olympics for over a year now and its getting to the point where you're not only repeating yourself, but you're coming across as bitter.

The 'cleaning' of the streets, the media censurship, the protests...it's all worth covering and you've done a good job at it.

time to move on though? In the past you've criticized others for only harboring on the negative, or on one element of more complex stories, and it seems like you're falling into the same trap here.

There's a lot of great in the Olympics from varied perspectives, beginning with the athletics.

E of S commenters. Thank you for supporting edgeofsports with your comments. They say the opposite of love is not hate but indifference so keep in coming. Just a couple points:

1 - Yes, I've written about the ways the Summer Olympics and the World Cup hurt host cities on numerous occasions. I'm going to South Africa in March to look at the housing demolitions in advance of the cup.

2 - Yes I deeply appreciate the athletes. Shani Davis is a regular reader at edgeofsports and I should be interviewing him on edge of sports radio where I will raise some of the points here.

3 - The solution, which I've raised in other instances, is to find a permanent site for the games. It would eliminate the insanely corrupt bidding process and take a world of power away from the IOC. I recommend Lords of the Rings by Andrew Jennings. A terrific book.

Hi Dave,

I too would love to see a good article from you on the world cup. In a sense, I feel like it should be a less damaging event than the olympics on the basis that the countries hosting the world cup should generally have soccer stadiums in place already, rather than requiring all new construction. Also, the matches in a world cup are spread over an entire country (or sometimes multiple countries), whereas the olympics concentrates all its construction and influx of people and security on a single city. But this is just speculation. . .

I do know that with the upcoming world cup, the geniuses over at FIFA decided that South Africa would have to remove native grasses from their fields and replace them with water hungry varieties. The head of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, is not a very pleasant human being either-- this was the man who declared that women soccer players should wear shorter shorts to create interest.

So, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the world cup and understanding its problems, but I'm also looking forward to seeing one of the very best sporting events there is. Ah, conflict.

The only thing I don't totally agree with is any sense of shock about all this. The Olympics have been a combination of soap opera and vile nationalist chest-thumping for decades -- ultimately in the service of corporate mega-greed. The fact that the athletes themselves have become actors in a blend of "American Idol" and "Survivor" is kind of quaint. I mean, hey, Apolo Ohno got chopped ("Chopped") by the judges and surely some of the skating teams lost points for poor tailoring ("Project Runway")....

Sure, there is a beauty in many of the sports at their best (although, once and for all, can we all agree that "curling" is a game like tiddly-winks, not a sport?!). Some of the "roller derby"-type events were really fun to watch, including the short-track skating and the new ski and snowboard crosses.

But I find I can stomach only a limited amount of it (not helped by the endless stream of blabber pitched to a high D). The vulgar excess of raw corporate power and materialism is sickening, as is the totally artificial construct of national rivalries, which results in endless wallowing in national steroertypes ("the crafty Austrians," "the Koreans skate this way," "sore loser Russians," and on and on ad nauseum) -- and even worse, in the apotheosis of American "patriotism" and exceptionalism.

The luge driver was only a token sacrifice to the Olympic gods. Think of the Olympics as the corporate juggernaut in "Avatar" -- grinding up entire homelands and crushing people without a single compunction. It's a perfect analogy, and no Great White Hope is coming to stop it.

I think Dave was right to go after Hitchens -- the overlap in their views is minimal, and Hitchens really is targeting sports in a much more sweeping way.

I'm assuming the tirade quoted below comes from that skinny guy from an early sit-com which was set in the Chicago Projects. It seems his artwork has finally hit & he is wallowing in wealth. Bless him.

"So tell, me, oh Holier than G.(H.), unless you grow your own food and wear all-cotton picked by yourself, you are exploiting someone else -- that does not have the side benefit of fomenting athletic competition and national pride. In fact, as a university professor, you are exploiting other Canadians' tax dollars who work in the private sector, since all Canadian universities are publicly-subsidized, or they would cost $30k a year like private colleges in the U.S. What difference, really, is this from Canadians' tax dollars subsidizing the Olympics, except that all I get to see from you on TV is your getting arrested and thrown in jail. I'd rather watch curling, to be honest.

So, G.H., a literal spoilsport, I do hope it's not beyond you to think of the Rochettes, Petersons and Davises who have busted their asses -- most starting with 0 sponsorship dollars, and some having experienced poverty themselves -- to succeed in sport, and to a greater extent, in their lives, as opposed to those who busted their veins on Hastings Street.

But that's Leftism in a nutshell: why build up when you can tear down."

Posted by jjdynomite on 2/26/10 at 1:20 PM

I'm intrigued by your suggestion that a permanent site for Olympics would solve a lot, if not all, of the 'pride' problems. The 'neutral' state of Switzerland seems a likely choice for both venues, but certainly for the winter sports. In a similar vein, why can't the NFL get together & build a permanent place for the Superbowl. Make sure the site is useful year round. Just a thought. Keep on stirring the pot.

[The solution, which I've raised in other instances, is to find a permanent site for the games. It would eliminate the insanely corrupt bidding process and take a world of power away from the IOC.]

Good to see that J.J. Walker has switched races and become a member of the Know-Nothing tribe of tea-baggers. Fun to read!
$6billion, at least, is now the bill that BC taxpayers will pay to have shown off the PED and medical team performances of the poor forum-deprived athletes JJ Walker wants us to cry for like they were Jerry's Kids.
Of course, that points to a problem - leftist athletes like Shani Davis and Steve Nash perhaps sharing decent understandings of the hypocrisies and blatant corruption surrounding their corporate financed, taxpayers bailed-out endeavors, but doing them nonetheless, and being generally decent folk. Tthere is no way around these moral dilemmas, so there will be no more Dave Meggyseys, no Jim Boutons, no Tommy Smiths - elite sport has lost all, entirely all, credibility.