[Gllug] Olympics

[Rev Simon Rumble]

On 6/7/2005, "Alain Williams" <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:

>On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 12:58:55PM +0100, Ian Lewis wrote:
>Hmmmm, time to start planning my holidays for that month, somewhere a long way away from all
>the traffic jams ...

As someone who's lived through being an Olympic city, and protested
against it, I have to speak up.  It was actually a great thing, loads of
fun and well worth all the expense and corruption it inevitably brings. 
The "Olympic Family" is about as fucked up and disfunctional as a
family gets, but the Olympics themselves shouldn't be tarred with the
same brush.

There will _NOT_ be traffic jams.  London has vastly better public
transport than Sydney, and the roads were eerily quiet.  What happened
is cynics like you went away, the rest took the time off work to go to
the events.  End result: bugger-all traffic on the roads.

>For those who live in the London council tax areas ... start saving for the extra tax to pay
>for this stupidity. Why can't it go to a place that *really* would benefit from this: like
>an african country (I assume that the money to pay for it would come from elsewhere)

Done sensibly, the Olympics can actually turn a profit.  Certainly in net
societal terms (not sure if there was a paper profit), Sydney did from
massively increased exposure (and resulting tourism).  London will, of
course, fuck lots of things up (cf Dome) and have huge cost overruns,
but if done sensibly you'll end up with some first-class new venues,
some nice transport improvements and a lot of goodwill.  The home-team
advantage might even get you over the line to win some medals.
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