Homer's Travels: How To Fix The Olympic Games

Friday, July 23, 2021

How To Fix The Olympic Games

Every two years, more or less, I plant myself in front of the television and watch the best of world athletic competition.  The Olympics is one of the few sporting events I watch.  I guess I enjoy the individual triumphs more than the team successes more commonly seen in sports.  But the Olympics have problems.  The primary problem is they are so expensive to host.

Hosting the Olympic games is expensive.  Billions of dollars are spent building venues, housing the athletes and the spectators.  Infrastructure has to be improved and the area around the games are often beautified at the expense of the local residents.  The cost is getting so high that some bids to host have been withdrawn after public outcry.  The games are becoming an economic superpowers only club in terms of hosting the events.  I think this hurts the spirit of the games.

This is just my two cents and I doubt it will be seen by more than a handful of people but here is my solution: Divide up the games  amongst several nations.  The Olympic games are already sort of divided up: Swimming, gymnastics, track & field, field games like soccer.  I propose dividing up the games by these event categories and have nations bid to host a category.  This would make it much more affordable to smaller countries to host part of the games.  An example, South Africa could never host the entire Olympic games without going into massive soul crushing debt but they could host the soccer portion since they already successfully hosted a World Cup in 2010.

Dividing the games up over several nations would bring more internationalism back into the game.  More nations would be invested in seeing a successful Olympic games and they would do it without incurring much hardship.  Also, in the age of COVID, if the games were divided up the chance of the entire Olympic games having to be cancelled due to disease or disaster would be reduced and the risk more spread out.

The only downside would be the lack of opening and closing ceremonies involving all the athletes.  Perhaps another way to open and close the games that would include all participating nations could be worked out.

What do you think?

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