my unpopular opinion is that they are a waste of time and effort.

  • tunetardis
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    4 months ago

    I have, if anything, been watching the Olympics more now than in the past. I think the change came about due to the fact that you can now stream any event at any time without commercials, annoying commentary, interviews, etc. It used to be that coverage would focus on events featuring your own nation’s top talent, which meant that some sport that interests you but doesn’t have much traction in your country gets ignored. And during a low time, rather than showing some sport where maybe your country has no medal prospects, they’d fill the time doing athlete profiles or whatever. I hated that.

    But I get that there are downsides. The cost of hosting the games have spiralled out of control, the IOC has FIFA-scale corruption issues, and the war on drugs is going about as well as wars on drugs go.

    One thing I have noticed with the Paris Games is that the venues are spread around a lot more across the country. The surfing was all the way over in Tahiti, which is about as far from Paris as you can get and still be on the planet. This opens the possibility that maybe one nation, let alone city, need not supply every facility anymore. Like do we really need another luge track? Just pick one that already exists.