{"id":203568,"date":"2016-05-18T06:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T13:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=203568"},"modified":"2016-05-18T10:39:49","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T17:39:49","slug":"has-there-ever-been-a-less-prepared-olympic-host-than-rio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/has-there-ever-been-a-less-prepared-olympic-host-than-rio\/","title":{"rendered":"Has There Ever Been A Less Prepared Olympic Host Than Rio?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Commentary by Casey Barrett<\/em><\/p>\n<p>These are grim days for the Games. Doping scandals are pumping fast and furious. The usual dark clouds of corruption and bribery hover. The credibility of IOC leaders is at an all time low. And <span data-term=\"goog_842905830\">in 80 days<\/span> the Summer Olympics in Rio will begin.<\/p>\n<p>In the days and months before a Games begin it&#8217;s not uncommon for the media to start throwing up red flags of hysteria. Athens in 2004 wasn&#8217;t the least bit prepared. They were planting saplings in front of the Olympic Stadium the day before the Opening Ceremony. Sochi in 2014 was a sick joke of corruption and shameless Putin cronyism. Salt Lake City in 2002 was beset by a bribery scandal. Beijing in 2008 began under true allegations of rampant human rights abuse. These days it&#8217;s more the rule than the exception for an Olympic host to be attacked with all the ways they&#8217;re unworthy.<\/p>\n<p>All that finger pointing at these host cities past, it was all true. And all of them managed to pull off their Games with reasonable success, without international incident. But this time it seems to go a bit deeper.<\/p>\n<p>Brazil is a mess. Rio, the epicenter of that mess. Sure, Russia and China could care less about its citizens; we still knew both nations would stage a well-run Olympics, even as we chose not to peak behind the curtain at these countries&#8217; true natures. Sure, Salt Lake City embodied the dark heart corruption of capitalism and shady back room deals. And of course Greece was a disorganized fiasco. It&#8217;s Greece. They&#8217;ve been coasting on the whole Founding Father of the Games thing for a damn long time. But with Rio, here&#8217;s what we&#8217;re looking at 80 days out:<\/p>\n<p>A country and a city at the white hot infected center of the Zika virus. The host nation&#8217;s president suspended and facing impeachment. The country itself mired in its worst recession in 80 years. Or, as the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/2016\/05\/13\/sports\/olympics\/ap-oly-olympic-meltdown.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">New York Times<\/a> said a few days back: <em>&#8220;Never has a host nation been in such economic or political turmoil before an Olympics.&#8221;\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The paper even <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/roomfordebate\/2016\/05\/16\/should-brazil-postpone-the-olympics?ref=opinion\" target=\"_blank\">featured a point-counterpoint feature <\/a>debating whether Brazil should postpone the Olympics.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow, every time we go down this doomsday road, it always seems to work out. Whether it&#8217;s the World Cup or the Olympics (really the only two comparable world-uniting sporting events on earth), all the troubles in the lead up end up being set aside for a glorious few weeks of blithe vicarious thrills. It&#8217;s like the entire world pops a few Xanax and decides to soak in the competition with a sigh. We know the aftermath is going to be ugly for these cities, but that&#8217;s, like, for them to figure out.<\/p>\n<p>The Games must go on.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s hope it all goes as simply and as irresponsibly <span data-term=\"goog_842905831\">80 days from now<\/span>. Because it might not. At some point the Olympic fairy dust may run dry and things can go very bad indeed. Munich wasn&#8217;t that long ago. As much as swimmers would like to remember Mark Spitz as the face of those Games, in the big grim picture he was just a footnote.<\/p>\n<p>For every Olympics in my lifetime I&#8217;ve managed to tune out all the noise and enjoy the spectacle as soon as the flame was lit. But this time it&#8217;s getting harder and harder to ignore the horizon.<\/p>\n<p><em>All comentaries are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Swimming World Magazine nor its staff. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commentary by Casey Barrett These are grim days for the Games. Doping scandals are pumping fast and furious. The usual dark clouds of corruption and bribery hover. The credibility of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":195449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[50558],"class_list":["post-203568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-commentary","tag-2016-rio-olympic-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\r\n<title>Has There Ever Been A Less Prepared Olympic Host Than Rio? - Swimming World<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/has-there-ever-been-a-less-prepared-olympic-host-than-rio\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Has There Ever Been A Less Prepared Olympic Host Than Rio?\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Commentary by Casey Barrett These are grim days for the Games. 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