What have the Olympics ever done for us? Other than fuel corruption, make countries spend pointlessly and profligately, inflame nationalist sentiment, act as onanistic stand-ins for geopolitical tensions, and cloak authoritarian leaders in legitimacy, I mean.
It is my real and very honest question every two years: What are the Olympics good for? Why do we continue to have them? Certainly for the athletes participating they can represent the pinnacle of a career worth of hard work; maybe even a life’s ambition realized. But for the rest of us, what is the point? Aside from the temporary flash of sumptuous spectacle, there’s little good that ever comes of the Games. If anything, they exacerbate some of the worst of human nature.
Nearly every time the Olympics come to a city, they remind us how little human life and dignity are worth compared to the hardware required to pull them off. In the run-up to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, some 1.5 million Beijingers lost their homes, by one count. By then, one study estimated, some two million people had been forcibly moved in 20 years in order to make room for Olympic structures around the world. In Vancouver, the build-up to the Olympics lead to a housing squeeze, which, in turn, caused homelessness to spike in the years leading up to the 2010 Winter Games there. On top of the construction deaths in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, thousands were displaced as the city made room for stadiums and rinks that would be used a handful of times.
