Seems the Olympic Spirit is alive and well with the American swimmers who lied to the Rio police about vandalizing a gas station. They claimed they were robbed, but the police had a video of them knocking down a door and harassing a security guard. The day before their antics, the top European Olympic official, Pat Hickey, was arrested in his bathrobe for a ticket scam he was running. This follows the long-standing tradition of Sepp Blatter, for years head of the Olympic Committee who was finally banned a couple years back for taking 1.35 million Pounds under the table. He's been deposed but is still under investigation by the Swiss and American officials for other misbehavior.
This--or any other blog--isn't nearly long enough to recount the history of political payoffs and scandalous behavior of contractors and local officials especially in China and Brazil uprooting and terrorizing poor people in their own countries to build Olympic venues. They are the most vulnerable people and the pain inflicted on them so colossal as to defy the imagination. Ironic, too, because the public money spent on stadiums and pools should be used to help these people.
Of course, the Russian Track & Field Team was not even allowed in--state sponsored doping. And stay tuned, because certainly there will be a dribble of retracted medals when they do retests and other irregularies emerge. But ask yourself: isn't there something diabolical and predictive (of the above) about pitting the finest athletes in the world against each other the way the Olympics does?
Yet people around the world support it, and sports in general, by buying expensive tickets and watching. If you lend your ears and eyes to this highly questionable enterprise, you are essential to keeping it going. So the quintessential Critical Eye Question is: Can you to regard yourself as a moral individual, and support the Olympics with its recent and past history?
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