Olympic Distory - 2010

Olympic Distory - 2010

In order to get into the where's and the WTFs of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, I think it important to know why we have such a compelling urge to defeat and/or destroy each other at anything remotely competitive, that someone had to create a thing called a "Luge" or have liked the Scandinavians so much as to have the "Nordic Combined" .

A little back-story... The Olympic Games began at Olympia in Greece in 776 BC. Calender makers were a dying breed back then, with a four year calender called the Olympiad. Christ was but a 775 year old twinkle in the Joseph family tree's eye.

Anyway, back then, they all liked their grumpy old god Zeus and they wanted to show him how cool they were. Zeus was a bit of a recluse and lived on a mountain. Sometimes after lunch (you don't want to know what he ate), he would throw a random bolt of lightning at the locals for a giggle and burn them to a cinder. He tended to stop this odd behavior if the Greeks jumped about and threw things at each other. For some reason it made him happy. If any citizen was better at throwing things and jumping about than the other guy, they got to wear a leaf on their head and got paraded around the town and made fun of.

So, how did we get here from there?

Same thing as before - making Zeus happy.

Do we really care, as Canadians, who did the ski-thing and then pulled out the rifle and shot the target thing ? No we don't. Why don't we have snowshoe racing with a big stick? If you get too close to your opponent... BAM! Now that would be worth watching. Ice-flow jumping anyone? It should be a popular sport considering all the effort that the current Harper government has exuded into making sure we have more floaty bits of ice breaking off the polar ice caps.

So, why does every country in the world line up for decades, for the chance to have "The Luge" plowing through their city. At a low low price of 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS?!!!! I feel I need to say that again...ONE POINT FIVE WTF!!! BILLION DOLLARS!!!!! There is your housing for everyone who needs it, right there!!!! So why didn't we spend it on that in the first place?

Again, it is all about making the powers happy. T.V. stations, banks, beer companies, Nike, Reebok, The Gap, McCrap, phone companies, taxi companies, Kentucky Fried Tortured Chicken and of course...tourism. By the way, locals need not apply for this one - especially the homeless locals.

Politicians will tell you that the 2010 Olympics will bring money into our economy through tourism and the jobs it creates in other sectors.
Bollocks! The Olympics were a financial disaster for Montreal in 1976, as the city faced debts for 30 years after the Games had finished. They just finished paying off the stadium which totaled 1.61 billion after all of the renovations, taxes, building costs, interest, more renovations and of course the interest on the interest for the renovations. That was just the stadium! Who paid for that??? Big business? Nope. Your good ol' average tax payer.

It is all about making the rich richer - RIGHT NOW and the poor... well... somewhere else for a couple of weeks.

These Olympics are not for Vancouverites, Canadians or anyone that gives a damn about what is right. It is for big business and you are not invited to your own city for "your" Olympics.

They belong to "Zeus".