I’m glad the Olympics are over, I banned it: total madness that doesn’t make sense to me. Living in London and having to pass the Olympic site on a regular basis made me realise what this madness is all about. You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that already has been wasted just to start the planning, demolish existing buildings and start the build of a different ‘updated’ infrastructure and village. I’m glad the Lowlands only hosted this once in 1928 and I bet back in those days it wasn’t about billions… Nowadays everything seems to have the ‘O’ tag attached to it as an excuse to waste more money while they’re already way over budget, four years before the opening…
Some predict it will be ten times over budget; more than £20billion and for what? Two weeks of competitive sports? Two miserable weeks… It’s sickening to see what’s going on behind the scenes: there are so many people out there in need of medication and food while on the other hand huge amounts of money is spent in the blink of an eye without having second thoughts. And then having to read all the transparent excuses published in the media just to justify certain behaviour while inflation is rising, unemployment rates have increased and people here are genuinely struggling. I’m not going to address the political side of this because I try to stay away from politics but I’m sure you’ll get my drift.
I read an article online published November 2007 about Beijing, where the author came up with the same questions and facts that I just mentioned above about London. Why is it then that exactly the same is happening over here: why do people have to reinvent the square wheel, don’t they ever learn? And what message do you send out when you decide that a 7-year old child -who won the competition to perform the anthem- is not ‘cute and pretty enough’ to represent the Opening Ceremonies and instead have her replaced by a lip-synching Chinese version of the perfect cabbage patch doll? So typical… It’s all one big puppet theatre. Doesn’t this all sound slightly twisted to you, it certainly does to me…
Beyond Burma, there are more reasonable arguments against the Beijing Olympics. The total expense, mainly on construction, is in the tens of billions of dollars. This is on top of the direct hosting expense, which is estimated to be $2.4 billion and will be covered by income from NBC, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and marketing revenue. Given the fact that a mere $40 can support an entire year of education for a poor, rural child, how many children could get basic education if this money were spent on them instead?
A Chinese official reportedly said that “The 2008 Olympics Games may advance China’s GDP by 3 to 4 percent.” What he did not say, or even understand, is that such increase is on top of the already overheated urban development, at the cost of the rural poor. The gap between China’s urban rich and rural poor is already huge, and rapidly expanding. The 2008 Olympics is only widening this dangerous gap.
Contributing more to the problem is the destruction of historical structures, local villages, and the environment in general, to make way for the very expensive new construction. But it’s too late to stop such destruction now. It was something the International Olympic Committee could have done six years ago. Shouldn’t you boycott the IOC instead?