The 2024 Olympics Spectacular

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This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

We're currently just two days away from the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

And if you couldn't already tell from the TV commercials, the branded soda cans, and the Emily in Paris Spawn Con, the Olympics are, once again, everywhere.

So in the Olympic spirit, we are bringing you four stories about the games in all their international theatrical glory.

Starting with one from 99% Invisible Supervising Producer, Christopher Johnson.

Hello, Christopher Johnson.

What do you have for me today?

Hello, Roman Mars.

So this summer, for the first time ever, there'll be Olympic level break dancing.

It's officially called breaking, and it's the first ever so-called dance sport to happen in Summer Olympics history.

Wow, I did not know that.

That's very exciting.

I agree.

I support all things break dancing, especially because I'm a hip-hop head.

But breaking is not like running or swimming or throwing stuff.

It's not your typical Olympic sport.

And this got me thinking, as unusual as Olympic breakdancing might seem, it cannot be the oddest event.

to ever be in the games.

And I was right.

Okay, so tell me more.

Okay, so first of all, I need you to know that many of the weirdest Olympic sports in history came into being way back before the Olympics were considered the pinnacle of professional athletics.

Those earliest games were actually meant for amateurs.

The modern games were started in 1896 by this French aristocrat named Pierre de Coubertin.

This guy's life is a whole story in itself.

You should look him up.

But basically, the Olympics were his dream.

He pitched it in lectures all over France, like let's all get together and play sports and then hand out medals and trophies.

And these sports were definitely not for professional athletes.

These were for like average amateurs.

Exactly.

These were mostly amateurs.

And when the Olympics began, the spirit of the games was hardcore amateurism.

So at that point, the one-offs and the crazies and all sorts of folks just show up.

I talked to David Goldblatt, who wrote a book called The Games, A Global History of the Olympics, and he told me just how casual the earliest Olympic Games were.

I mean, in 1896 at the Athens Games, the first Games, the guys that won the pistol competition are two brothers from Harvard and they're on holiday.

So these guys just rolled up to the Olympics pistol event like, hey, y'all, we have guns.

We can shoot.

They just showed up.

They had their pistols with them, of course, you know, as everybody does when they travel in the 19th century.

And they took part.

Okay, so in the first modern Olympics, people could just like walk on off the street and they could participate.

Exactly.

That's outstanding.

And the fact that the Olympics were new and experimental and not at all about being a pro, that opened the door to all sorts of sports being in those early games.

For example, in the second ever modern Olympic Games, one of the events was firefighting.

Oh my goodness.

How did that work?

So they lit a house on fire and you had to put that out and then you had to do a fake rescue.

Wow.

The 1900 Games also had this aquatics event where you'd go under boats and then over boats and then under some more boats.

Obstacle swimming.

It's a tremendous event and you had

swimmers diving off boats that had been moored on the river and they would swim, you know, 20 meters and then they would have to either go under a second set of boats and come out the other side or sometimes they had to clamber into the boat and then dive off back into the river.

And this is all happening on the same.

Lord knows what the condition of the water was.

Other events from the 1900 Games include hot air balloon racing and croquet and cannon shooting.

Can you imagine cannon shooting in the Olympics?

so if i'm hearing you right the 1900 games specifically was the one with so many great unusual events yes but check this out one reason these olympics have so many random events may very well be because the 1900 games weren't really actually

factually officially recognized as the olympics at least not until like 80 years later.

Okay, so what do you mean by that?

So in 1900, the Olympics was just in its second year, and it wasn't its own established standalone thing yet.

So they kind of just glommed on to the World's Fair, which was also happening in Paris at the same time.

And the World's Fair people really didn't know what the hell the Olympics even were.

Some folks thought it was this weird Neo-Hellenic cult.

Nobody really knew that the Olympics were going on.

There were no posters with Olympic insignia around.

The press referred to it as the international games or, you know, they didn't quite know what to do with it.

The 1900 Games were also an outlier in much of Olympic history because instead of lasting just two weeks, those games lasted five whole months.

Wow.

And they had more than double the events that we have today.

And in the end, the IOC had to go back 80 years later and decide which of those weirdo events were even going to count in the Olympic records.

It was only in the 1980s that actually a definitive list of who won what and what events were Olympic and which weren't were drawn up by the IOC.

And one event that most definitely was not considered Olympic was the firefighters.

Yeah, huge mistake.

Huge mistake.

Totally agree.

Rest in peace, firefighting in the Olympics.

But listen, listen, the fun Olympic sports didn't end with 1900.

And in fact, one of those sports put the United States at the center of an Olympic scandal.

And that sport was tug of war.

Tug of war is an absolutely fantastic sport.

I can't believe actually that we don't still have it in the Olympics.

So you might think of tug of war as something you did as part of field day when you were growing up, like right after the sack races and before running with an egg on a spoon.

but in the early 1900s tug-of-war roman mars was hot so hot it was in five summer games i mean this is also strikes me is super fun to watch you get all these like gigantic Andre the Giant, like with the singlet on, you're like Wesselmania 3 style, you know, like

just like pulling on things.

You just get your biggest dudes in the whole country.

Exactly.

It is, it is everything that you are picturing.

It's like, you know, between five and eight guys, the numbers changed over time on each side pulling for their lives.

It's basic, it's straightforward, it's primal.

But for such a simple sport, Olympic tug of war got a little spicy, Roman.

Lots of little scandals along the way.

The 1908 games in London are probably the best example of that.

You've got

a British team and an American team contesting.

The Americans is basically a scratch team.

It's like the wrestlers and the heavy guys from the field events and they're put together.

And they're going against the Brits who have a legit tug of war team.

They're all members of the Liverpool City Police and they're hella strong.

They've been training a lot.

Tug of war is what they do.

But the real edge that the Brits have got is that these guys show up in their work boots and they've got steel-capped heels.

And you can imagine, given how tug-of-war works, that is giving you a real edge over a bunch of guys who are wearing their track shoes.

That is the American side.

They're at this huge disadvantage.

The Liverpool team absolutely crushed them.

The Americans, of course, incent, saying this can't possibly be in the rules.

The Americans contested.

They were overruled.

The Brits won.

And the Americans apparently left in a huff.

What I love about this moment is that the American sports press, which is just kind of finding its hyperbolic voice at this moment in history,

writes about the event.

And the New York Evening Post said of the City of Liverpool police boots, they had inch thick soles and were heavier than those worn in the English Navy, while the New York Evening World thought the boots were as big as North River ferry boats.

By the way, at that same Olympics, another British tug-of-war team, the City of London police team, they later challenged the Americans to a match in just their socks.

And the Americans said, no, thanks.

Okay, so they probably knew what was up.

Right, right.

You see, you see how it is.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, obviously, sadly, we no longer have Olympic-level tug-of-war.

Again, criminal shame.

Totally, right?

We also don't have obstacle swimming or cannon shooting.

Come on.

Most of them disappeared pretty quickly once the Olympics became the professionalized event that we know it to be today.

But that doesn't mean that we lost all interesting sports because there's a whole other category known as demonstration sports.

I think I have some idea what those are, but could you describe demonstration sports to me?

Sure.

So those are...

essentially sports from specific regions in the world that aren't meant to be official sports just yet.

They're kind of just played for show and to promote the international spirit of the games.

They're chosen by the host, and usually it's an opportunity to showcase a sport that is not globally particularly well known, but which, you know, is important to that nation.

So, for example, there's this sport called Glima, which is basically Viking wrestling.

That was a demo sport in 1912.

Later, you get Swedish gymnastics, which I didn't know existed.

There's corfball, which shined for a couple of years in the 1920s.

But some events do eventually become permanent fixtures of the Olympics.

So in 1964, for example, judo.

became a demonstration sport.

And in the case of judo, and this is also true of taekwondo, first introduced as a demonstration sport by the South Koreans at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, they then go on to be permanent Olympic sports.

I mean, that is nice that they can introduce new things and then have them be adopted as more and more of the world takes them on as no longer regional sports.

That's great.

I mean, do we have any cool demo sports this year that you're aware of?

Sadly, we do not.

The last demo games included in the Olympics were actually way back in 1992, which had several games, including roller hockey.

Well, if we don't get any demo sports, at least we have breaking to look forward to.

That's going to be exciting.

Well, thank you so much for this, Christopher.

I had had fun.

Same here, Roman Mars.

You're welcome.

When a city hosts the Olympics, they have to construct a ton of new buildings, like an entire village to house the athletes, and a track and field stadium, and a specialty venue for bicycle races.

And the list can get very long.

Sometimes those structures end up being a fixture of civic life for years to come, like the London Stadium, which now hosts soccer games, or the Atlanta Athletes Village, which has been converted into student housing.

But there are also venues that become white elephants, looming over the skyline and offering grim reminders of the high cost of two weeks of fun.

Such is the case in Montreal, Canada, host of the 1976 Summer Olympics.

Here's producer Chris Barube.

The Montreal Olympics were the brainchild of Jean Drapeau.

And I think it's fair to say, when it comes to big city mayors, they don't make them like Drapeau anymore.

Jean Drapeau served as mayor twice between 1954 and 1986.

He wasn't very intimidating.

He was kind of diminutive, always had these big square glasses and this of the time mustache.

But during his hotly debated 29 years in office, Jean Drapeau had big ambitions.

He used to drive around Montreal in a limousine, blasting arias by Rickard Wagner and stopping to talk with his constituents and admire some of the works he had commissioned.

Even though Toronto overtook Montreal as Canada's biggest city in the 70s, Drapeau insisted that his town would always be the greatest.

Let Toronto become Milan, Drapeau once said.

because Montreal will always be Rome.

And during his early years as mayor, the the city did go on quite a hot streak.

Drapeau managed to rustle up a subway system, a major league baseball team, a World's Fair, and in a masterstroke, the Summer Olympics of 1976, somehow beating out both Moscow and Los Angeles for the honor.

For Drapeau, the Olympics would cement Montreal as Canada's greatest metropolis.

But he faced some pointed questions, like, how exactly are we supposed to afford all of this?

Drapeau was unfazed by the criticism.

He famously promised voters, the Olympic Games could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby.

And if you're thinking, hey, that's kind of a weird thing to say, I wonder if those words would come back to haunt him in some way.

Perhaps you've guessed the outcome here, but those words would 100% come back to haunt him.

Of the proposed $120 million budget for the Olympics, more than half was reserved just for constructing Olympic Stadium.

It was designed to have this unique doughnut shape, giving it the nickname the Big O.

And it promised to be state-of-the-art, with a retractable roof that would kind of look like a big white tortoise shell.

The closable roof was a novelty at the time, and the idea was that sports could be played there after the games, during Montreal's brutal winters.

But the most distinct feature of the Olympic Stadium would be a 540-foot tower that would arch over the field at a dramatic 45-degree slant.

A tower was an unusual thing to add to a stadium, but Drapeau was insistent.

He wanted it to be like the Eiffel Tower, an icon that everybody conjured when they heard the name Montreal.

But reviews were mixed.

Years later, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, Jack Todd, would call the stadium design space-aged fascist.

When construction began on the Big O, the problem started pretty much right away.

Construction kicked off 18 months late, and then it got delayed again by a worker strike that wiped out most of 1975.

That left just one year to finish the project before the thing was supposed to open.

Against all odds, Drapo's Grand Olympic Stadium was finally finished right before the games.

Well, sort of finished.

The state-of-the-art retractable roof, it wasn't ready.

Neither was Drapo's big tower.

Not even close.

Only the very bottom was completed.

So on opening day, the tower was still just a stump with some wires poking out of the top.

It just sat there like this puny concrete tree trunk.

Despite all this, the games, for the most part, went pretty well.

People won medals, the city got some nice press.

But when you talk to Montrealers about the 1976 Olympics, Nobody leads with the athletes or the fanfare.

They only want to talk about the hangover.

At the time of the games, some estimates put the cost of the stadium at over $500 million, just way over budget.

But the worst was yet to come.

After the Olympics, the stadium became the new home of the Montreal Expos baseball team, which was kind of perfect because the Spos had been playing in a makeshift ball field in a municipal park before that, and they needed the upgrade.

But my God, the Big O was a horrible place to watch baseball.

I remember how sound used to echo off the concrete walls and the hideous yellow plastic seats.

And the aesthetics were the least of their problems.

The big dramatic tower, that was finished in 1977, but it was clearly something of a rush job.

At one point years later, there was an explosion in the tower, and chunks of steel fell off during a game.

Thankfully, nobody got hurt.

But the biggest headache was the retractable roof.

That wasn't completed until 1987, a full 10 years overdue.

And to put it bluntly, the roof was not very good at being a roof.

It was made of Kevlar, and one time when it rained, drops pierced through the tarp, soaking everybody in the crowd.

Then the roof was hit by a tornado in 1991, which tore a bunch of holes in it, and the same year, a support beam collapsed, and the team had to play the rest of their games on the road.

Eventually, they gave up on the whole state-of-the-art retractable thing, and the roof, it just became a normal roof.

But that didn't fix much.

A couple of times, snow built up over the winter and caused small cave-ins.

Gosh, I cannot get into all of the calamities that happened with this roof.

Bob Ojeda, a pitcher for the L.A.

Dodgers, put it succinctly.

This roof, even when the thing worked, it didn't work.

The city finally paid off its Olympic debt in 2006, 30 years after the games.

And while estimates vary, if you count up all the stadium shenanigans, the final price tag for the Montreal Olympics was over $1.2 billion.

Today, the stadium's not even home to the Montreal Expos.

They left town in 2004.

But the Big O is still standing.

According to the provincial government, it would just cost way too much to tear it down.

So instead, they're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make it better.

The culture minister says the city actually needs a major concert venue.

Maybe Taylor Swift or Beyoncé could play there, since both of them skipped Montreal on their last world tour.

So the leaning tower and the concrete ring, they aren't going anywhere.

They remain this potent symbol, mocking everybody who thought this futuristic doughnut could ever be the Quebecois Coliseum.

John Drappeau was wrong about a lot of things.

About the Olympics paying for themselves, about who he hired to build the stadium, about how he would be remembered.

But he was right about this.

Nothing really looks like the Big O.

And when I think of Montreal, I can't really imagine the city without it.

There's really one day, one event when an Olympic stadium is on full display.

And that event is the opening ceremony.

It is a high-stakes moment where a lot can go right or very, very wrong.

Here's 99PI Supervising Producer Vivian Lei with a story about the opening ceremony to change all opening ceremonies.

Unfortunately, many animals were harmed in the making of this story.

Yes.

So, Roman, this pretty horrible thing happened during the Seoul Olympics in South Korea.

And I will admit that when I first learned about this horrible thing, I did immediately think, this is a 99 PI story.

Okay, well, now I'm nervous.

Okay, but go, go, but go for it.

Okay, okay.

So, just to set the scene, the year is 1988.

It's a beautiful, sunny day in Seoul.

In the stands of Seoul Olympic Stadium is a sea of perms and aviator sunglasses.

Hundreds of drummers and synchronized dancers just performed on the field.

The athletes just finished marching out on the track for the Parade of Nations.

Oh, it's my favorite part.

All the flags.

Yes, all the flags.

All the Germans in silly hats.

The Olympic flag has just been raised to possibly the most dramatic music ever written.

2,400 Dubs of Peace have just been released while five jets simultaneously skywrit the Olympic rings over the crowd.

It was a scene which leads us all into the pivotal moment of the opening ceremony, which is the lighting of the Olympic flame.

So the torch was just carried into the stadium by a 76-year-old son Kijung, who was actually the first ethnic Korean to win an Olympic medal half a century earlier.

And he's running the flame over to the Olympic cauldron, which is this absolutely massive structure that looks maybe 100 feet tall.

And so, you know, the torch bearers have to be raised slowly on this platform up to the cauldron to light the flame.

And

I am actually just going to play you the video of what happened next so you can see it for yourself.

Okay.

Okay, so they're being raised up to the platform on this little elevator, and they're about 10 feet away.

And there's three torch bearers,

and they're facing the crowd.

They're not facing the cauldron, but the cauldron is full of birds.

Like there are birds, there are birds everywhere.

Some of them are flying, some of them are staying.

And they're turning around.

They're turning around and they're about to light.

And they have no idea what's going to happen.

Oh my god.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

The thing caught.

Oh.

Some of.

Oh, no.

Oh no.

There they go.

Yeah.

A few of them made it out.

But several, several did not.

You can really tell.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Oh, the humanity.

The humanity.

But yeah.

So, of course, I feel terrible for the doves.

Like, this is horrible to see.

But I felt especially terrible for the torch bearers because like, what are they going to do?

Like, you know, they're on this gigantic platform up in the sky.

Yeah.

And from the video, you can tell, like, the doves from the edges had somewhat dispersed.

Yeah.

But also when you're in front of that many people, it is really hard to add lib or to change it up a little bit when you're expected to do something extremely important.

All they have in their hand is a lit torch.

Like, what are you going to do?

It's so unfortunate.

I feel so bad for everybody involved.

Yeah.

You probably wouldn't know it from the video, but the animal handlers actually trained for a year.

They were supposed to, you know, fly in these widening circles over the field and then disperse into five different directions.

But a lot of them, I guess, landed on the Olympic cauldron.

Yeah, doing what doves do.

They land on things.

Exactly.

They're just going to, doves are going to dove.

But yeah, this scene in which a number of doves

being consumed by the Olympic flame happened in front of tens of millions of people around the world.

Oh, my God.

The other horrible part of this is that, you know, hosting the Olympics was a really, really big deal for South Korea in general because, you know, it had been a country that previously was ravaged by war and occupation and military dictatorship.

So this was going to be the moment where, you know, they marked a new era for South Korea.

Yeah.

I remember I was very aware of these Olympics.

I was a alive and cognizant human being.

And these were big games.

They talked about this in the moment that they were a big deal for Korea.

And I can totally imagine, like, this is not the best look for this international symbol of peace getting torched in the Olympic cauldron when, you know, when you're trying to put your best foot forward.

That's hard.

But I mean, I do want to say that the Seoul games on the whole were actually really, really well received.

Like this Olympics was seen as a really positive moment for the country's history.

But the International Olympic Committee received so many complaints about the doves being burned alive on television that they actually decided to change the charter for the opening ceremony.

And although it had been a part of the Olympics since 1920, they said like, no more live doves.

You're done with the doves.

And I actually, I do agree with this.

I don't think live animals

use these live situations because of what just happened.

Yeah.

I mean, it makes a ton of sense to me that they should just do away with it after some horrific incident because, like, nobody wants animals to be harmed.

But given how the Olympics does all kinds of things that don't make any sense to me, that are just like steeped in the tradition of the Olympics, I'm actually surprised that they remove this whole protocol from the opening ceremony just, you know, because of how, you know, symbolically powerful doves are, but also just how stubborn they are about their own traditions.

I mean, like, it just sort of blows my mind that they reacted so quickly.

Well, funny that you say that because they never technically did remove the dove release from the opening ceremony.

They just fully leaned into, you know, what you said, the symbolic nature of it, and then pivoted entirely to a quote symbolic dove release.

Okay.

What does a symbolic dove release look like?

So the first Olympic Games to do this was actually the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics.

And actually, fun fact, the dove release practice had not actually been as much a part of the Winter Games, just because these games were usually hosted in like freezing cold cities that are inhospitable to live animals.

That makes sense.

But that year in 1992, they performed the first symbolic dove release by releasing white balloons.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Those have their own problems, but again, it makes sense.

So, but what have other cities done since then?

So, you know, the next summer games, the 1996 Atlantic Games, they had 100 children come running into the stadium with, you know, paper-mâché doves on sticks.

So it looked like they were fluttering in the wind.

The next couple games, the 2000 games in Sydney and the 2004 Games in Athens, they both featured projections of doves, which I think honestly is a little bit of a cop-out.

The 2008 Beijing Games actually went pretty hard.

Yeah, I mean, the entire Beijing Olympics went pretty hard.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So, like, the they had women dressed in white, like doing a dance and flapping their arms like bird wings, as there were dove projections in the background.

And then that was followed by massive fireworks, which also represented doves that were shooting out of the stadium.

Okay.

I think the 2012 London Olympics was my favorite interpretation.

They had 75 white-clad cyclists wearing LED wings circling the stadium.

And I think it's my favorite because

having people on bikes being the doves kind of makes absolutely no sense.

And that whole entire opening ceremony was just like a wacky fever daydream.

And since then, you know, we've had the return of children.

This time they, you know, ran to the stadium wielding dove-shaped kites.

And then in the Tokyo Olympics, there were thousands of paper doves falling from the ceiling to the music of Susan Boyle.

Symphonic release of the doves.

Always before the lighting of the Olympic cauldron.

So

that is how we have gotten past the live dove release in all of the ceremonies since then.

You know, even though this has important symbolism, I'm kind of intrigued by the idea that each host country has to come up with this whole new form of symbolism to approximate doves being released.

Like, that's actually kind of cool that they could come up with something original every time.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know,

my city, my home city that I live in, Los Angeles, is going to be hosting the 2028 Olympics, which pray for us, please, Rosen.

I really don't want them to do it here.

Oh, God.

But yeah, I mean, the one thing is like, Los Angeles is the city of entertainment.

It's what we do.

So I guess if anybody from the LA 2028 committee is listening,

try to do something cool for that symbolic dove release.

Also, we need more public restrooms before you guys come to Los Angeles.

Just think about that too.

I mean, that's really what the focus should be.

Yeah.

200 white toilets lining sidewalks.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Dove-shaped public restrooms all dotted around the landscape of Los Angeles.

It would be such a service.

Two birds with one stone, Roman, I'm telling you.

I know.

Well, this is awesome.

Thank you so much for telling me about this conundrum that they have to deal with every four years.

Thanks, Vivi.

After the break, Avery Truffleman has a very hot take about the future of the Olympics.

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We're back with one more story for you from Olympic Games Past and Future.

And this one comes to us from Articles of Interest host and 99% Invisible alum, Avery Truffleman.

Good to be back.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, Avery, you're here because you have a big idea about the Olympics, and I would very much like for you to share that idea with us.

I have got, I have got, I've got a take that I like to whip out at a certain hour at a party to make people mad.

People like to fight me on this, and I really don't understand because I think I'm right.

Okay.

What's your proposal?

Okay.

The Olympics should be

in Greece every single time.

It should not move to different cities.

It should only be in one city.

And that city should be in Greece.

And I need more people

to beat this drum with me.

Okay.

So tell me,

what is behind this proposal?

Like,

what problem are you trying to solve?

Oh.

What problem am I not trying to solve?

There's so many problems with the Olympics.

And I first had this idea back in 2016 when the Olympics were in, were in Brazil, and they were mowing down homes, you know, like favelas were being destroyed to make way for these big fancy structures that were being erected with like dubious labor practices because it had to be made so quickly.

And the thought was just like, well, who is this for?

You know, if you're destroying housing

so that visitors can come in and then leave, like, who is this actually for?

Yeah.

And also, it's not like the people in the city want the Olympics to come and change their traffic patterns and change their transit patterns and, like, disrupt everything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's clear that the Olympics is good for a very select group of regional oligarchs and then it's bad for almost everyone else.

I mean, maybe you can get psyched up about it because the Olympics actually like, you know, it inspires a certain type of like pride and like, I love watching Olympics.

I know you love watching Olympics.

I love the Olympics.

I love the Olympics.

I propose this because I love the Olympics.

But it is extremely disruptive.

Yes.

Well, I mean, I was in Athens, Georgia in grad school during the 96 Atlanta Olympics.

Like when they say an Olympics is in a city, it kind of spreads out.

And so a few events, like three or four events, were in Athens, Georgia.

And living through it was just misery.

And one of the parts that I really didn't like is the local merchants were kind of sold a line that they were going to make tons of money.

And it turned out like no one really did.

And it just made things kind of miserable because some volunteer in an orange vest told you you couldn't drive, you know, like down a street that you drove fast every day in your life.

And this was in 96.

Like 9-11 hadn't happened yet.

I can't even imagine what it's like today.

So they are disruptive.

I totally get that.

If you live in a city where the Olympics is being proposed, I'm telling you, like, don't buy into it.

It's just misery.

Like, get out of town.

Do a house swap.

Yeah.

And then the other thing, it's terrible for the athletes.

Like, why would they want to be uprooted into a totally new city every single time with a totally different climate and like not knowing their way around?

This job, being an Olympic athlete, it depends on having slept well and eaten well and like being comfortable.

And if it were in the same place every four years and they could maybe go there to practice in the offseason,

I think it it would do wonder, especially because the facilities that they erect to house the athletes are like an afterthought after these really fancy stadia.

And, you know, I forget which Olympics this was, but the Olympic village, the athletes were sleeping in cardboard beds.

That's insane.

Like,

it's not treating the actual athletes well if it's in a different place every time and they're expected to come up with all this housing.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they're also really, really expensive.

Like,

it's a strange thing to build all these facilities so quickly.

And usually it's done with poor labor practices.

It's very, very expensive.

And, you know, it's really hard for these cities to make their money back from their investment.

And they say it's going to be tourism, but it's not tourism because, as you said, kind of sucks when the Olympics are taking over your city.

You know?

Yeah.

And if Greece were allowed to invest fully in state-of-the-art facilities, have them maintained, have them used, they could actually make money back.

Yeah, it's true.

They're not in full use after the Olympics.

You know, like it's pretty rare for that to happen.

And therefore, like building one thing, maintaining it, taking care of it, like updating it, having the IOC funnel their money into it instead of local taxes being spent on it seems like a great idea.

I love it.

Yeah, steady investment.

And then I think it would allow for other teams from all over the world to just, instead of like, oh, we need to update our equipment, just pay for a plane or a train ticket to Greece.

You know, like they can have practice there in the offseason.

It would get full use, like almost constantly.

And it would be great for the local economy.

People would actually be spending time in whatever city this was.

So I don't see why it's so controversial.

But what about this tradition?

of the bidding process.

Like there are certain instances where hosting the Olympics is such a proud moment for at least some people in the country.

Like the Beijing Olympics, the opening ceremony was just beautiful and artistic and precise.

And you could tell that the Chinese government was like, we are going to put our best foot forward to just wow everybody in the world with this.

But yeah, I think that's also part of the problem.

There's such immense pressure for every host nation to like, quickly, quickly, quickly, clean it up, clean it up.

I mean, we did that episode about the 68 Mexico Olympics, where a bunch of protesters were shot at.

You know, they were protesting the single-party government, a totally reasonable grievance, peacefully protesting.

And we don't even know the amount of the dead because they were quickly cleaned up.

The blood was washed from the streets so the Olympics could begin.

Yes, sure.

Sometimes it's a great way to harken like arrival on the global scene, but it's also a way for nations to like shove everything quickly under the bed and be like, ta-da, we've made it.

And I think a better way to prove yourself in the Olympics is to take care of your athletes and win things.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, like, I think people think of it as this moment that it can catalyze a lot of infrastructural investments in a place.

However, those investments are geared towards this purpose, which is not necessarily serving the public at large.

Right, exactly.

Like to use the Mexico 68 Olympics again, like that was even a good example of infrastructure being added.

You know, it was like really responsible for the expansion of the Mexico subway system.

But still, I mean, it was designed so that no one would have to speak Spanish to understand it.

It was like geared for an international audience.

And so like, you know, obviously we're all for new infrastructure, but the whole thing about infrastructure is that it should be for the people who live there.

And the Olympics is not for the people who live there.

So why Greece?

Like, why is that the place that you think it should be the center of all this?

Anywhere other than Greece would be cultural appropriation.

It's Greek.

It belongs to Greek.

Like, they did the ancient version.

They did the revived version.

We still, you know, the flame starts in Greece and they've run it around the world.

It's like so obviously belonging.

I don't know about the Winter Olympics.

That can, maybe that can be a bit ever here.

But the Summer Olympics.

That'd be hard to figure out.

Yeah, that'd be hard to figure out.

But the Summer Olympics, 100% belongs in Greece somewhere.

I mean, if you think about it, it's like Greece's intellectual property that's being used.

And so,

yeah, Greece.

Also, like, why not?

It'd be a fun place for athletes to go visit.

Like, they'd get to know the restaurants.

They'd get to know the whatever, local massage therapists.

It would actually be good for the community because there would be more of an incentive to actually get to know it, and it wouldn't feel so temporary.

I love it.

I think this is a great idea.

I'm sold.

Rather than grabbing onto this like new tradition of hosting at a different place every four years, like embrace the old old.

The old.

I know.

I'm like, we must go back to the old ways.

But I don't mean it that way.

Just have it be increase.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this.

I'm totally sold.

I find no flaws in your argument whatsoever at this point.

Thank you so much.

This is very validating.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Jacob Moldonado Medina, and Vivian Lay.

Edited by Kelly Prime.

Mix and sound design by Martine Gonzalez.

Music by Swan Real.

Fact-checking by Laura Bolins.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer.

Kirk Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor.

Nikita Apte is our intern.

The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, La Shamadon, Nino Patuk, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% of Visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

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