Episode 161: The Olympics, Part 1

Uh oh boy.

Uh oh come on man.

You've been doing this for a hundred years.

No, it's it's all it's all running.

We've been sitting here.

I've been prepared.

I've been ready waiting to fire off this podcast now.

I just got home.

30 minutes.

I got to kiss my wife and then run down into the podcasting mine, strap on my podcasting helmet.

And now

I tell my wife that unironically a lot.

I'm just like, the life of a potter's wife was never an easy one.

And she's like,

Is this all there is?

And it's like, Yes, go to Couple Therapy, pay it so much.

You'll be there alone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like being a firefighter in a lot of ways, and that you kind of marry the job, right?

Like, you have course.

You're committing to the podcast more than anything.

A railroader, a whaler.

That's okay.

You can be in the video stuck on club with me.

This is genuinely one of the most offensive things I've ever said on this podcast: that being a podcaster is like being a firefighter.

We're nowhere near as racist as firefighters.

Yeah.

No, we get, but, but, but I would love to smash a car window and put all of that.

Oh, yeah.

We had a,

so, so, uh, last year, right, there was, um, uh, my neighbor upstairs was out of town or something, and her smoke alarm was going off.

Um, and eventually the fire brigade came around, and the joy, the gladness of heart that appeared on their faces when they realized they were going to have an excuse to put the door in was it like

it was like christmas morning they love that shit i'm sure i've told this story before in here but like firefighters live for that stuff and honestly you know i respect that very deeply who can blame them they love they love they love to do and this is what sets them apart from the cops is that firefighters only do property damage as opposed to not exclusively true

and this is the thing like i i do have an actual take here which that which is that a lot of the stuff that you hate about cops is true of all emergency services and emergency services culture, right?

The thin red line stuff is not so different after all.

But yeah, you know, whatever.

I don't know.

I love to see a firefighter break down a door.

That's great.

Everyone does.

Of course they do.

Fantastic thing.

Yeah.

But it's not what we're here to talk about today.

But I have to introduce the podcast first.

Hello, and welcome to.

Welcome.

Yeah,

that was a bad segue to the introduction.

That was beautiful.

That was great.

Keep going.

Keep going.

Anyway,

the real, the real, the real like fourth emergency service podcasting.

Yes, straight.

Arriving on the scene.

Portally.

Yes.

We're going to spend 45 minutes setting up the audio equipment and

by then the emergency service.

And then do a dog anyway.

Yeah.

But we're not going to shoot anybody's dog, so we're still better than the cops.

I can't promise either of those things.

Do you not like dogs, Nova?

I like dogs fine.

I was just making a joke about descending to a kind of cop denominator.

Oh, no, don't do that.

Achieved cop nature,

one with cop.

Yeah,

if you just meditate hard enough, the badge like appears on you.

I don't know where my second monitor went.

Sergeant Siddhartha Guatama.

Oh my god.

An officer involved in lighting.

Officer involved podcasting.

Cop achieves, achieves uh you know uh like samsara turns off the universe's body cam i achieve achieve the middle way between cop and firefighter

emt i think firefighter but a secret third thing yeah emti fire police fire police yeah

i have lived in pennsylvania basically my entire life and i still have no idea what the hell fire police do introduce they put the fire in jail duh

yeah and then i i i support abolition for like all marginalized fires.

Introduce the guest, at least.

Hello.

Hello, and welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Roznik.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the firefighter who's talking now, and my pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him.

And we have a guest, our returning champion, who you may recognize from the fashion episode.

Lovely voice.

First name, nunya, last name, business.

Uh, pronouns not included with this purchase.

Um, mystery pronouns.

And uh, we have previously been calling me Madame X.

So, if you feel the need to picture a face, please picture the John Singer Sargent portrait.

Um,

yeah,

uh,

the other thing I was going to say: uh, if you you are someone who happens to be able to recognize me by my voice,

don't tell my mom or my boss you found me here.

Thanks.

If you think you know Madame X, no, you don't.

No, you don't.

Nope.

So we see on the screen here the Olympic Park in Athens.

Oh, those are the Olympic rings.

Indeed, they were.

Reminds me of an old Soviet joke where Brezhnev, in his dosage, this is going to link to a news item, is opening the Olympic Games.

He's delivering the like sort of commencement address or whatever.

He's like, you know, has his little reading glasses on.

He reads from a paper and he says, oh, huge applause.

Oh, huge applause.

Oh, huge applause.

A guy comes up and whispers in his ear, Leonid Ilich, those are the Olympic rings.

You don't have to read them.

It's funny because it's relatable to current politicians.

I was about to say, but yeah,

you can see this is not in great shape.

Today we're going to start a three-part series on a very topical thing, the Olympics.

It's a podcast series.

It's like a little limited podcast, but then a podcast.

Yes.

This is not going to be the Penn Central episode where you people are just like, is this the end of the podcast?

Still no, we still got to make red.

And this is, this is, you know, if

we're going to record this in a big, huge chunk, so you're not getting any good goddamn news for a while.

It's all going to be the news of four weeks ago.

Which speaking of, we have to do the goddamn news.

Hang on just a second.

Just before we get started here, and this applies to this slide, which is why I need to say it now,

there are

a lot of instances of Olympic rings, Olympic logos, so on and so forth occurring in this.

The Olympics are very, very tight arsed about their trademarks and have gotten more so over the past 10 years.

So just to keep our asses out of hot water, nothing that we're doing in here is claiming to represent the

views of the Olympic organization or be in any way associated with them.

And if you happen to know me, happen to know where I work, this also does not in any way represent the views of my employer.

I am speaking off the clock out of my own opinions.

It's very funny to be precious about the logo when it is literally five O's, like five circles.

It truly is, but they are.

Yes.

Any,

we do not represent the views of the Olympic Committee or the, well, there's your problem Olympic organizing committee, which is essentially.

Yeah, thank you for organizing that.

Yeah, I mean, I will say this.

I absolutely do not represent the views of the IOC because the views of the IOC are predictably awful.

Yes.

Yes.

We're trying to get podcasting in as an Olympic sport.

You know one way in which my views differ from the views of the IOC?

I don't think it's acceptable to have been a member of the Nazi Party.

You know another way that

your views probably differ from those of the IOC?

You think it's okay to be a trans person.

Well, we just assumed that of me.

I didn't actually say that, but.

Oh, fuck's sake, Nova.

No, no, no.

I'm embarking on a new career as one of the good ones.

November Kelly, author of the cast report.

Baroness Kelly to you.

Thank you.

You must address me by title, Caltis von Fingerbag.

I think it's kind of insulting that she wants to identify as a baroness when she wasn't assigned that at birth.

I do think that's a good point.

You're not ABAB.

What kind of hormones did it give you for that?

The good ones.

It's the good ones.

It's in a big vault underneath like Adrena Crime.

All right.

Speaking of Adriena crime, it's time to do the goddamn news.

Hey, we got into it.

I'm at 10 minutes.

Oh, my God.

This fucking asshole again.

I'm so fucking tired of looking at this dude's face, man.

For those of you on audio, it's fucking Joe Biden eating an ice cream.

God fucking damn it.

I'm so tired of him, man.

Let me lay down a marker here that may be wrong, even by the time this episode goes out.

I think his cold, dead hand hand clings to the nomination.

The convention is a kind of death march, and he gets into the election, loses to Trump, and then dies.

That's my prediction.

That's yeah, I mean, this is this is, you know, we're sort of

slowly coming to the realization of something that was surprisingly obvious four years ago.

Joe Biden no longer has a brain.

Being joined in that by John Federman, who is, of course, a staunch defender of him on that basis, a kind of like you know brain injury caucus i mean and and and and the funny thing is of course trump doesn't really have a brain either so we're just you know we're we're we're watching this sort of slow motion train wreck everyone can see it coming people could do something to stop it but no one's gonna do that

you man they i listen My parents, as we know, are a communist and an anarchist, but because we live in Pennsylvania, vote Democrat, because that's, we live in a swing state, folks.

And both my parents independently call me to be like, this guy needs, Joe needs to drop out.

And again, when you've lost my mom, who is a very pragmatic person,

you lost me too, but I just can't believe I have to fucking vote for this asshole again.

God damn it.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, it would be funny if they both died in October.

I agree.

I agree profoundly.

The thing is, right, if Biden does drop out or die, what you're left with is most likely Kamala Harris, who is like only like 10% less evil, right?

And mostly that's like lack of longevity.

Joe Biden has been fucking around since the 70s.

72.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whereas Kamala was just like, she's, she's got like a couple of decades of evil shit, but she, she needs to like rack up some more numbers.

The thing that's amazing to me is the stuff that's just like, it's, it's rape culture to want Joe Biden to drop out.

Yeah, it's, it's rape culture.

It's also, we're doing racism and misogyny against Joe Biden.

But you can't do that to him.

It doesn't work that way.

Just bizarre, like, sort of collapsing, misfolding identity politics within the Democratic Party as the whole thing just collapses.

Before anyone gets mad at me for voting for Joe Biden, I need my VAWA funding so I still have a job.

He will have at least left office having achieved his goal of banning abortion for the Pope.

Operation Complete, Your Holiness.

Yeah, exactly.

Our second Catholic president, he finally did it.

He banned abortion.

This is what's so insane to me about the whole abortion thing is that you have Donald Trump and sort of like unabatedly evil guy, right?

Obvious rapist, but someone who clearly

has no qualms with abortion, has undoubtedly paid for multiple, who is in the position of being the pro-life candidate.

Whereas Joe Biden, lifelong Catholic, lifelong misogynist, probably also rapist, who is horrified at the idea of abortion,

is in the position of being the pro-choice candidate.

And everyone wonders why he's so lukewarm and tepid about Roe versus Wade.

And it's because he doesn't like it.

He's like not an abortion guy because he's a Catholic.

Like, and he takes that shit seriously, and he's a terrible person.

Yeah.

And I mean, also, he doesn't have a brain.

Well, also that, but even before that, you know.

Even before that, yeah.

Yeah.

So it seems like a bad time for the United States of America on a few levels.

Yeah, I mean,

the problem with the Democrats right now is that if they keep the candidate, they're screwed.

And if they switch the candidate, I think they're also screwed.

I'll buy that.

I think Kamala beats Trump, but then you get into the situation of like you have again achieved harm mitigation, right?

Like things are not as bad.

Things are still really fucking bad.

And the system continues to like roll along for another four or eight years until, I don't know, Trump runs again.

Or

the other problem might be you might not even be able to get Kamala on the ballot because all these signatures have gone out already.

I mean, the only way to switch to candidates is someone may have Joe Biden.

I mean,

you can't

the verb.

I'm not saying go out and do it.

I'm just saying maybe the, maybe they'll have, you know, Schumer take them out back.

Yeah.

Old yeller his ass.

Yeah.

To sort of, to my point, bleep all the verbs.

To my point about Trump, right, about like, whether it's him, whether it's someone like him in like four years, eight years,

like 12 years, 16 years, is that you're not going to do that by like sort of beating him with Kamala Harris or whatever other like middle of the road, like sort of authoritarian Democrat because there's a like he's sort of unleashed something.

And I think the only sort of like

I don't know how you look at this and don't feel like it's bleeding Kansas and you don't feel like John Brown, you know?

Right.

With all of that said, speaking as someone who is a queer person whom the state sees as a woman living in Texas,

I kind of need us to have the chance to get some decent Supreme Court picks into that office.

So please don't vote in a way that's going to make it easier for Trump to win.

Anyway,

I don't know that there's a possibility to do that with the kind of norms that the Democratic Party have established for themselves.

You know, like, I don't think Camela is going to pack the court either.

Everyone's scared of, you know, putting in like a two-year-old judge.

Oh, dude, I have to do.

You have to put the world's healthiest two-year-old and you have to get like 900 of them.

Pack the fucking court.

Yeah, you have to like play a little bit dirty at a minimum, ideally a lot dirty, and no one wants to do it.

Everyone's like, oh, we've got to respect the process with people who are like absolutely not respecting the process and who are dunking on you time and time again.

As I've said many times,

issue an executive order that says Marbury versus Madison was wrongly decided.

You have to home.

Yeah, just tell it, tell them to enforce any of this shit.

Like,

that's within the president's remit.

From the desk of Joe Biden, it just says, suck my acid balls.

And this is the thing.

Like, any, any, like, mainstream Democrat, any of them, and I include Bernie in this, right, is going to be perfectly comfortable ordering like unlimited suffering, whether that's in Gaza, whether that's on the border, whether that's domestically within prisons, right?

But they won't take the time to extend that kind of authoritarianism to the people that they might have to see at a restaurant.

They won't extend that to like Supreme Court justices who all hate them and are all corrupts and would all happily see them uh like executed pack the fucking court yeah yes or just pack the court abolish the court i i don't move it into a reference like that is all the side

like yeah that's the basketball court oh jesus okay well make them sit up there and like you know think about what they've done uh but like the this is the thing i feel like you you come to a point where you think uh the the contradictions in the system can't like stand and survive for long yes i i'll buy buy that i gotta tell you on my soundboard that i'm using thank you friend of the show amanda who bought this for me there's a button that just says dnr and i wonder that if i press that a bunch of canadian doctors come in and shoot me with the euthanasia gun yeah we yeah our message to uh like president biden president trump seek canadian healthcare yes um that may be what we have to do i mean the canadian doctors wouldn't even take two looks at biden before setting him on the fucking plan.

I mean,

they'll look at anyone and just say, have you considered medical assistance in death?

They'll like look at a fucking Olympic.

They did tell a Paralympian, have you considered medical assistance in death?

It's the thing

I kind of like on an instinctual, like principled level, I support the right to die in a sort of like time and manner of your choosing.

But fuck me, does Canada make it difficult?

That's a future episode.

I already put that on the spreadsheet a while back.

Anyway, thank you.

So, in other

news.

So,

you may have heard these notes.

You may have heard that in a few weeks, there actually immediately a time of release for this episode there's there's going to be a sporting event in France and

they are planning to have

some of the open water events in

as well as the opening ceremony in the river Seine in the Seine in Paris

and

So there was a

the Seine is kind of known for not being a particularly clean or nice river.

And so there was very, very stinky.

A massive campaign to clean it up, to make the water quality acceptable for all of those.

And Macron said that he would swim in it for the opening ceremony.

And then the most, like, and then the sort of most popular hashtag on French Twitter was je chid en la sine

and like the date of the opening ceremony.

I'm going to shit in the river.

It's going to be a bunch of farmers are going to show up and they're going to

do the usual protest thing where they just spray manure in there.

Actually, a little bit more complex than that.

They were planning a day, I think it was June the 23rd, that he was going to get in and swim

to kind of demonstrate that, oh, it's cleaned up, it's ready.

And

a computer programmer as a protest made this website where wherever you lived along the Seine, you could put in your distance from Paris and it would tell you what date you needed to go to the river and shit so that it would flow down to Paris and be there by the 23rd.

You know,

between this and the election results, France has been a little inspirational lately.

Yeah, I mean,

one of the things, though,

Anne Hidalgo, I think, has done a lot of good for Paris.

She's the mayor.

You know, and a swimmable...

you know, river is like an incredible achievement that only a few places have, you know, done.

I think Baltimore's trying it with the inner harbor right now, but they got a long way to go.

But yeah, it looks like they may just about miss the deadline.

They're going to have to do some extraordinary measures just to keep the river clean for like the Olympics.

And then it's like, okay, we still got some work to do afterwards.

Big kind of pool net.

You know, you're sort of riding around in a boat, fishing turds out of it.

It's awesome.

They go right through the thing, through the netting.

You're going to have to get a turd bucket.

You know, the bucket you use for throw-up and popcorn you got to use that for poop too

oh gosh i i don't want to hear about that anymore i'm sorry it made a big like impact on the listeners is the thing can i just add my commentary that what we used in my house growing up was just the bathroom trash can with a with the bag taken out

wait with the bathroom you can hug that out oh i see yeah you can hose that out but you can throw away the bag yeah

it's got holes in the bottom because we never use like specifically made trash can liners.

We just use like shopping bags.

A plastic bag, yeah.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

And those always get holes in the bag.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm tracking.

I'm tracking.

Yeah.

So add that to the list of bodily functions Roz is uncomfortable with.

I don't like hearing that people use the same.

I'm not going to talk about this.

It is unhygienic.

But what about throwing up is hygienic?

Amis.

True.

We did discuss this briefly before we started the podcast.

I wasn't here because I was too busy dying in traffic.

I'm just annoyed that I've Americanized myself by saying hygienic as opposed to hygienic.

Hygienic.

Hygienic.

Hygienic.

We're coming for your pronunciation of women next.

No, we're not.

No, we're not.

I don't want to do an impression of you because I'll just fuck it up.

Yeah, your voice doesn't go that deep.

Oh, okay.

I uh, I could do a Raw's impression, uh, yeah,

Raw's impression is identical to your impression of your dad.

Yes, it is.

I only have one voice.

All right, so shit and descend, do your protests, shit in a plastic bag with the with that's leaking and bail it to a Supreme Court justice.

Yeah, we don't have to bleed that one, right?

That was uh the goddamn news.

All right.

So, moving on to the actual presentation.

This first episode is going to be focused particularly on aspects of the planning and preparation process for the games and how they often fail primarily the host cities, but also

everyone else who is involved.

And so, the first thing we're going to talk about is Olympic bidding.

Next slide, please.

Raising hand is this this is the part, well, one of the parts that's like obviously insanely corrupt, right?

Um, we're gonna talk about that.

We're gonna talk about that a lot.

All right.

Um,

yeah, that's I think that's kind of the point.

Be at the Olympics.

Next.

Until very recently, um, like they just changed the process for the most recent Olympics to be awarded, which was uh Brisbane 2032.

Um, everything

up until then, since a very long time ago, has been

done via this process.

It starts out with the IOC puts out a call for bids and national Olympic committees respond with their cities from their country that are interested in hosted in hosting.

And you get a large pool of applicant city respondents.

And we see all the like beautiful logos here, which really just seems like a kind of scam to like funnel money to graphic designers.

I mean, don't worry, they'll start doing it with the AI.

City logos are a bit graphic design is my passion.

Not this specific batch, but there have been some some that were rough.

The Baku logo looks like a like an Enron rebrand.

I like Rome's.

Rome's is cool.

Well, that's Baku.

If you look very closely at the Baku one, it's actually 20 facing one way and then 20 facing the other.

I hate that.

That's fuck off.

I like Madrid's.

I don't know.

That's kind of sweet.

I like the flip-flops.

Is that what these are?

Or are these surfboards?

I'm on my surface laptop.

It's a very abstract depiction of some culturally significant building or something that's in Madrid, but I don't remember exactly what it is.

I'll go with flip-flops.

Fuck them.

Culturally significant flip-flops building.

All right.

so those applicant cities submit a questionnaire with a lot of information about their bid and based on that they get scored um in 11 categories those are political and social support for the games the general infrastructure they need to host it the sports venues specifically uh the olympic village the environmental concerns for their plan,

accommodation for like reporters and tourists and everyone who wouldn't be staying in the village, transportation security past event experience with hosting major sporting events uh the finance for it and what the legacy will be in their country um and

i know what the legacy bit means that means all the shit that you like leave behind and you claim oh this is going to be like a sort of center of excellence and you're going to build a bunch of social housing and shit on top of it this is

are these scorecards released to the public yes okay thank you telling me they should just keep doing atlanta over and over and over again.

Yeah.

Hopefully they'll get bombed again, man.

Not a great legacy.

Oh, but they made money off of it, though.

Okay.

I think it's the most recent Olympics in memory that actually made money for someone.

I don't want Atlanta to have shit.

I've been to Atlanta.

I don't care for it.

You were saying, Madam X.

You may or may not get real mad about.

I forget if it's two slides from now, but anyway.

So the IOC executive committee from that scored list of applicants then picks a short list of candidate cities, typically three to five that scored the best.

And then the IOC evaluation committee performs much more thorough evaluation, scoring, and recommendations on those candidate cities.

The candidate cities themselves have to create a much more extensive bid book with all the information they can possibly provide about their candidacy.

This information is then presented to all of the IOC members.

And the IOC membership then votes in what is called an exhaustive ballot.

And the way that works is you start out with every candidate city on there, you vote for who you want.

If no one candidate city gets greater than 50% a majority, then the lowest scoring city is eliminated and everyone votes again.

And you keep doing this over and over.

until there is a city that gets a majority.

And the IOC members during this process, if you're an IOC member from a country that has a candidate city, you're not allowed to vote until your country's bid has been eliminated.

The 2020 bidding process was the last Summer Olympics where this actually functioned as intended.

It kind of started to break down for 2024 and 2028.

We'll get into that in a bit.

But the USOC also follows a similar process at the national scale to choose the US's candidate city when it puts a bid forth.

And this image here is the logos of all the finalist cities for the 2020 Olympics.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Boo!

Oh, we got some old guys.

I don't even know who these guys are, but I bet they suck.

Just say all you really need to know: like old, old white guy, expensive suit, insanely corrupt, right?

Yes.

Didn't we arrest or was it FIFA or the IC or

You're thinking of Set Bladder and the FIFA scandal, but there.

We kind of have Set Blatter vibes here.

There are some Set Bladder vibes, but we will talk about somebody who got arrested a little bit later on, but it's not one of these guys.

Incarcerol, but only for the IOC.

On the left here, we have Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was the IOC president in the 80s and

90s.

And then we have Jacques,

I cannot pronounce French, Jacques Roges, I'm taking a swing and probably missing there, who is actually Belgian, but he was the IOC president who directly succeeded Samaranch.

He was

all through the 2000s and the early part of the 2010s.

And

under Samaranche's tenure,

the Olympic movement grew considerably.

They added more sports.

They added more participants in many sports.

They added more countries and they added more money into the operations of the games.

So there was an impetus to make the games more sponsor-friendly and more inclusive of the developing countries.

And one of the things that you see as a result of that is they were pushing to get the Olympics into new locations.

Before the 90s, it had mostly been limited to Europe,

the Americas, particularly North America, and a little bit of Asia.

Like there had been some in Japan, but and one in South Korea, but not much of anywhere else.

But you start seeing like Greece being an Eastern European nation that was considered developing,

South America with Brazil, China, all of that sort of thing.

And the focus in picking countries sometimes lay more on what city and what country would create a memorable event or have kind of sex appeal over what was the wisest choice in terms of finance, politics, and safety.

And this.

So you're like, we're going to have, we're going to have, we're going to have.

The Olympics are going to be in, I don't know, we're going to have them in Sochi, but we're not going to have them in Smolensk.

Where do these guys want to hang out in a VIP box, right?

Sochi has nice weather.

Smolensk does not have nice weather.

Yeah.

I won't even consider Odessa.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Okay.

So now we're at the difficult bit.

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

Oh, look at this.

This is the boot.

This is terrific.

Yeah, I remember this, I think.

Oh, you're mad about this, huh?

Oh, I have been living mad about this since 1999, and I'm going to die mad about this.

That actually says I'm

angry about this.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

So let's go ahead and watch the video.

Okay.

This is going to be going to be irritating.

Essentially, what we're all doing, for those of you listening at home, is because I can't figure out how to put the audio through.

We all have to watch this video at the same time.

Right.

We are all big.

It's like, yeah.

So I'm going to full screen this, and I assume everyone else has theirs.

All right.

Just say like three, two, one, mark, and I'll hit play when you say mark.

All right.

Three, two, one, go.

Is that Mark?

Much of South Maine

lives in the past.

Cars drive past a succession of boarded buildings and vacant lots.

The world seems far away.

But the world may be coming here now that Bob McNair's NFL dream provides a stadium fit for a glittering Olympic opening ceremony.

This is real important for our bid.

I think it makes our bid go from being really good to great.

Houston is competing with the likes of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.

for the 2012 Olympics.

That one event, boosters claim, will make a greater economic impact than the Super Bowl and both national political conventions combined.

The Astronomical Complex, After Domain Complex,

because Houston had recently hosted both.

Oh, you guys really got shafted here, huh?

It's one of those clusters that the

Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee really look for.

And that reborn Astro Domain could mean a reborn Super Bomb.

Oh, she's magnificent.

It has the potential of looking like another downtown.

What we're hoping to do in our new design is have economic value for the stadium and the dome complex, but also

talk of a Super Bowl or an Olympics would have seemed like a cruel joke on South Maine.

Now at last, it may be time to dream again.

So, this was a piece from our local NBC affiliate, KPRC, that ran in 1999, I think,

to promote the Olympic bid that Houston had submitted to the USOC to become a

to become the US's candidate city for 2012.

And what wound up happening was they made it down to the round of four and then they and I think Boston were knocked out and New York and San Francisco stayed in and eventually New York was the one that was presented.

They lost to London.

So the reason I'm still angry about this is because in terms of actually thinking intelligently about what makes a good Olympic bid, Houston's was pretty much perfect.

It was cost effective.

It used mostly facilities that already existed.

The few that needed to be built would either be temporary, so they wouldn't become a long-term blight, or they were something that would fill needs in the community, like repurposing the Astrodome, which As it turns out, 25 years later, we still can't figure out what to do with that.

Student housing for University of Houston and Texas Southern University

forcing us to actually build a metro rail system downtown.

A lot of it got built anyway because of the Super Bowl bid, but it probably would have wound up being more extensive and more complete if we had had the Olympics.

The total proposed capital expenditure for us was about $165 million,

which was less than half of what the main stadium alone for London wound up costing.

Didn't they do nothing with that stadium too?

And obviously.

Oh, I forgot.

2012.

Yeah, we were the ones who ruined your shit.

I was waiting for a hook into this.

I'm like, yeah, our sort of our gain is your loss.

If it's any consolation,

the London Olympics became this kind of like centrist totem in British politics of the last time things were good.

But on the other hand, I am glad that they caused misery elsewhere in the world.

It seems like a disqualifying factor if you're like, you know, you can walk up the Olympic Committee and say, yeah, we have all the facilities already.

Yeah, it's not exciting.

It's boring.

You got to go with the old raffle.

You're not creating work for all these architects

designers.

I should hire Zaha Hadid to use slave labor to build a slave labor.

They don't bore Zaha Hadid.

The world is a good thing.

think she did the world i was gonna say that i don't think london 2012 used slave labor but i don't know that that's true i think that we did use like people who like on by under threat of benefit sanctions we made them be security guards the world has not moved past zaha hadid because she is one of the very few people who after her death her firm retained her name um now it's now sculpting zaha hadid from beyond the grave yeah

I do look forward to the

people who clip this out of context and just use it for a classic, well, there's your problem in a nutshell video, where it's just Nova trying to make a point about slave labor while Roz

fights valiantly to bitch about Zaha Hadid.

Yeah.

What I've learned is I just continue talking at the same volume until one of you

so much.

Because of the low capital expenditure and other kind of cost-saving measures, the games were expected that if we got the bid, they would probably turn a profit, which is incredibly unusual for the Olympics, as we discussed.

I think it's Atlanta that was the last one that actually managed to do that.

And before that, it had been a while.

Another.

Because they were just like, we can use all our shit we already have.

Another interesting factor about the Houston bid is that despite being a city known for excessive urban sprawl, our bid was pretty compact and kept most of the medal events within three major sites, that being the Astra Domain, which is the area now known as NRG Park,

the campuses of the University of Houston and Texas Southern, and then the downtown Houston area, and all three of those were expected to be to get connected together with the light rail like I was talking about earlier.

I don't mean to gloat in any way

of the London 2012 Olympics, but I do have a drop that may be slightly related.

I thought it was going to be Royal Britannia.

That's better than I thought.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't.

Well,

Houston was out and running before it ever got to the question of is it going to be the US or the UK or whoever else?

Like, we were a little, we were eliminated at the USOC level.

But

Houston beating London.

That would be a big

victory for American excellence.

But I mean, that's basically what the Atlanta bid did.

I haven't had the chance to read this book yet, but there is some book that goes into like excessive detail about what a bizarre

occurrence it was that led to Atlanta actually being selected.

But we'll get back to that.

Anyway, with regards to the Houston bid, a lot of the other events, which often kind of have have to be placed further afield for practical reasons, would be kept closer to home.

Our open water events were probably going to be in like the Clear Lake area, which is very close to our downtown compared to, say, Savannah, where Atlanta had a lot of its open water events.

Marseilla, where...

uh paris is doing its sailing tahiti where they're doing their surfing event um what yeah

yeah it's french i yeah i mean i it's not just the water events.

Like for London, one of the things was there was genuine concern that it might not be legal to do the shooting events anywhere in the UK.

And they might have to do them in France.

They ended up doing them in, like, God, I want to say like Bisley or somewhere like that, which is like miles.

What do they do for modern pentathlon?

Because that's got a shooting ground.

I think they just like, I think they managed it here, but there were some questions about the like legality of it.

I know that like some of the like Team GB

for shooting events had to train in France for instance.

they'd have to they if they if they did in houston they'd have to add guns to more events they'd have to add like add like water balloons

yeah tom tom daly sort of like jump tom daly dives off the high board glock comes out of the waistband

um and then uh the equestrian events are something that also often has to be put further away from the main

side of the Olympics because of uh well in Beijing they they did them in Hong Kong because that,

because the horse racing industry in Hong Kong meant that there was already the import and quarantine facilities that they needed set up.

So it was just easier to do it there.

But there have also been other Olympics where they've been placed, you know, kind of out in the country where there's actually space to do equestrian versus in the middle of downtown.

In Houston, you could have done, you could have done dressage with guns.

In Houston, we have an equestrian center in KD that hosts some nationally renowned shows, and then

another round of the proposal.

I don't know which one was final, but I saw both the Equestrian Center in KD and the

Sam Houston Raceway mentioned as options.

And then for like preliminary play of some of those tournament style sports,

Houston and Texas Triangle in general, which is Houston, Dallas, and then Austin, San Antonio area,

has a lot of very large high schools and colleges, which have very nice stadiums and arenas, which could have been used for this.

Even

it's very, very funny.

Like, I know like these things are religions in Texas, and I know the facilities are world class, but like on paper, very funny to be playing something like Olympic basketball in a high school, like technically a high school gymnasium.

I mean, they, they, they have big fucking money.

I went to the high school that made the international news for um making the 13,000-seat stadium.

Or is that right?

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, yeah, you know, 13,000 people show up to look at kids.

They do.

Nonce, nonce, non-state.

Sorry.

I mean,

like, we've, we've said all of this on college football football already.

High school football, same thing times a million.

That's weird.

It's like, you know, a bunch of 50-year-old guys looking at the cheerleaders.

I don't need that.

Still big rat.

Bring it on as a classic.

I won't hear anything against it.

Yeah, correct.

Yeah.

Anyway, so

the kind of main arguments against it that were brought up were, number one, it's hot, which what I have written here is blah, blah, blah, it's hot.

Shut the hell your mouth air conditioning exists losers if i can handle your mouth shut the hell your mouth and if i can handle being outside in it for six years of junior high and high school athletics and marching band practice you can handle two weeks um honestly you should be more worried that a hurricane will spin up out of nowhere two days beforehand and ruin everything and the games probably would have been scheduled more like late september like they were in sydney for the 2000 olympics to minimize both these risks get us out of hurricane season out of the hottest part of the year

Hey, I mean, now, given climate change, a few years later, it's not out of hurricane season, and it's not out of the hottest part of the year anymore.

I had to say, you could, you could, you could, you, you, you may as well put it in Galveston.

That's where you should have the Olympics.

I want to see an entire Olympic rowing team get picked up like twisters,

just like, just like going all around her.

That would be a tornado, I think.

Yeah.

Would the boat

at that point?

I mean, there's only one way to find out.

Very aerodynamic.

Has to be.

Be the sort of first rowing boat equivalent of those storm chaser planes that

NOAA flies through like hurricanes.

I've been out in a racing shell back when I was in high school when there was like a thunderstorm coming.

And I was like, I was like, you know, I was like, why did the coach bring us out today?

This is fucking miraculous.

We're out in the widest part of the Potomac River.

And

there's like three-foot waves.

And this is a boat that was notoriously unreliable um

it it it liked to sink on its own for no reason and we had to somehow row it like five miles

it was miserable you don't you didn't have like life jackets around oh hell no

okay well i'm i'm glad you didn't die because now justice

lore drop kills

oh yeah it was uh we were rowing from thompson's boathouse back to the anacostia community boathouse after regatta so we we were also tiring as all hell because we had done a race.

And then it was like, yep, here we are.

The river's a mile wide at this point.

There's a thunderstorm going.

The wind is terrible.

Everyone's soaked.

It was awful.

Yeah.

This is why you pursue a career that's like very, very indoors and warm and dry.

Yeah, I don't have to deal with that anymore.

Actually, no, I love drawing.

That was great.

I'd love to do it again, but I'm too big.

Oh,

Ross.

It is.

I didn't turn the fan on because you could hear it off of the podcast.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

So it was...

Meanwhile, I'm muting myself to eat digestive.

Oh, nice.

The weather was brought up as one thing.

And then the other thing that was brought up was just like Houston isn't a city with an identity that's international.

And I mean, I personally argue against that.

Let's go Beyonce.

It's got like the fucker Houston, Texas, by the way.

Beyonce was like still part of Destiny's Child, but

Beyonce had a solo career by 2012.

It's got the star of Austin Powers 3 Gold member.

Oh, great fucking movie.

Don't say that shit to me, man.

You don't know the shit that I've been through.

Like, no one can say there's no culture in Houston.

Come to Roscoe.

There's no modern artists there.

You can see a Roscoe.

Yeah.

but

we, uh,

I mean, the three things that I would have said to lean into: number one is that, um, if you want to get a little bit more flashy and futuristic about it, you can lean into our identity with NASA.

Number two, if you want to be more kind of broadly Texas as a whole, you can lean into the cowboy and the rodeo thing.

And number three,

if you want to take the same tack that the

Houston Organizing Committee did wind up taking, we are demographically kind of leading the country in that the minority, majority

cultural makeup that is expected to eventually be where the whole U.S.

gets, where no one specific racial or ethnic group has a majority, is something that I think Houston may have already hit, but is certainly projected to hit within the next 10 years.

And at the time, I think it was like projected to hit by 2025.

And so that could have also been something that they could have leaned into as their, or that the USOC could have leaned into as their big selling point for the games when they talked to the IOC is that Houston is one of the most truly international cities in the United States.

We have, you know, a large black community, a large Hispanic community, and also large communities of various different Asian groups, Middle Eastern groups.

Imagining pitching this to the IOC, one of the most racist organizations on the face of the planet.

Maybe they got it confused with Dallas, which is a genuine hellscape and barren wasteland.

Good, we agree on that.

Anyway, so after Houston was eliminated, the San Francisco Chronicle ran this nasty little article with quotes like,

It's rather amusing that second-tier towns like Houston, which I remind you, Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, continue to huff and puff when they get left at the threshold when competing against the San Francisco's of the world, which is to say the likes of London and Paris and New York.

I actually love this shit.

I love liberal sneering when it's of like little political consequence.

Because this is just like straightforwardly entertainingly evil to me i they don't like putting up buildings is illegal in san francisco

um you know i'm kind of like i the the san francisco is a dead-end city they have like 40 people there um and none of them can make rent yeah and well like apart from like two tech guys who are trying to like organize a kind of ultra-fascist coup you know yeah that's true that's well they're using that from the rent money that no one else can pay

And then another

quote from this article is saying,

referring to a quote from a Houston sports writer, John P.

Lopez,

without all of its pizzazz and sexiness and popularity and allure, San Francisco wouldn't even stand a chance.

And the Chronicle says, and he's right, for without all of those traits, San Francisco would be Houston with better weather.

Like, it's just such

jackassery.

Fuck this newspaper.

Fuck them hard.

That's a kill shot.

I'm sorry.

Like, that's, oh, my God.

I'm coming out surprisingly pro-Houston today.

I've never been

before, but

this is them.

Yeah, let's go, Houston.

This is winning me over to San Francisco.

They're very much the kind of like, uh, like preppy house and like a sort of like college film.

You know, they have the, like, all the money and the, like, attitude and the, like, slick down hair and shit.

And for some reason, that endears me.

Uh, do you want to pay?

Do you want to pay

like $4,000 a month for half a bedroom?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm moving to London.

Absolutely.

Let's go 49ers question mark.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong, wrong.

I worked in all the frat houses were preppy houses.

Oh, God.

Roll tide, roll, baby.

Roll damn tide.

Anyway,

next slide, please.

This is what y'all all started baying for the moment I mentioned Olympic bidding.

So let's talk about it.

The Salt Lake bidding.

Oh, God damn.

We're hogs too.

Oh, yeah.

The candidate cities bribing IOC members to vote for them was not a new practice.

It's also

not a subtle practice either, right?

Like it's one of those things.

But you can be subtle with it.

You can be like, hey, this is important fact-finding for us to go to all of the best restaurants and like, you know, get a bunch of like gifts of cultural value or whatever.

But you can also do, as a bunch of other places have done, especially like the World Cup to, of just like, here is an envelope full of cash.

Yeah, I mean, what happened was Mitt Romney invented the IOC to Salt Lake City and introduced them to the practice of soaking.

Not exactly.

No, that's exactly what happened.

I was there.

You're just in the next room.

Hello, Willard.

Mitt Robin got shot on the bed.

Hello, Willard.

Should I just say something to someone that I know is listening to this episode?

Hi, Ash.

This is for you.

Anyway.

So it wasn't a new practice, but it came like out to the public during the Salt Lake 2002 bid process.

I'm just thrilled about the idea that the guy you get to do the jumping on the bed isn't a Mormon, like a kind of Shabos guy, but for like to the Mormon soak, you know?

It wasn't me.

Mormon as a bonus episode is coming just as soon as I read it.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

You have to go to the like, you know, 5% of like BYU that's like nominally not Mormon, I guess.

And so a Swiss member of the IOC, Mark Hodler, blew the whistle on that and came out with how hundreds of thousands of dollars had been misappropriated to make scholarships for IOC members' kids, to pay for medical expenses, to buy them guns, all that sort of stuff, in addition to your

more typical

trip to the city, getting wined and dined, getting, you know,

envelopes of cash stuffed under your door in the middle of the night, all that sort of thing.

Eventually, what happened was that 10 IOC members resigned, another 10 were sanctioned.

The Department of Justice

brought federal bribery and corruption charges against the Salt Lake organizers, but those wound up eventually getting dropped.

It came out later on in kind of all the media storm that also the Sydney, Nagano, and Atlanta bids had been affected by similar practices, and it likely goes back much further than that.

There was actually some questioning for a while over whether the Sydney games were going to have to give up their right to host because

it turned out that like they had specifically bribed two African IOC members, and if I remember correctly, and then they won their

election as host city by two votes, or something very similar to that.

Perfect coincidence.

And so after that,

the IOC subsequently banned visits to bid cities by the IOC members,

instated age and term limits for new IOC members, although not for the members who were already part of the IOC and hadn't been sanctioned.

And they significantly revised the bid process to what we talked about earlier.

Prior to that, it had just kind of been that they, instead of being evaluated by a specific subcommittee of the IOC, it was just any IOC member who wanted to could go to

candidate cities and get information from them that and, you know, envelopes full of cash, pose and blow, that sort of thing.

This is, this is one of the like,

much like FIFA or UEFA or like any number of these sort of like organizations, one of the best jobs in the world if you have no morals.

Like, you just

can surround yourself with like extreme luxury in return for like, you know, sort of trading on the rights to hold these games.

And a fun side effect of this is that

after they got rid of the original organizers, the person that they hired to replace them and kind of get the Salt Lake

organization back under control was Mitt Romney.

And that was like

his first thing outside of the corporate sphere, which led to him eventually becoming a politician.

So, whoops, we inadvertently launched Mitt Romney.

Fuck.

Wow.

All right.

Next slide, please.

So, Rio.

Yes.

The title of the...

I remember the favela clearances vividly.

That's actually going to be more in the second episode, I think.

But

for this one,

pay attention to your fucking bid scoring, jackasses, is the title of this particular slide.

And using Rio as an example, there were six candidate cities that applied to host for 20, or six applicant cities that applied to host for 2016.

Five of them met the minimum requirement score, but only four were passed through to candidate status.

And for some reason, despite being the lowest scoring of the five, Rio was taken over DOA.

It's thought that the reason that they maybe eliminated DOA was because they wanted to hold the games later in the year than what the Olympic committee wanted to, again, for reasons of weather, but

it's not really known.

But

the comprehensive reports that get submitted to the IOC voting membership for the second round that I talked about earlier are not public, but it's difficult to imagine that Rio fared much better with those reports than it did with the original bid scoring.

But nonetheless, they won pretty handily when it came down to the actual voting,

meaning that the people who were voting didn't really pay much attention to what the smart bid would be for that Olympics.

Predictably, there were a lot of issues with the Rio Olympics not meeting their readiness targets.

Several major projects related to the games were left unfinished by the times the games...

by the time the games began or even several years later.

And a lot of the work that was done for Rio only spruced up the touristy areas while offering very little tangible benefit to the actual residents of the city.

But like I said, we'll talk more about that in the next episode.

Yeah, the IOC was probably like, okay, I'm voting for Rio because I want to go sit on the beach.

Yeah, I want to go to Brazil.

Yeah, fully.

Like, I want to go to Rio.

I want to go to Sochi.

It takes a lot of bribes to get those types of guys to go to Salt Lake City, you know?

Yeah.

Like I talked about earlier, some of it is also just political on like,

you know, we're, this was the first Olympic Games that had ever been in South America.

And so it's a thing of if you're South American, who are you going to vote for?

Of course, you want the Olympic Games that's going to be in your continent and bringing money and viewership and everything to your area.

But

it's kind of frustrating because, and we'll get into this later, a lot of times passing through a

bid with, you know, questionable actual quality is what leads to the later issues of the

things not being finished on time, venues being abandoned afterwards, all that kind of stuff.

Next slide, please.

They got to commit to the bit.

They got to start putting the Olympics in like really weird places.

Yeah, just get real fucking weird with it.

Absolutely.

Exactly.

Like Tierra de Fuego, or like we're going to put this on

like

one of the tiny Pacific Islands or like or the South Indian Islands or like the Korean demilitarized zone.

Oh, if you put it in the DMC, that'd be fantastic.

Hell yeah, yeah, that'd be really fun.

I don't know how Dressage is gonna do, but that's gonna be fun.

Oh, it's looking like the Battle of Waterloo out there.

There's horse legs all over the place.

We're we're holding the Olympic, we're doing the Moncton New Brunswick Olympics,

the Fort McMurray Olympic Games, not winter, the Fort Mac Olympics.

Yeah,

oh yeah,

don't breathe that

era too deep, folks.

All right.

All right.

So

this is a picture of the 1936 Olympic park in Berlin that I took myself when I was there in like 2012.

And this slide is a side.

Hey, why the fuck did they let the Nazis host?

So the Olympics for 1936 were awarded in 1931, which was before the Nazis took power.

When they did take power, there was a negative negative reaction from several federations, including the U.S., which was basically the amateur athletic union at the time,

especially when the Nazis decided to ban German Jews from participating.

A fellow by the name of Avery Brundage, yes, was the president of the American Olympic Committee.

And initially, he paid lip service to being a detractor.

He said the very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.

And then he went to tour the facilities in Germany in 1934.

And as the Nazis do, very similar to what they did with the USA.

Getting Nazi bribes.

You just get a shitload of like Schmolzi, like chocolate boxes and like looted jewels or whatever.

Very similar to what they did with like Red Cross observers in Theresianstadt.

They

kind of managed the tour and made sure that he only saw the good side of things.

And based on that, he concluded that the Jewish athletes were being treated fairly.

And then the next year, he kind of took a hard turn down the fast track to Yikesville and started very

openly

being much worse.

Anyway, ultimately, the U.S.

athletes voted not to boycott.

It was put to them as a vote, and they voted not to.

And because the U.S.,

even back then, brought one of the largest delegations to the Olympics, most of the other countries followed their influence.

There were some individual Jewish athletes who chose not to participate in protest to that decision.

In particular, with regards to this Olympics, we often remember Jesse Owens' wins as kind of being a triumph over the racist Nazi ideology because he was black and he won like four medals over a white Nazi German athlete.

But he and Ralph Metcalf, who was another black athlete, were both put into the 4x4, the 400-meter relay,

in place of Jewish athletes who got benched, that being Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller.

And the Berlin Olympics were definitely still a PR coup for the Nazis because they were able to use them to present their country in an overall positive light.

They cleaned up a lot of the kind of creeping fascism bad stuff.

They took the like the Stoma Kesten, the like, I don't know why I put an umlaut on that, Kasten, the like boxes, the newspaper like display stands for Desdüma.

They like took those off the streets for the duration of the Olympics.

And as soon as it was over.

They took off a lot of the signs that said no Jews allowed and all that sort of thing.

And in addition to that, like just for me as someone who's interested in Olympic history, it really just fucking sucks that a lot of the oldest Olympic footage out there is stuff from Lenny Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

Because it's like, I would rather watch anything but that, but, you know,

she was documenting it.

So she took.

all of this footage and most of the other Olympics from around that time.

You know, you're lucky if you get one newsreel.

And so, you know, all of that's cool, but I think the IOC should have been a lot more willing and ready to yank their hosting rights and just kind of say to them, fuck around and find out.

They instead, the IOC ejected the one member who kind of stood up to their BS and said, we need to revoke the hosting rights.

And they elected Avery Brundage to take his place.

And eventually, Avery Brundage became the president of the IOC.

So

he had a

long sort of like J.

Edgar Hoover-like tenure throughout which he remained insanely racist.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Are we going to mention, by the way,

fucking John Carlos and Tommy Smith?

Yes.

Is that going to be the future episode?

Okay.

Future episode, yeah.

Great.

So

Avery Brundage is a specter haunting this podcast.

Yes.

All right.

So now we're talking about the IOC and its relationship with the concept of marketability.

So go ahead and next slide.

A lot of Olympic sports are rather unique compared to what you see as regularly popular in a country.

You know, for example,

most of the world, their favorite sport is soccer.

Here in the U.S., our favorite sport is gridiron football.

Yeah, and the Olympics are the only time you can watch some archery or whatever on mainstream TV.

And my favorite thing.

Gonna see some curling.

Yeah, well, my favorite thing watching the Olympics is whenever you get into something, and within having seen half an hour of curling, you start

following on from the commentators being like, oh, he's fucked that up badly.

As if you know anything about curling.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

so archery, curling, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming.

Fencing.

Hugely fencing.

Women's beach volleyball.

Thank you, Ross.

All that kind of just random stuff that you're not going to turn on the TV on any particular Saturday afternoon and be confident you can see it.

So these sports, they're uncommon.

They don't have as much of a regular viewership as, you know, a mainstream manball sport.

So they don't get televised and publicized as much as the mainstream manball sports.

So no one one finds out about them.

So they stay uncommon and unpopular.

Speak for yourself.

I'm watching the women's biathlon and I'm having a time.

I had

an old landlord who definitely turned on the television to watch women's beach volleyball.

This is cowardice, women's biathlon.

Very wiry women who can like ski for like 500 miles and then like, you know, shoot a fly between the between the like wings or whatever.

Many eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just the two eyes, actually.

And all right, go ahead.

And next slide, please.

So kind of in response to that,

because as we'll talk about in the next episode, so much of the IOC's role in the Olympics has become just getting as much money as it possibly can to run the games, they have become obsessed with markability.

marketability often to the detriment of the sport itself.

And so we're going to do a case study on the sport of equestrian three-day eventing.

So first of all,

equestrian three-day eventing was created as a military test for cavalry horses that it's kind of your ultimate cavalry horse can do dressage jumping in the open field at speed.

And this is designed to be a test of the horse's ability to like carry a message back from the front lines.

And then show jumping on the third day after the dressage day and the endurance day to to prove that the horse is fit enough that it is still, you know, useful as a horse.

It wasn't always that way.

Some competition format changes that have happened over the years as a result of IOC decisions.

First off, they came to the FBI and they said, you know, number one, we want something that is more marketable, shorter for television.

And number two, we need something that does not put as many requirements on the host city to find space to host this competition because your endurance day of cross-country, if you're running a true classic format, endurance day, takes a lot of space and a long time.

And so they eliminated those endurance XC phases and cut it down to just the

what used to be the phase D, number four out of four, the jumping test in the open field.

After a couple of years, this eventually led to the entire sport shifting to this shortened format.

Another thing thing that the IOC said is that we're not going to give two Olympic medals for the same performance.

So now instead of having...

You can win the Medal of Honor for the same performance.

Not anymore, but you used to be able to.

Maybe you got a weird horse situation.

You know, it could happen.

Double horse.

So now what they do is that

if you are in contention for an individual medal and your team is in contention for a team medal,

you have to show jump twice.

They have the show jumping round that awards the individual medals and the show jumping round that awards the team medals.

And then also very recently, they've taken the teams that are used at the Olympics.

Previously, it was you would have four pairs of horse and rider who would compete and you would have a drop score.

So if somebody, you know, their horse got hurt halfway through the competition or they just had a really bad round, you could drop their score and it wouldn't count against you.

And now it is, it's, you have three riders, and all of their scores have to count, which is, um,

this also has an effect on safety.

All equestrian sports are dangerous.

Of the, of the three that are in the Olympics, eventing is the most dangerous because you have that open jumping test at speed over large, solid obstacles.

As we often discuss on this show, regulations are written in blood.

And for eventing the old long format endurance day and the fitness of the horse

and the rider that you require to complete that is your regulation.

The blood was literal cavalry combat.

If you don't have a horse that's fit enough, you're going to wind up getting killed.

So

since its elimination of the long format, the cross-country course design has shifted to technical questions, which are taken at speed.

Since sheer fitness is no longer the separating factor in the past, you know, it was pretty straightforward obstacles, and it's just about: is your horse still a horse at the end of the day?

This is dangerous because

speed running it.

One of the things with jumping a horse is you have to be in control of the horse enough for a tricky question to line them up at the exact right spot to jump.

Some riders also no longer feel the need to use the most naturally athletic athletic horse breeds that were traditionally popular for eventing, such as the thoroughbred, the Irish sport horse, that sort of thing, nor do they feel the need to condition them to the same level of fitness since it's not strictly necessary to complete.

a three-day event in the current format.

This is also dangerous.

If you are an eventing pair that shows up to the Olympics and you're not up to the level of competition, you could get seriously injured or you could die.

And it does happen.

And so in my personal opinion, I think the growth that they're looking for can be encouraged in other ways.

For example, providing funding to developing federations, focusing on offerings at the continental level

and

creating training partnerships where a more experienced coach.

in the sport comes over and helps train new athletes from a country all that sort of thing it's it's not the best use of resources to set people up for failure.

Basically,

good luck when you're shooting like 14 horses after the event.

Even though it's like the Grand National.

No, that's true.

Yeah, it's like any normal horse race.

Just like anytime you get into the equestrian stuff, and everyone involved is like, it's not horses, love to die.

They're like Canadians.

They love to die.

Their life has no value.

Poor Snuffles thought of ants and died.

All right, um, next slide, please.

Horses, man.

All right, so now we are talking about

the cost of construction of Olympic venues and the debt burdens that host cities often have to take on in order to do that.

Next slide, please.

I'm sure that everyone involved in the construction of an Olympic venue is paid fairly and at all.

Well, we'll start out with the classic case, which is Montreal 1976.

Once again,

Canadian construction.

You look at two breeze blocks on top of each other and you go, Have you considered demolishing yourself?

Please excuse my massacre of the French language in all things.

But the architect for

Montreal's not far off you, don't worry.

The architect for Montreal, Roger Tayab.

Anyway, Tayaber stated that the construction of the Olympic Park and Stadium showed me a level of organized corruption, theft, mediocrity, sabotage, and indifference that I had never witnessed before and have never witnessed since.

The system failed completely, and every civil engineering firm involved knew that they could just open this veritable cash register and serve themselves.

Bringing endorsements.

I mean, he was speaking like if he was speaking French, then it's probably something like Le Régister de cache.

The initial cost estimate for construction in Montreal was $120 million Canadian dollars.

It wound up costing $1.6 billion Canadian dollars.

Part of that was

part of that was due to things that were kind of out of their control, like the inflation that happened to everyone in the 70s and after Munich 1972 and the massacre that happened there,

unanticipated.

Which, by the way, those games had to, like, were forced to persist after the massacre by the president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, haunts the podcast.

That dude hated Jews.

God damn.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway, unanticipated issues, such a security after Munich that they didn't know that they were going to have to pay for that.

And I think it was 80 million that they wound up having to pay.

Anyway, but a lot of it came down to corruption and inefficiency in their construction processes, and it wound up taking them 30 years to pay off.

Now, an interesting thing as a result of this is that that

created such a

sour political environment in the city that it launched the Quebec separatists as a like meaningful political party.

And, you know, downstream from that,

there was a referendum that only barely didn't pass.

And also,

like, kidnappings and assassinations that just watch me, like, set off a genuine, like, sort of 1970s urban guerrilla insurgency for a minute.

Montreal is so good.

I love Montreal.

Yeah, me too.

This is the sort of like the direct line between Montreal 76 and the like great concavity

all right um and next slide please this is off topic the article i referenced for this particular part kept referring to this stadium as the big o which

this is

this is the montreal olympic stadium which is the most incredibly complex and stupid building I've ever seen in my life.

I love it.

It's beautiful.

There's not a bad angle on this thing.

It's so, it's so good.

It's, it's just amazing.

It's fantastic to look at.

Big looming tower.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I took all these photos.

And

it has a

roof is retractable, but it's retractable diagonally, which, if you know how wires work, that doesn't make any sense.

And that's why I think they only managed to retract it like six or seven times.

We gave a stadium Fimosis.

It's only safe to be in the stadium if the snow load is under three centimeters.

And this is in Montreal, Canada, where you regularly have over a foot of snow.

Well, we're fixing that problem.

It's got this huge cantilever tower, which is very difficult to maintain.

This was, after the Olympics, the home of the Montreal Expos, the baseball team.

which of course moved to Washington, D.C.

to a much less interesting stadium.

Well, interesting things are forbidden from happening in D.C.

This is true.

This is true.

Yeah.

It's frowned upon in their culture.

I don't know.

One day we'll do a whole episode on this stadium.

One day we'll do a whole episode on Washington, D.C.

Oh, my God.

What a place.

I'm still obsessed with that woman who's suiting up the press in Gaza to go in the fucking Navy Yard.

That was to go to the Navy Yard.

Yeah, I was going to say.

Yeah, exactly.

I was going to say the Quiznos at 8th and M, but that's not there anymore.

There's an optometrist optometrist there now.

Ah, they ruined DC.

I know.

There's no Quiznose anywhere nearby.

The closest Quiznos is in Maryland now.

Gotta go to a Schlosser.

Oh, the one in Chesapeake House?

No, they got rid of that one.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Do you remember that right-wing pundit who

died of Quiznos?

Yeah,

she got fucking Quiznose poisoning.

Her last tweet was like, I love to have a raw lobster sub at Quiznos and then fucking die.

She just immediately died.

Yeah, that's because Quiznos,

you can only eat at Quisnos if you're worthy.

You approach the Quiznos with an image of the moving

Excalibur.

I think it's just because you're killed has come into my mind and I don't know what to think about that.

No, I just think that it's because your country doesn't practice food safety, which, you know.

Oh, we do, just loosen fast.

I don't know.

I think if you go to Quiznos and you get seafood, you're taking your life into your own hands.

Yeah, that's on you at some point.

Yeah, usually I got like some kind of Chipotle chicken bullshit.

That was fine.

I used to eat at Quisnos all the time back when we had Quisnos.

Now we only have Subway, which is objectively inferior.

Because of woke.

Because of woke.

Quiznos.

And they don't even give you a schlotze.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah.

Can I just

say about the Montreal Olympic Stadium?

This bottom photo is giving Tiny Dick huge scrotum energy.

Oh,

it's it's it's true.

Um, it's sort of like, you know,

10 or 12 months on anti-androgens.

I was I was obsessed with this building the whole time I was looking at it.

And I was like, then I was dehydrated because there's nowhere to get a place to eat.

There's no, there's nowhere to eat nearby.

Stadiums are all like this stadia.

Like, uh, fucking

concert venue, conference center thing.

Find something to eat.

It's like $12 for a fucking hotel.

Yeah.

Like the Armadillo in Glasgow, the SECC, whichever the fuck one it is, that whole area, that whole precinct around there is just like a blasted concrete wasteland when there isn't something on.

Everything is closed.

And the funniest part is that they're constantly trying to sell luxury flats with the like premise of, oh, it's right near this.

And it's like, there's nothing there except concerts.

It's like, it's walkable.

Yeah, that's definitely just going to be like somebody's pieta terre who likes to go to concerts a lot.

Like a lot.

They got a nice, they got a metro station right next to it, though, at least.

You know, it's nice.

I mean, like, Alabama could definitely sell that sort of thing for somebody to have in Tuscaloosa for the football games, but they won't because we actually have like campus around the stadium.

I was picturing there for a second the Tuscaloosa Metro.

I went to a flat viewing in Highbury, which you may be aware is where Arsenal Stadium used to be.

And the new stadium is like very close to.

And

I looked it up on Google Maps right before I went.

And it was like a street over from the Emirate Stadium.

And there were flats like sort of...

on like having viewings that looked more or less directly onto it and I asked the estate agent hey how like how bad does the like noise and disruption get and I've never seen anyone lie less convincingly to just be like

it literally it's like once every two weeks uh they only close to like three nearest tube stations uh it's it's fine it's totally fine and i just yeah i i did not take that flash yet what's the what's the what's that uh the one football club where the entrance is like through a row house oh god oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

oh that's gonna that's gonna absolutely kill me because i know that And like, I'm having a kind of Biden moment.

All the other urbanists are obsessed with the money.

The minute-made park entrances through the former Houston

Union Station.

That's true, yes.

Where the fuck?

Houston gets one train a day?

No, Houston gets six trains a day.

Who's it?

Lucin.

Oh, God.

Less than one train a day.

Yeah.

So the Sunset Limited.

I didn't know this because I and the Sunset Limited doesn't even go down its complete route anymore.

It hasn't since Hurricane Katrina.

Yeah, it is Luton Town.

Okay.

Yes.

I wasn't going insane.

Uh, take this bus to Luton.

Do do not ever take this bus to Luton.

No, well, I will do the I will do reverse speed.

If we go over 55, I'll kill you.

All right.

Um, ready for the next slide?

Ready for the next slide.

All right.

Um, so next thing, uh, is that more recently, there's been very similar issues with host cities like Athens, Rio.

Is that the bottom?

Sarajevo.

Sarajevo.

It is.

Yes.

And then this bottom left here, I think, was the beach volleyball stadium from Beijing,

where just...

I can't believe that I'll use it.

Sarajevo, eventful Olympics, you know, more eventful post-Olympics.

I love to do some sniping through my bobsled track.

Yes.

Anyway, so

they spend massive amounts of money to construct all of these stadiums and venues and such.

And then they wind up, you know, either because the sport isn't popular in the country or because of political things that happen or any one of a million other reasons, they don't continue to use the venues and they just kind of

sit there and rot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like often, especially especially as you say if the bids are like uh sort of poorly managed they're like poorly built hurriedly built um and they're like in weird locations and do weird things and it's like well i'm not gonna go and see like some like dressage or whatever um i'm gonna i'm gonna go and go and see like some football who was it who like hosted i think the world cup recently they made a big show out of building one of the stadiums out of shipping containers cutter you're thinking of yeah and they were like uh and you could look at that structure and like, okay, there's just a big steel structure with shipping containers bolted on there.

Yep.

And they killed.

They killed all the shipping containers.

The shipping containers are aesthetic.

Yeah.

And they killed like hundreds of like indentured laborers to do that.

Yeah.

Yep.

I think they also hired Zaha Hadid architects.

Yeah.

Also,

this is not a comparable beef to the hundreds of murders, but also absolutely fucked the schedule for international football

because they could not play it in summer because it would be like lethally hot even more lethally hot um so they did a they did a winter one and it just like uh basically ended up with this stage where everyone was playing international football more or less non-stop with their domestic football until it got to the point where everyone was so exhausted that england made it to the final of the euros in 2024

And one, I should say.

I've been doing this thing on Trash Future where it's even funnier than more markers I put down down in things that we record previous, like before the final to say as an absolute certainty that England win.

So I'm going to put that marker down now.

Devin, I hope that's not going to happen.

Devin, just put in whatever you think is most amusing if we don't, or if we do for that matter, but like it's coming home is the thing.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

Uh, people are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want.

Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that.

Back to the show.

In the process of preparing for this episode, y'all got me back on Twitter for the first time in months to get

around with y'all.

The first hashtag that I see when I open the app is trending in US, it's coming home.

Yeah,

that's all of my posts.

Oh, we're going to win the Euros too?

Yeah.

Hey, you're welcome.

How's USMNT doing, by the way?

We're going to get Klopp, I guess.

That's how it's going, maybe.

Take this manager, but be aware.

He comes with a terrible curse.

Are we able to play in the Euros?

No, man.

It's not like Eurovision where we can just sneak in.

You didn't sneak into Eurovision either.

We play in the Copa Americana.

Point to me.

You get your shit.

Point to meet in in the Copa America.

Point to me.

Point to me on a map, Nova, where Israel is within the continent of Europe.

I mean, Australia isn't there either, but like,

the thing is, you don't have a national broadcaster to join the European broadcasting.

What if we just showed up?

We just showed up with guns and we were like, okay, we'd like to participate in Europe.

We're going to be talking about the Eurovision.

With guns.

It's the one thing we're good for, dude.

We sent Luke Brian to

shake his little ass for the 45-year-old mobs.

Yes.

I had a coworker once.

Go ahead.

At least in gymnastics, I don't know about every sport, but at least in gymnastics, Israel also plays in the Europeans.

Yeah, what?

Fucking nation states should not exist.

They like caucus with the Europeans because they're a European colonial project.

What do you want from them playing?

Anyway, you had a co-worker.

Oh, I had a co-worker.

Roz knows his co-worker, Miss Yvette, who was a West Philly black woman and born in West Philly.

Yes, lived in West Philly her whole life.

Wonderful woman.

Blared R ⁇ B in the store at 900 decibels.

Nice.

When I worked at the liquor store at 25th and South.

She was amazing.

But she was like, what kind of music do you like?

I I was like, I like a lot of stuff.

And she's like, do you like my music?

I'm like, RB is not really for me, but we can probably work out some sort of a gooch.

She's like, okay, well, you can put on XTU, the country station in Philly.

And I was like, okay, like that would be really cool.

And she's like, like four days later, she comes to me and she's like, I love Luke Bryan, man, shaking his cute little white ass.

Apparently, she had stayed up all night on YouTube just watching Luke Bryan shaking his ass.

Thank you, Brian.

Called him back.

Girls rock.

I always remember the

what is it?

The Mr.

Liam swears a lot story.

Yeah, I was in the I was loading cases of liquor as you do, and her son was back there.

And I think I knocked over a case of Jameson, and I just didn't stop swearing for like seven to eight minutes.

And she asked her like 11-year-old son, How was your day with Mr.

Liam?

And she just looks at her with like a baton death march stare and goes, Mr.

Liam swears a lot.

All right, let's keep going.

Let's go, let's go.

Let's keep going.

Yeah, Nova's dying.

Wow, this

Denver 76.

This is cool.

I mean, yeah, just take the Philadelphia 76ers logo and do whatever you want with it.

What if the six looked like it had an asshole in it?

It's okay because it didn't actually happen.

All of this that has, you know, gone on has had an effect on the pool of potential hosts on who actually wants to step up and take on all of that to host the Olympics.

Hey, do you want to bribe the sweatiest, richest cunts in the world?

It's like, not really.

The kind of opening salvo of this that was important of things to come was that

Denver bid for and won the 1976 Winter Olympics.

And then there was a major turn in public opinion against it.

And eventually they abandoned their bid and

it was

i think innsbruck that took it up in their stead um

and that was the only time if i remember correctly so far that the olympics have changed to a different host after originally hosting or after originally picking

a host that the games actually went on.

Like Tokyo was, it was transferred to a different host in 1940, if I remember correctly, but then it wound up not

happening at all because of the war.

St.

Louis got moved to

moved from Chicago to St.

Louis, if I recall correctly.

Yeah.

So,

okay, then the first time in like the modern era of living history, yeah.

Yeah.

St.

Louis Olympics would be a good episode.

But it kind of went downhill

over the past couple of decades in terms of how many countries wanted to apply to host.

You look at the history of host and it starts out with like there's nine or ten countries that apply, and then it slowly works its way down to

for 2024, there were only five countries that applied.

And of those five, the original bid from the United States was Boston.

And Boston had a very similar reaction to Denver, where

their public rejected it.

And

USOC wound up switching to a bid from Los Angeles.

And then

Budapest, Hungary, Hamburg, Germany, and Rome, Italy all just dropped out before the final round of voting.

Just like, no, this sucks.

Fuck this.

Yeah.

Yep.

And so the Boston campaign against the Olympics was pretty big.

I remember that happening.

That was like, oh my God, these things are going to suck so bad.

Get them away from us.

And Bostonians being told, hey, people from all around the world are going to come to Boston.

They're like, what the fuck?

Cancel the shit immediately.

I'm not going to be able to park my car in Harvard Yard.

You can't park it there anyway.

Think of all the new racisms they could have developed, you know, over a beautiful few weeks.

Think of how many people they could have burned burned up on the orange line.

There's going to be a double-decker bus full of IOC officials and they accidentally go down Storo Drive.

That's the end of the year.

That's the end of the Olympics.

Mark Warberg hate crimes a different nationality every day.

That's his Olympics.

Just

decapitating the state, but it's the IOC instead of a real country.

I support that.

I think we should do a decapitation strike on the IOC.

I think this is the first good policy idea we've had.

We finally got there, 170 episodes in.

Does the IOC have a second strike capability?

No, it does not.

So I don't think so.

We're going to international Olympic Committee friends down.

Don't be surprised.

Oh, I don't like that.

I mean, there are people in the IOC who are shooting athletes.

and especially if we had been talking, you know, about 50 years ago, it used to be like in the

first half of the 20th century.

50 years ago, it had about the same percentage of Waffen-SS veterans as the French Foreign League.

Yeah, a lot of Olympians were

military athletes because they're, we'll get into this more in the second

military.

All of them.

But the bad ones.

No, I'm bad.

I'm calling down the Nazis.

Yeah.

Yeah, go for it.

I'm not stopping you.

But anyway, so what the IOC wound up deciding to do was they just took the two remaining cities, Paris and Los Angeles, and they gave the 2024 games to Paris, the 2028 games to Los Angeles, because they were like, we're not getting a whole lot of interest coming back for 2028 either.

We're just going to make things easier on ourselves and do this.

This is primarily a bid evaluation problem

in that, again,

the result of picking cities that are not the best choice to host the Olympics is that you get cities that don't do a great job of hosting the Olympics, and then they have buyer's remorse, and that kind of becomes a

that buyer's remorse becomes what the public thinks of when they think of, oh, we could host the Olympics.

Oh, well, we're just going to be in debt forever.

But there's continue to go down to increasingly smaller and smaller cities, you know, to figure out who is yeah.

No, 2032 Olympics, Roanoke, Virginia.

However, with regards to the Winter Olympics in particular, climate change also plays a role in that there are

fewer cities and projected to become even fewer in the future where hosting the Winter Olympics is even going to be physically possible because there's just not going to be snow that's reliable for staying around long enough.

They already machine blow a lot of snow to kind of support the Winter Olympics

and make sure that weather doesn't get in the way, but it may come to a point where, you know, Winter Olympics athletes don't really have many places that they can train.

However, credit where credit is due to the IOC in that in the

very, very recent timeframe, they have changed how Olympic bidding works to be a little bit more foolproof.

In that now what they do, I think I have a slide specifically about this later, but now what they do is they do that committee evaluation and the committee picks the city that they think is best.

And then it just goes out to the IOC membership as a referendum that either, yes, we're going to host it here or or no we're not instead of it being uh vote for the one who gave you the most money sort of thing just being like do you want to go to roanoke virginia yes or no yes you do it's so great there's so many things to do there's lots of breweries um the downtown's like nice and walkable you can get real lost in the woods

you can see the big abandoned norfolk southern skyscraper because they moved

yeah those fuckers uh what else can you do in roano well you can visit the city games used to be there yeah hi Hi, Aunt.

Yeah, I'm about to say their name is Lonair.

Hi, Aunt Linda, and Uncle Robert.

Yeah, he can do it.

All right.

All right.

Keep it moving.

Keep it moving.

Keep her moving.

All right.

Can I?

I cannot hot edit this because you exported it to PowerPoint.

I just realized that this next section would have been better

titled as more like timelines in general than just construction timelines.

We'll do it live.

We're doing it live.

It's just timelines now.

Yeah.

Thanks, John Matt.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Oh, wow.

So,

yeah, historically, there have been several notable cases of down-to-the-wire preparations for the Olympics.

That tweet on the left there is from the Sochi Games.

That is a reporter who is talking about this is the hotel that he was giving, and as you can see, see, or that he was given to stay in.

And SD World.

Yeah, it's not in fantastic shape.

And there were several hotels.

I think the Athletes Village also had issues similar to this, all that sort of thing.

Top right, that is one of the Athens stadiums that was still under construction.

I think this was a matter of months before the games.

And they were just like building the athletics track ahead of hussein bolt as he starts running yeah

doing like y'all gotta get down

yeah doing doing grommet's sort of train uh like model train track thing yeah wrong track track in front of you yeah

um and then bottom right there is a picture taken by one of the jamaican athletes at their um Olympic Village accommodations in Rio, where you can see that the sink bowl has just fallen out of the counter and crashed on the floor.

Now, in fairness, this has happened in my apartment as well.

This is an undermount sink problem.

I think undermount sinks are actually one of the worst things that we've developed as a species is like this.

It gives the opportunity for so many problems

for the trade-off that, okay, now I can use a paper towel to clear off the counter a little bit more easily.

I hate undermount sinks.

I believe they're work of the devil.

I don't think this is.

I just

yeah, exactly.

They're just bad.

They're just you put just

give me like I'm fine with the little bit of gritty nasty that comes around a regular sink.

It's fine.

Anyway, I don't like undermount sinks.

They just they will do this to you eventually.

They're holding them a clue.

Don't you get the same shit underside the lip on the inside of the sink that you would get on the ring around the outside anyway?

Like, you're just moving the problem to a different place.

Yeah.

But anyway, so as of May 2014, which was a little over two years to go till Rio, they had...

There was a report that came out that they had 10% of their preparations accomplished.

The normal progress that far out from the games is 60%, and the lowest it had ever been up until that point, and the game still happened was 40 and that was for athens in 2004.

So there were some major concerns about whether Rio was going to be able to happen or not.

They were like querying London to be like, hey, could y'all on short notice maybe hold the games again?

Oh, hell yeah, we should have done it.

I think Sochi also had like, I remember something from Sochi was like, there were pictures of the bathrooms in the Olympic village had two toilets in them.

Facing each other for like

each other.

Yeah.

Well, I know.

I know the poop duel.

Before the tornado came through in 2011, I could have showed you a Krispy Kreme in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had much the same sort of situation going on.

I think

the most hard-ass sentence I've ever heard.

I think what happened with that was it had originally been stalls and they took the wall out to make it ADA

accommodated, but I don't know for sure.

The Russian ADA.

Are you brave enough to dual poop?

There's a lot of people who already shoehorned in Nintendo DS controls into a lot of weird things.

There's a lot of people who were involved in constructing and finishing a bathroom with two toilets facing each other.

No one stopped and said, Pull up a screen or something.

God damn.

I mean, this is fine.

This is fine.

That's right.

It says,

we're modern.

We're all adults here.

We can watch each other poop.

Well, I mean, to be fair, if this is in the athletes' village, they do multiple times over the course of the games have to let somebody watch them piss.

That's a good point, yeah.

All right.

No, I don't want to piss in front of anybody.

Yeah, you always go to the stall.

I mean, progress the episode.

I'm dying.

Yes, please.

Sorry.

All right.

Sweet girl.

Next thing

is that sometimes you also get just random October surprise shit that happens.

So, for some examples here,

we have the ticket scandal for London, where a short amount of time before the games, it came out that some of the national organizing committees that had been allotted a certain amount of tickets to the Olympics to sell to people from their own country were instead selling them on the black market for vastly inflated prices, and that threatened to taint the image of the games in people's minds.

It was a huge scandal at the time.

The pool in Rio, which at the beginning of the Olympics turned green, turned out that what was going on there was it was an algal bloom and somebody had, instead of putting chlorine into the pool they had put the chemical that dechlorinates your pool i can't remember what it's called the extremely dechlorinated pool

yeah and this this this led to this led to delmaruse and lula losing the mandate of heaven and and levahato and all of the rest of it so um you know very bad decision turn your pool acid green um yeah potion of turn your government fascist and what they wound up having to do with that was halfway through the olympics they had to completely drain, refill the pool, and rebalance all the chemicals because to do synchronized swimming in there, they needed to have clear water so that the judges could see under it.

Just like, oh, oh, they're very synchronized in the muck.

Yeah.

Oh, they're not coming up.

Oh.

Oh, that's bad.

And then

some of you may remember earlier this year, there was suddenly a big kerfluffle in the news about Paris being infested with bed bugs to the point that it would cause

problems.

Yeah.

With everyone showing up for the Olympics, possibly taking that back to their home country.

As it turned out, that was kind of blown out of proportion by the Russian disinformation apparatus, but...

you know, still one of those things that you get to the 11th hour and you're like, oh shit, what are we going to do about this?

Another one that I don't really have a good picture for is that in June June 2016, the doping control lab in Rio got suspended by WATA.

So they were looking at potentially having to ship everything like 2,300 miles to Colombia to verify test results.

Just like intra-continental flights full of piss jokes.

Yeah.

I disappeared for a second.

All this talk of piss made me had to go piss.

Oh, okay.

That's fine.

Yeah, that's how I do it.

I just sneak out.

You guys like to to leave up diets?

Like, no, I'm either pissing or eating noodles.

Yeah,

I can use the weak.

We are weak.

We know.

Yeah, I'm very weak.

Yeah,

I'm afraid that cannot sneak out because I'm presenting.

Anyway,

so, you know, you might wonder what causes all of this sort of stuff when you have eight goddamn years to get your shit sorted after your bid is picked.

And the answer is basically follow the money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, next slide, please.

Talking about potential solutions.

These are not in any way expected to be, you know, panaceas, but they're things that could at least improve the specific issues that we're speaking about here.

Next slide.

So there have been, like I mentioned earlier, some changes in how Olympic bidding and site selection are done and changes in the criteria that they're looking at.

The bids are now evaluated by a smaller committee, which chooses the best one as a preferred bid.

The main IOC membership is only involved in that they have a referendum to approve or deny the preferred city or, you know, moving on to the alternative if they deny the first one.

They no longer choose between the finalists.

So, you know, you did it.

You paid attention to your fucking bid scoring, jackasses.

This is very much the meme of the guy celebrating very hard after winning third place.

Anyway,

the long-term effects remain to be seen, but the upcoming LA 2028 Olympic bid was very much sold on similar advantage to what Houston was bidding on for 202012.

And

just this past couple weeks, they released that they are making some further adjustments to their site plan, which will kind of push even harder on that.

For example, they moved the equestrian from like a site that they would have to build in a public park to being at Galloway Downs, which is already a very high-quality equestrian facility that hosts a lot of FEI competitions.

It's kind of the obvious place to put it.

And so,

you know, we'll see how that winds up affecting things in 2028, but I think it's a positive move.

Next slide, please.

They got to put up all those oil derricks for the rowing event again, though, you know, from the last one.

It's a great photo.

Another thing that they can do is multi-site bids.

And this is what Milano and Cortina Italy did for 2026,

where instead of having it in one spot and building everything that you don't already have,

you can use existing sites that are spread out over a wider area.

As I mentioned earlier, this already kind of has to happen to some degree a lot of the time with equestrian surfing, sailing, things that need water.

But

there's been talk even above and beyond what Milano and Cortina have done of, like,

for example, when it came out that the U.S.

was going to bid again for 2028,

an idea was floated of the entire Texas triangle, Dallas, Houston, and Austin, San Antonio bidding as one.

And there have been other similar things to that.

Next slide, please.

I mean, they got so much, they got so much stuff already.

I mean, you know, it's you may as well use it.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

When this was called a chastity cage.

So the most critical thing is that the IOC have to stop being such a bunch of giant dildos.

That's going to be hard with a guy named Dick Pound, I got to tell you.

I included Dick Pound for the sight gag.

He's actually one of the fairly decent ones.

He's a Canadian, or was a member for Canada until like 2021, and he was involved in the institution of the World Anti-Doping Agency and in the takedown of the 2002 corruption.

But, you know, can't resist a dude with a funny name.

Goes right up there beside NASCAR racer Dick Trickle for why did your parents give you this name?

All right, Dick Trickle, yeah.

All right, Um, next slide.

That's the end of our show.

I was about to say, what do we learn?

Burn the IOC and salt the ashes.

Give all their authority to me.

Yes.

Correct.

The world waits with bated breath for Olympics Stalin.

Yes.

It could be.

It could be Dick Pound.

Dick Pound.

Dick Pound.

You know, the power is there for you to seize it, Dick Pound.

Nova, do you want to drop off and we'll do safety third so you go to bed?

No, I'll stick stick around for it.

I'm a woman of commitment, you know.

All right,

we have a segment on this podcast.

You didn't ask me to take that oath, but I did on my own.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Hello, November, Roz, Liam, and possibly guest.

That's hedging, and we don't stand for it.

Trans Woman Eagle Scout here.

You can call me Jay.

You can call me Jay.

Anyway, I have endless stories about the stupid shit we scouts would get up to, many of them fire and or knife related.

For this story, however, I could place the vault squarely at the feet of the Boy Scouts of America, soon to be called Scouting USA or some other bullshit to cover up years of sexual assault.

I forget.

And maybe also the U.S.

military.

Two great institutions, I'm sure.

That tastes better together.

I was at the 2010 Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree.

The subsequent subsequent jamborees will be hosted at the newly acquired Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve.

Yeah, it's called that because two women have a conversation there that isn't about a man.

That's Bechtel, not Bechtel.

Fuck.

Bechtell is the engineering firm.

It's Beshamel.

It's one of the mother sources.

Fuck, I hate you.

Which was on land newly purchased by Boy Scouts of America in West Virginia and announced at this Jamboree.

Like so many Boy Scouts of America events, this Jamboree was largely a thinly veiled recruitment event for and funded by the U.S.

military.

I love those.

I mean, I ran into so many, it's a miracle I never joined the U.S.

military.

America's Army, I remember that?

Yeah, my parents tried to get me to go to the Jamboree.

That was a camp out I was able to successfully avoid.

I hated the Boy Scouts.

It was miserable.

Once again, I'm hoisting a big trans flag and a question mark in the background.

It was hosted at Fort A.P.

Hill, a military base used to train all branches of the U.S.

military.

You're named after one of the worst Confederate generals, if I'm not mistaken.

That sounds about right.

Yeah, they got a lot of those.

Well, they got rid of the Confederate names.

Yeah, they did.

They did.

So now it's like Fort Cavazos and stuff.

For about two weeks, 43,434 scouts and leaders camped out on patches of lawn grass all over the bays.

It was a logistical nightmare as most troops had to train just ahead of time so they could haul most of their gear several miles to their campsites from coach buses they took across the country.

This was supposed to be a high adventure, which supposedly denoted some heightened requirement of maturity both physically and mentally, and typically were supposed to be for older scouts.

But this being one of the more expensive ones, they'd take about anyone who had the money.

So scouts range from age 13 to 18.

It was more like an outdoor scouting convention than any other high-adventure.

Sounds absolutely horrible.

Oh, yeah.

Unsurprisingly, these grounds were not built with the infrastructure to support nearly 50,000 extra people on the lawn for two weeks every four years.

Additionally, they had this jamboree a year early, so it would be on the Boy Scouts of America Centennial.

And I guess they tried to make that a big deal.

I'm sure this all contributed to some cut corners.

Instead of permanent outdoor showers and kaibos, we had port-a-potties.

We did laundry in 12-gallon buckets with a plunger.

Troops were responsible for bringing them themselves.

But you know, half the scouts there didn't use them once.

Oh,

I don't expect the, like, I know there's a sort of militarism thing here, but I don't expect the Boy Scouts to be on deployment, man.

I don't want you to be in the kind of uniform that stands up on its own.

This feels like World War I.

Here's the thing.

I almost probably wound up here.

Just Baden Powell jerking it in heaven.

In heaven?

In hell, clearly.

In hell, yeah.

No, no, I wasn't.

I was 17 at the time.

I was well past the Boy Scouts, I think.

Oh, Jesus.

Right.

2010?

Yeah, I would have been 17.

It would have been 17, but yeah, exactly.

You were born in 93.

Yeah.

You and me both.

I always forget that you're younger than me.

Yeah, you're older than both of us.

No, I'm the older.

Ross, get on with it.

I'm getting on with it.

You young folks.

Yeah.

There were concrete pads with a small water supply.

There were concrete pads with a small water supply that they would build with plywood and 2x4 makeshift shower stalls around at most campsites with ice-cold water.

The black plastic thin thin-tarp curtains stapled to the walls didn't reach the ground, so you might expect to walk in on something like another scout sitting on the floor in a cold shower, jerking it.

Don't get me started on homoeroticism in the scouts.

Again, Robert Baden-Powell looking up from hell, also jerking it.

Why would you sit on the floor of the shower to jerk it?

Yeah, you're going to get every disease

to me.

Yeah,

I would avoid the floor in the Boy Scout camp.

I would not.

Especially in the shower.

Yeah.

You're going to get fungus.

Yeah, you're going to somehow get athletes' foot in your ass crack.

You've got athletes' ass.

On to the incident.

Oh, no.

This being a high-adventure scout event meant they had to set up a lot of exciting activities cheaply and quickly.

Yeah, what do you think the guy jerking off was done?

Oh, my God.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

He found a Sears catalog and went to the underwear.

There are four instances of each activity set up in different areas of the campus, and they all had the same stuff.

Action Alley featured team obstacle courses you were supposed to finish together.

One of the obstacles we encountered consisted of two large wooden poles, similar to large utility lines, about 30 feet apart, with two two-inch-thick steel cables between them.

One about eight feet off the ground, the other another six feet off above it.

It had small single steps you had to climb up the backs.

The cables were secured to a big bolt sticking through and out the back of the poles, and they were secured with nuts on the back.

There were small platforms to step on once you were up, and you clipped yourself in a harness to the top line and you crossed between them.

See,

team building, high ropes, of course, you know, the whole thing.

Yeah, the general miserableness.

There were some messages about teamwork, and we all had to get across as a group.

And we had a lot of fun fucking around, as you would expect, a group of 14 to 15-year-olds with limited supervision, as this course was relatively unsupervised.

One of our group, who was the last getting down, missed a step, managed to grab onto the pole, and slid down.

Unfortunately, he might have been better off falling the six-foot drop because he grabbed himself right on the bolt and it tore a decent gash across his chest.

And it had managed to dissect one of his nipples.

No,

clean in half.

God damn it.

Although I'm sure he was in shock, he was in pretty good spirits once the medics arrived in a golf cart.

Yeah, I remember that scene from Furiosa, too.

And we soon roasted him for ripping his nipple in half.

He got stitched up fine and joined us back to camp that night.

I'm pretty sure his name was John, but for the rest of the trip, the whole troop called him Ripple.

Ripple.

Shout out to Ripple if you're listening.

I hope you're doing well and can look back on that memory with some fondness as well.

You are

fucking eligible for a National Defense Service medal.

I'm once again wondering if there are significant differences between how Boy Scouts structure troops versus how Girl Scouts structure troops because I have to say that in my 12 years in Girl Scouts, there is not

like I knew everybody in our troop by name.

We weren't that big.

So

how do you have somebody in your troop that you've never met?

Don't know their reality?

My troop probably had like a hundred or a hundred or something people in it.

Yeah, it was big.

Wow.

They were all pre-military little shits and all their dads worked at the Pentagon.

We've had like

25 at our biggest.

You've got one more paragraph here.

Yeah, we okay.

I could talk about this event for hours.

Insane events and military presence everywhere.

Got to be one of the biggest recruitment events ever.

Included are some photos of similar rope courses.

I didn't include those because they sent too many photos.

I was going to curate these a bit, you know.

Also, the most insane and/or funny photos, including custom, Boy Scouts of America Remingtons, ExxonMobil, Astronaut Talk, Micro and Switchfoot, openly horny scouts, scouts, fighter jets, and the Army Black Daggers parachute team flying the POW Missing an Action flag.

Among the memorable moments for me was the Islamic Mosque Tent, as opposed to the other kind of mosque, where

I went one Sunday morning instead of one of the dozens of churches, and the Imam made fun of us for coming on the wrong day and then told us about the five pillars of Islam.

Which is a good bit.

I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Folks, that's the Boy Scout jampere for you.

Incredible.

Do not get your nipples ripped off and then don't join the U.S.

military because then you can get a lot worse than your nipples ripped off.

This could have been me.

This could have happened to me.

Well, thank God it wasn't.

All right, wrap the shit up.

All right.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

No.

Bye.

Madam Axel.

Try to find me.

All right.

And