Anne Burgess on Geograph
The Olympics and Debt
Montreal hosted the Summer Olympics in 1976. When the city was awarded the games, its mayor, Jean Drapeau, boasted, “The Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.”
However, one of those two impossibilities became possible, and it wasn’t until 2006 that the citizens of Montreal finished paying off the debt incurred by hosting the Olympic Games.
That dismal story has been repeated over and over again as governments snap at the bait dangled in front of them by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Corruption Inc.
The group that decides where the Olympic Games will be held doesn’t pass the sniff test.
British investigative reporter Andrew Jennings called the IOC “a nest of vipers.” He knew whereof he spoke and he wrote three books exposing nefarious goings-on within the organization: The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics (1992); The New Lords of the Rings (1996); and The Great Olympic Swindle (2000).
He wrote that long-time IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch was an unreformed fascist and member of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s…
