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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe London Olympics Are Looking Like A Financial And Organizational Disaster
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-london-olympics-are-looking-like-a-financial-and-organizational-disaster-2012-5As part of my London trip, I attended a university track and field event at the Olympic Park. On the northeastern outskirts of London, this is a former industrial wasteland that has been transformed with $15 billion into a consumer/spectator wasteland (enough to fund three or four Shanghai Disney resorts). Paths between venues are on a vast inhuman scale, with hardly any art or sculpture to break up the long walks.
Athlete housing is visible from the park and it strongly resembles the Cabrini-Green housing project. Supposedly the apartments will be turned over to local residents (who tend to be low-income immigrants from Muslim countries; this is the same area that was supposed to be home to the largest mosque in Europe) after the Olympics.
It is tough to understand how this is all going to work for spectators. With the stadium literally only about one percent full, there were long queues for coffee and snacks. It took about 10 minutes to get through an airport-style security process with complete X-ray and metal detector screening. An average of about 100,000 people per day show up at the worlds busiest airports, but they tend to arrive in a reasonably randomly distributed manner. The stadium alone holds 80,000 people and they will be arriving in tight blocks.
The English are going generally crazy spending money for security (story putting the total cost of the event at $17.6 billion). There are surface-to-air missiles being mounted on rooftops. In case the British military needs to invade its own country, while I was there they sailed their navys largest ship, a 22,000 ton amphibious assault vessel, up the Thames (story). If nothing else, billions spent on security has to be considered a subtraction from a nations wealth.
Read more: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/05/09/london-olympic-park-and-costs/#ixzz1uTn6x6yg
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The London Olympics Are Looking Like A Financial And Organizational Disaster (Original Post)
xchrom
May 2012
OP
Not only that, but you have to dish out hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks
Blue_Tires
May 2012
#7
No one saw this coming....
bhikkhu
(10,708 posts)2. I love the Olympics myself...
but I think the point is past where you can build a vast new arena for it from scratch every darn time around - its just too big, and far too resource-intensive. I think it needs a permanent home.
What country?
How are you going to get the vendors to go along with that?
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)7. Not only that, but you have to dish out hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks
to the IOC and their cronies to even get the bid in the first place...
But no one dares investigate the IOC or FIFA World Cup committee...
jwirr
(39,215 posts)4. Not to mention that it sounds like it is going to be an armed camp. That does not appeal to me.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)5. o yeah -- it's going to be fierce.
steals something of the spirit of the games.
crazylikafox
(2,739 posts)6. Better send Mittens over there to fix it