Excess, not just cost, turned off Norway to 2022 Olympics [View all]

[DinahMoeHum]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/chi-excess-not-just-cost-turned-off-norway-to-2022-olympics-20141003-column.html

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Selling Norway on another Winter Olympics should have been a no-brainer. No country is more passionate about and successful in winter sports. No country has them more completely woven into the fabric of its culture.
(snip)
To understand why Norway's government gave the back of its hand to hosting the Winter Olympics – but not to winter sport or even to hosting the more modestly scaled 2016 winter Youth Olympics in Lillehammer – you need to understand its relentlessly egalitarian attitudes about pretension, self-aggrandizement and entitlement, especially as embodied by the International Olympic Committee.
(snip)
And those attitudes help explain the reasoning in Verdens Gang (VG) newspaper columnist Frithjof Jacobsen’s excellent analysis of the 2022 bid rejection, which begins:

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/ol-2022/ioc-kan-takke-seg-selv/a/23307336/ (**)

(snip)
“The Norwegian no to hosting the Winter Olympics 2022 should be a death blow to the pomposity of the IOC's apparatchiks."
(snip)
"The Olympic Games are still a beautiful spectacle, but its owners have rotted on the vine."
(snip)

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And here's the IOC's reaction after the Norwegian people and government told them to go F themselves:
http://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-statement/238610

Wow, what fatuousness.

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(**) Use Google to translate, if need be.