#rio 16

The Rio Games Were An Unjustifiable Human Disaster, And So Are The Olympics

Yes, the Olympic Bubble is so all-encompassing that the IOC has convinced itself that it doesn't exist. "These games have not been organized in a bubble," IOC President Thomas Bach told reporters on Saturday as he made other demonstrably false claims, such as the Games not using any public money and Brazilians being "united behind these Olympic Games" despite the fact that half of them weren't. 

About 70,000 people have been displaced—20,000 families—by the Olympics and its parallel but dubious "legacy" projects. Thousands of poor people—mostly black and mostly men—have been killed during "pacification" efforts to make the city appear peaceful, but the exact number is hard to determine.

To call the Olympics a bad investment would be disingenuous, because few actually believe the Games produce any return of public value. Study after study after study has shown they create no economic benefits, yet cities and nations still fight to host them, always to disastrous ends. Something like $12 billion—roughly $15,000 per Carioca, five times the annual minimum wage salary in Brazil—was spent on the Rio Games. Nearly all of that money went to the already wealthy: developers, landowners, transportation moguls, massive—and allegedly corrupt—construction firms, effectively making the Olympics an enormously successful regressive wealth transfer program, taking money from the poor and middle class via taxes and giving it to the rich. This is an unconscionable crime in a city with open sewers, endemic violence, abject poverty, and lack of economic opportunities for millions of its citizens. Rio will be paying for these Games for years, if not decades, to come.