Athens Olympics

I'm quite enjoying the Olympics this time round. First time I've really paid attention to them and much too late to be wishing I'd worked on my badminton when I was a kid. I think these days you need to start planning to be in the Olympics when you're in the womb, judging from the average age of the competitors.
It helps that they're fairly close to us this time - the Sydney Olympics passed me by because of the time difference (as did England's Rugby World Cup victory last year).

London is of course bidding for the 2012 games and is one of the favourites. Although it costs a lot to host them, I think we need to burst of regeneration that the games will bring. Sadly, the thing that puts our bid above all others is our expertise with security issues - what a commentary on the modern world...

Something that occurred to me recently as I was watching the games was "what happens to the expertise?" Each games has a different organising committee, reinventing the wheel each time. Seems odd to me.
It's undoubtedly one of the reasons why a US swimmer was disqualified yesterday and lost his gold medal (moving the Brit up to Bronze) but was then reinstated not because there was no problem but because the lane judge didn't speak the "official language of FINA" the international swimming body. How bizarre.

Turns out others have wondered why the Olympics aren't held in the same place each time, and there's an interesting article by Christina Larson over at Washington Monthly Here's an extract but take a look at the whole thing:

In these games, as in all previous modern Olympics, the vast majority of the staff who work the events--the bus drivers, the food vendors, the traffic cops, the military officers manning the security command centers--have never done this before. It is this lack of previous experience that has caused or contributed to the most famous problems that have befallen modern Olympic games, from lost bus drivers in Sydney to the failure to prevent a terrorist bombing in Atlanta.

The heart of the problem is that the Olympics--for no unassailable reason--alters its location every four years. With every change of venue, millions of staff-hours of know-how are lost. That's not how most other major sporting events are organized. Professional golf tournaments return to the same courses year after year, allowing the staffs there to learn from their mistakes. Same with tennis: The groundskeepers at Wimbledon have had decades to practice pulling out the rain tarps and emptying out the parking lots. Yet the Olympics tries to reinvent the wheel every time, fielding a new team of planners, contractors, accountants, technicians, security personnel, and volunteers every four years, and expecting them to execute myriad complex logistical tasks perfectly the first time out. As Atlanta's Olympic finance chief Pat Glisson explained to CFO magazine, her job was to 'create a Fortune 500 company from scratch, then take it apart at the end.'

Virgin sacrifices

The ancient Greeks who invented the Olympics would have shaken their heads at the traveling-circus style of the modern games. After all, they didn't hold the Olympics one year in Sparta, the next in Corinth, then in Delphi. For over a thousand years, the games took place in the same wooded sanctuary of Olympia, on the Peloponnesian peninsula. This set-up seemed to work fine. The extant classical texts contain no complaints of faulty Olympic crowd control, misplaced victory wreaths, or insufficient supplies of lamb kabobs. The Roman Emperor Theodosius put an end to the games in the 4th century A.D. not because he'd tired of traffic congestion or ill-behaving drunken helots, but because, as a Christian, he couldn't abide the thought of celebrated athletes parading in the buff and offering sacrifices to pagan gods.