We Got the Olympics, Fuck Yeah!

The International Olympic Committee checked the second set of books it keeps in the floor safe, evaluated the fact that smartly run cities were dropping out of future bidding, and gave the 2024 Olympics to Paris and 2028 to Los Angeles in an unprecedented bit of long range planning designed to avoid future embarrassment. Two massive sanctuary cities propped up by prime property tax bases, legacy tourism, and dominant public employee unions. Two once great metropolises. 

Los Angeles seems likely to lose less public money than other recent savaged international cities that took the IOC bait, given the existing sports and hospitality infrastructure. Slightly better than the roads, highways, waterways, bridges, schools, sewers, power grid, public safety, and airports which have been left to crumble despite being one of the biggest spending municipalities in the world. The IOC’s got nothing in the grift department on the people who maneuvered their way into ownership of the City of Los Angeles. Good luck fixing a pothole. Though ten guys will take home six figure salaries and seven figure lifetime pensions for supervising that pothole and being somebody’s brother-in-law. Don’t worry. The Olympics fix everything.

All sports world activities contain some level of crass corruption. The NFL hardly has its hands clean. This is big business. The Olympics are unique in that nobody much gives a crap about the sporting events that follow the three hour interpretative dance explaining how the white people killed all the natives. They’ve recently added professional sports to the lineup to enhance marketability, but ninety-five percent of the athletic competition is niche audience. Or Bolivians. The most niche of all sports fans.

It’s human nature to maintain tradition for the sake of tradition. It helps us believe that our great-grandparents thought about us kindly before we were even born. Also, that our great grandkids will give a shit about us when we’re gone. The melancholy is used remorselessly against people to steal their money. Watch any Christmas ad. The Olympics took a breather for two thousand years because nobody really wanted them back. The French and the Greeks colluded in a sodomitic conspiracy to bring them back so they could be special again and maybe win some awards in fast walking. The axe should’ve fallen on this traveling quadrennial road show many besieged and mugged foreign tourists ago. 

Welcome back to Los Angeles, Olympic Games. Will this be covered under my recent new gang tax?

_{Photo credit: Getty Images}