Ethan Explains Olympic Mess

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games have started in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and they appear to be an Olympic Mess.

Depending on your source, the government there spent between $12 billion and $14.4 billion in a country with severe poverty, crime, zika virus, bad water making swimmers sick, and more.

Yes, Brazil is a beautiful country with wonderful people, but this is not the right approach without an economic return to the people. And it’s particularly wrong when the top officials are raking in the cash while the athletes struggle to make it. This is just another example of the wealthy elite cashing in on the hard work of others.

From The Washington Post:

At the very top of “the Movement” sits the International Olympic Committee, a nonprofit run by a “volunteer” president who gets an annual “allowance” of $251,000 and lives rent-free in a five-star hotel and spa in Switzerland.
At the very bottom of “the Movement” — beneath the IOC members who travel first-class and get paid thousands of dollars just to attend the Olympics, beneath the executives who make hundreds of thousands to organize the Games, beneath the international sports federations, the national sport federations and the national Olympic committees and all of their employees — are the actual athletes whose moments of triumph and pain will flicker on television screens around the globe starting Friday.
But by the time that flood of cash flows through the Movement and reaches the athletes, barely a trickle remains, often a few thousand dollars at most. For members of Team USA — many of whom live meagerly off the largesse of friends and family, charity, and public assistance — the biggest tangible reward they’ll receive for making it to Rio will be two suitcases full of free Nike and Ralph Lauren clothing they are required to wear at all team events.

Should we just make a single place be the site of the summer games and another place the on-going host of the winter games?

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