my unpopular opinion is that they are a waste of time and effort.
It’s a drain on resources intended to boost the prestige of a nation-state and the vile, self-serving elites that control them. The IOC itself is a corrupt bribe-machine that willingly bolsters the reputation of the worst regimes in the world.
It’s the circuses part of ‘bread and circuses’ - a tool of oppressers the world over.
For the athletes, it’s a not a waste of time and effort.
For the hosting countries/cities?
They cost a TON of time and money, and it’s a dubious proposition that the host cities ever recover that investment. Olympic villages are also rarely the best possible use of prime land, and often involve buying up and gentrifying entire neighborhoods for the purpose of building the facilities, and for the duration of the event, and the planning leading up to it, your city basically gives up autonomy to an organization that spends your resources as if they were their own in order to create a platform to sell advertising rights in the guise of sportsmanship. For the Olympics to be more sustainable and less corrupted by commercial interests, they should focus less on spectacle and expenditure and rely more on existing infrastructure.
Furthermore, while sport is an important and noble endeavor, it is by no means any more important than any other human endeavor, and every four years we have to be exposed to the intersection of sports and politics in discussions about nations that, for example, allow medalists to avoid conscription or escape poverty in various countries in exchange for bringing national prestige, and rarely do we take the opportunity to discuss what this says about our priorities, simply accepting the elevated prestige we place on this particular sporting event without question.
In short, I don’t agree their cancellation would cause NOTHING of value to be lost, but the Olympics as an event in its current incarnation has PLENTY worth reevaluating, and we could all benefit greatly from reexamining its scale and role.
wasting time on something you enjoy is not actually wasted time. Besides, so many people get positivity from watching etc
Right!? Can we not yuck other people’s yum please?
I wonder what the response would be if the OPs unpopular opinion had been on video games and esports instead? For the record, I enjoy video games.
You don’t need to bankrupt entire cities to build esports arenas so esports is better.
On a planet as diverse as ours, there should be plenty of room for both regular sports and e-sports.
There is plenty of room. But the Olympics insist on changing city every 4 years and building a brand new stadium and village every time. It’s wasteful.
Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. - John Lennon
I’d agree except that the possibility remains to just build a permanent site to host both the summer and winter games, removing like 99% of the negatives that it actually causes.
Just like Superbowl.
I love the idea of the Olympics and would like to see a version that wasn’t an environmental, economic, and humanitarian trash fire.
I have, if anything, been watching the Olympics more now than in the past. I think the change came about due to the fact that you can now stream any event at any time without commercials, annoying commentary, interviews, etc. It used to be that coverage would focus on events featuring your own nation’s top talent, which meant that some sport that interests you but doesn’t have much traction in your country gets ignored. And during a low time, rather than showing some sport where maybe your country has no medal prospects, they’d fill the time doing athlete profiles or whatever. I hated that.
But I get that there are downsides. The cost of hosting the games have spiralled out of control, the IOC has FIFA-scale corruption issues, and the war on drugs is going about as well as wars on drugs go.
One thing I have noticed with the Paris Games is that the venues are spread around a lot more across the country. The surfing was all the way over in Tahiti, which is about as far from Paris as you can get and still be on the planet. This opens the possibility that maybe one nation, let alone city, need not supply every facility anymore. Like do we really need another luge track? Just pick one that already exists.
LA’s transit plans are all aiming for a 2028 Olympics launch. If it was not for that, I doubt any of these projects could get the funding in time.
And people should be fucking angry about it instead of being happy that it will get done for tourists instead of the residents, just like the cleanup of the Seine that should have been done decades ago.
I’m pretty sure people uninterested in the things that interest you would say the same thing.
Globally your position is extremely popular.
Disagree. Let people have their fun.
Honestly, not to be mean or anything, BUT, this sorta reeks of “I don’t like it so nobody else should.”
This is a type of mentality that I believe to be highly negative and frankly kinda toxic. Your welcome to your opinion, but I really don’t think the many many hours, days, weeks, months, and years of effort, training and planning that goes into those who both run and participate in the Olympics is a waste of time and effort.
Also we live in a world that you can just block or ignore anything you don’t particularly care for.
“…so nobody else should”
I don’t think OP ever said that, nor did they imply it. I interpret OP’s unpopular opinion as nothing more than “it’s not for me”.
But I guess there is some room for ambiguity.
Sure, but plenty of things I don’t like I still wouldn’t call a waste of time and effort.
They all have their world championships already so they can already compete there (and I mean, that’s exactly what a multitude of sports do in fact, hell, climbers weren’t that happy about how the sport was added to the Olympics and some high ranking comes just didn’t bother even trying to go).
The environmental and socioeconomic impact of the Olympics make them something we really should consider at least making permanently held in a specific location.
Hmm, an interesting take. The Olympics, being an international multinational event, being in a singular location could cause political tension between countries. It would have to be on neutral land for such a thing to work. Maybe some of that unclaimed land In Africa?
Edit: messed up the formatting by accident.
That would mean a private company becoming the owner of land that isn’t part of a country, would be kind of weird wouldn’t it?
They’re already registered in Switzerland so let them deal with it, countries should refuse to host them considering the cost and the fact that there’s no return on investment in the end.
The Olympics is a time to celebrate athletes in sports we don’t follow every day.
I don’t watch baseball, soccer, basketball, etc at the Olympics because they all get plenty of air time.
In the last week I watched water polo, gymnastics, breakdancing, volleyball, skateboarding, and more.
There’s an event (modern pentathlon) that consists of pistol shooting, fencing, Horsemanship, running, and swimming. That’s a fascinating mix of disciplines and there are people who train for decades to be good at it, and I think it’s wonderful that they get their time in the spotlight every few years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Modern_Pentathlon_Championships
Again, just considering the environmental and socioeconomic impact of the Olympics should be enough to convince everyone that we need to stop hosting them or that we should host them in a fixed location with only the athletes going.
Homeless people get kicked out of cities and no one cares what happens to them. Billions in public funds are spent without a return on investment, very often to buy infrastructure that is then left to rot. The impact on the environment is incredibly high (this year’s Olympics are evaluated to have released 1.5m tons of CO2 pretty much evenly split between traveling, construction and game operations).
If you think about all of them you then realize that the Olympics literally kill people and it’s just another thing we’re spending public funds on to enrich private corporations at the expense of the public’s well-being.
We’re not responsible enough to host that kind of events responsibly.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19406940.2023.2271487#abstract
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-games
https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-explainer-086d71dfa93128a2c5a302cb47ec3524
Also, if there’s any vision, aspiration for better, hope for improvement, expanding the limits of the human body is important, just as aspiring to ever improving science or technology
Honestly, not to be mean or anything, BUT, this sorta reeks of “I don’t like it so nobody else should.”
As someone who had to learn how to avoid these feelings after growing up with parents who felt this way about everything, OP is clearly just salty that people like something they don’t like.
There are legitimate problems with the Olympics, and the scale of the spectacle, international attention and amount of people and money involved really lends itself to the worst of modern humanity. But that doesn’t mean nobody can enjoy them, that just means that the world needs to push to improve the Olympics further
Sex trafficers would lose major revenue source!
Lemmy hates sports
They would be fine, you just have to choose a permanent location. Currently, we build the required stuff almost every time from the ground up and a lot of it isn’t used afterwards.
