Colonel_Maybourne wrote:When this is all finished with, I would love to see Greeces official tourist count for the year. It will be interesteing to see whether the tourist count increased or decreased during the games.
It MUST have increased, but that in and of itself does nothing for you or for them, since the whole point is that dramatically fewer people went to these games than the ones in Australia or the US.
Alot has to do with the medias covarage of the whole affair. Here in the UK we heard nothing but bad things for months on end. There were never any positive reports and this must have put people off. If they just kept their mouths shut and repeated the Greeks statement "that the games will be starting on time" then who wouldn't want to go and see the games in their home country.
They would also be totally derelict in their duties. The Greek Olympic Committee has been mired in scandal and other serious issues from the day they received the games. Does this not register with you? While there are problems putting on any Olympic event (building the facilities and such is NOT easy), the kinds of problems experienced in Athens were dramatically greater and more serious than the ones experienced previously in other cities. They were LITERALLY unprecedented.
Another killer in my opinion is the massive military presence in Athens. All this talk about terror attacks has turned the mood sour. Seeing thousands of soldiers all over the city does increase security, but at what cost?
A huge cost--about $3.5 billion, but one that's obviously smaller than the cost of NOT having them there. Does it not occur to you that many people WOULD NOT have attended the games without that security presence? This is a situation in which security should be increased potentially to a point beyond the potential damage*risk of attack, simply because people's concerns over the issue are so great that economically it makes sense to devote additional security.
True, they didn't finish all the details they had planned. But so what, what they did finish is more than good enough for the task. Lets not let the rediculous media tell us whats wrong but lets listen to what the athletes will say after they have competed.
Yeah, like the American stars who didn't show up to the games because of the problems they were having?
If the athletes say the facilities were not up to the task then you damn well better listen and accept that. If they say the facilities were great then I wonder if the media will report that.
A lot of them ARE saying that the facilities suck. The swimmers, in particular, are seriously pissed about the lack of a roof on their stadium. Other athletes didn't even SHOW UP because they felt that the facilities and accomodations made weren't sufficient.
Hmmm, I remember when I was at university, I would be given weeks to complete a certain task, but as always I left it to the last minute and did all nighters. My grades were still very high. True, they would have been higher if I did the work earlier, but so what, I was pleased with my results. Same can be said about the games. they did an "all nighter" and the games are running fine as far as I can see.
Can you say "false analogy?" There's a difference between procrastinating on a school project and not doing shit for THREE YEARS after being given the Olympics (most cities start work immediately--some even before they get the games). Moreover, as you can tell, the Greek's procrastination actually caused some serious concerns.
The whole wembly subject was raised so that we can see that any country can run into difficulties. One stadium (wembly) has caused a massive fuss and is well over budget and past the initial deadline.
Anytime someone runs a project this big there are going to be problems--I don't disagree with that. There were problems in Sydney and Atlanta, LA and the other cities that have hosted the Olympics. However, to say "other cities had problems, too, therefore the Athens games are okay," is short-sighted since the problems at Athens are much greater than those at other cities, and were poorly addressed.
If the same organisers that were running wembly, ran the olympics then you could forget about the games ever starting.
I kind of doubt that, but regardless of its veracity, there's a huge difference between a single site having some problems and delays (which is part of why most Olympic facilities are scheduled for completion months or even years in advance) and the sort of across-the-board problems experienced at Athens. Do you justify a government's mismanagement by finding some dumbass off the streets and saying that if he was president then things would be worse?
I agree. I believe that the publicity was unjust and very negative. The media scared away the public, not the Greeks, afterall, the Greeks kept their promise and the games were finished on time.
The games were STARTED on time. And seriously, there was never any real doubt that the games would happen in some form, but there were questions as to what sort of condition they would occur in. There were even plans in the works, at one point, to just have the swimming competitions in the middle of the frickin' Agean! No one can say that that's a good plan for doing the Olympics. When something similar was done decades ago it was universally slammed as being crappy. As it is, we can easily see that there were much more serious problems with these games than previously. Did you see any facilities in Sydney that were supposed to have roofs but didn't?
Getting something done on time is not a substitute for doing them properly. If I turned in a piece-of-shit report to my boss, is it okay to say "well, it was on-schedule, wasn't it?" When someone hosts the summer games, they are expected to do certain things above and beyond putting the athletes out in a field and telling them to go at whatever they're supposed to be doing. The Greek preparation was DECIDEDLY sub-par, in spite of the hard-work that many people put in to hosting the games, and a large part of the drop-off in attendance can be attributed to these management issues.
Unless you can show me where I said seven billion people watched the Olympics, that is.
