Should Vancouver host the Olympics every two years forever?

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      The 2016 Summer Olympic Games is proving a handful for Rio de Janeiro.

      Venues were barely finished on time, crime has been a problem, a swimming pool turned green, and gridlock has left reporters travelling from one venue to another stuck in traffic for hours (during which time they go on social media and complain to the world about traffic).

      Brazil is not to blame. (Well, it is partly to blame. A recession and political scandal of staggeringly epic proportions probably didn’t make the task of hosting the Games any easier.) The story was largely the same in Sochi in 2014 and in Beijing in 2008. London did a bit better in 2012, though there were still plenty of complaints about the sort of security budget you need to host an event like this in the post-9/11 era and cost overruns in general.

      The increasingly painful headaches that come with putting on the Olympics mean fewer world-class cities are competing for the honour. What’s to be done?

      The folks over at the online magazine Slate have a suggestion.

      “The Olympics Should Be in Vancouver. Winter and Summer. Every Two Years. Forever,” reads a headline published today (August 11).

      The case they outline isn’t without some merit.

      “Four years after the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the group that organized the games reported no debts, with revenues and expenses each amounting to a rather thrifty $1.9 billion. (Remember: Sochi’s Winter Games cost more than $40 billion.),” writes Slate senior editor Jonathan L. Fischer. “The venues constructed for the event remain in use, thanks in part to a trust established in advance by the city. The decorations were minimal—that was the right, recessionary look less than two years after the global financial crisis, and it will remain the right look given that the Olympics have too long been suffocated by extravagance. The hometown newspaper of Vancouver’s neighbor/rival to the south, Seattle, called the hosts ‘gracious’ and the event a ‘national triumph.’ We would all be lucky to be invited to visit Vancouver every two years.”

      I suspect residents’ thoughts on that prospect would be mixed, but that at least some of those who survived the five-ring circus when it passed through in 2010 might not be so enthusiastic about the idea.

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