Pyeongchang! Congratulations!

Er – Gesundheit! What’s that you say? Why that’s Pyeongchang, not a city at all strictly-speaking, but a county, located in the east part of South Korea, and the locale which was chosen yesterday to be the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Maybe/probably you don’t know it now; you’ll know the name enough by, say, March of 2018.

With their victory, the South Koreans left behind in their dust their other two main competitors for this designation, namely Munich/Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany, of course) and Annecy (in the French Alps, right by the Swiss border). But don’t labor under any mistaken impression that Pyeongchang ran away with the competition based on any super-spectacular presentation they made earlier this week before the International Olympic Committee’s conclave in Durban, South Africa. No no no – as a quite informative article by Friedhard Teuffel in Der Tagesspiegel points out (Fiddling your way to Olympic victory, reprinted in Die Zeit as Race of the string-pullers), every one of those 110 IOC members charged with voting on the matter had certainly made up his/her mind before the presentations even started. (more…)

Yes, as if you don’t have enough to worry about these days . . . but the decision-process is now starting to get in gear for who will get to host the 2018 Winter Olympics! We’re reminded of this by Evi Simeoni with her article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, brought out on the occasion of the recent deadline for submission of official “bid-books” from candidate cities to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Understandably, Ms. Simeoni is particularly interested in Munich’s bid for the honor, which was delivered to Lausanne in person (because that’s simply what you do) earlier this week along with the documents of competitors Annecy (France) and Pyeongchang (South Korea). What follows from this point is inspections by the IOC’s Evaluation Committee to each site (to happen 1-3 March for the Bavarians), followed by formal presentations at the Lausanne headquarters on 18-19 May and the announcement of the decision at an IOC meeting in Durban, South Africa, on 6 July. (more…)

Followers of this weblog over at least the past few months will recall my very doubtful stance towards the issue of possible doping by athletes at this years Beijing Olympic Games. I presented commentary from an ex-Olympic star doubting that doping could be avoided; and I pointed out how technological advances in sporting accessories were probably producing athletic performances many would call “unnatural” anyway. In fact, in my last sentence of that latter post I opined that, because of these accessories, we “have something else to be concerned about in addition to the pharmacological/blood-swapping tricks that we have to hope the Olympic authorities are sufficiently on-guard against.”

Sorry to say, but up comes an article in the respected German commentary weekly Die Zeit, by Friedhard Teuffel (Doping Policy of the IOC [= International Olympic Committee] is not credible), which indicates that those authorities were rather unlikely to have been sufficiently on-guard.
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It was something to make you wonder aloud: “Are they serious?” As part of the good face towards the outside world that China was trying to build in the run-up to the Beijing Games – an attempt to live up to supposed “Olympic ideals,” since similar measures had apparently been introduced at the Athens and Sydney Olympics – back last month the Chinese authorities announced that protests and demonstrations would be legally allowed, but only within zones that would be designated within three of Beijing’s parks, namely the Zizhuyuan, Ritan, and World Parks, respectively in the city’s NW, E, and SW parts. All that was necessary was to apply for permission five days in advance, specifying in your application, in detail, the planned nature of the protest, the topic, and the number of participants.

(If you’d like a bit of English-language amusement, you can check out the on-line article about this from Xinhua, one of China’s two official news agencies. The respective park managers are diligently boning up on the national “law on assemblies, procession and demonstrations” to get prepared; meanwhile, park visitors express alarm that their lives could be disturbed.)

No, of course they were not serious. (more…)

OK, let’s talk about the Olympics, then. But not the 2008 Beijing Olympics – rather, the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics! Yes, we pride ourselves here at EuroSavant on our solipsism, but the immediate motive for this nostalgic look 80 years backward is the excellent recent article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw by Haro Hielkema, Amsterdam: Example for the Rest, which is itself largely derived from the book Model voor de toekomst – Amsterdam, Olympische Spelen 1928 by Ruud Paauw and Jaap Visser (which was itself only published a few weeks ago, that is, just before the opening of the Beijing Games – which I bet will not surprise you at all). (more…)

Alright!! The French newspaper Humanité (the official organ of the French Communist Party, if you’re interested) has good news to report today from Beijing: The IOC Has Carried Out 650 Anti-Doping Controls, None Positive.

Those 650 tests have been carried out since 27 July, when the Olympic Village in Beijing officially opened – but they have been done not only in the Chinese capital, but also at training camps even outside the country: in Singapore, in Hong Kong, even in the US – “everywhere.” The speaker here is IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch, who made the announcement.

IOC President Jacques Rogge also had a piece to say. He announced that those first 650 were part of the 4,500 tests that Olympic authorities ultimately plan to carry out. Of course, he expects that there will be positive results at some point: specifically, and extrapolating from the 26 cases that were uncovered from the 3,500 test done in Athens four years ago, he expects there to be around 30 to 40 positives by the time testing ceases on 24 August. Of course, if there turn out to be less he would be mightily pleased, he added (if not in those words).

Back now to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. I mentioned before their rampant commercialism. That is certainly not a recent phenomenon by any means, but nonetheless an ever-growing annoyance, clearly at variance with the original “Olympic spirit” and quite possibly a major reason behind the awarding of the Games to Beijing in the first place (that huge Chinese market!), despite the country’s deficiencies in the area of human rights and free information that we have already seen, as well as Beijing’s own deficiencies in sheer clean air which we may be about to witness.

The guardian of the Games and their “Olympic spirit” is supposed to be the 110 members of the International Olympic Committee, lead by its president, the Belgian Jacques Rogge. For anyone who might have any confidence in that body as a defender of the Olympics against the seductions of money, the recent article by Evi Simeoni in the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (or FAZ) should provide a bracing corrective (The Rivalry of the Applicants). (more…)