krow

ostersund 2013 still the GOAT, i see. don't think it will ever be topped. havana, rekyjavik, almaty holding up well. singapore a strong addition.

that's amazing - we love to see an equal opportunity hater. purely in it for the love of hating.

D may be a bit generic but it looks 'gardens by the bay' inspired and it's masterfully done. the animation is exactly the kind of progressive thinking we need for 2036. it is, after all, the last olympics ever before societal climate collapse.

i worked on a bid book comp in 2011 but i never submitted it. it was very complicated, maybe a world cup. i got fired suddenly - i underestimated how much my boss disliked me - and lost the indesign files on the work computer. i used to watch tv episodes on youtube all day because they were slow with copyright takedowns back then. good times.

i live relatively close to malibu and lost power 2 days ago, and literally sat in the dark yesterday lmao it was so boring. the fire isn't really near my house though. i left the area today since SCE, our power company, has no idea when they'll be able to restore it. some of my favorite restaurants burned down. it's unbelievable.

sure it does, it was my nickname in high school.

wait there's fruit in that? literally impossible to tell.

that's gross british people should be banned from talking about food. you know what might make it better though is if you deep fried it and put it on a stick.

i'm guessing the brand consultants probably aren't too keen on UHC initials these days 💀

damn

this board is unusable.

not exaggerating much when i say a successful SA bid might be the only thing capable of killing the olympics for good.

the preparations would likely be disaster on top of disaster and the western media would have a field day with their coverage, unleashing unrestrained racism and cynicism on the world the likes of which we have never seen before that would get so toxic, the games themselves would be overshadowed by it. sorry but someone needs to burst these balloons before they ever get inflated. let's confine ourselves the realm of the possible, unless we'd like to indulge in a fantasy thread where we talk about elon musk's speculations for an olympics on mars.

i sincerely doubt the IOC is willing to spend one penny to bring the games to africa. everyone on earth knows it's completely unworkable — except AF obviously — and any dialogue is purely for the sake of optics and to be used as leverage against whoever will ultimately host 2036 and 40. whichever cities get it will be in a country with the money to spend and the economy to back it up.

he really does treat the IOC with the kind of arrogant contempt they deserve. gets a lot of milage out of humiliating them at every turn and then playing the victim when they retaliate (remember those valieva photo-ops?). always careful, though, to dangle some promise of future cooperation to ensure the IOC is working for him no matter what they do. i wish our autocrat was ever that canny.

anyone remember that old civ 4 tech quote? "members of the same trade seldom meet, even for merriment and diversion, without the conversation ending in a conspiracy against the public."

i think he's just blowing smoke and sucking up as he stumps for KC, tbh. it's a little like telling your sister 'wow, you look great today!' when you need a favor.

oh ffs how gimmicky. though i guess a full metal jacket obstacle course does showcase 'complete soldier' skills, so it's probably a decent enough replacement.

i read the bios of the USA's IOC members and they're elite but...qualified enough: a tennis federation executive, games organizers, allyson felix. that seems appropriate and doable. meanwhile, there are 7 HRHs, 1 HH, 1 HSH, 2 HMs and a suspended sheikh. madness. it's the house of lords before 1999. https://olympics.com/ioc/members

there has got to be a better way to select IOC members because what even is this nonsense.

obviously it's speculative, i literally say that in the first paragraph. but it's backed with plenty of links on her career you can read up on. if you can take anything from it, great. if not, idc. she seems like a good deputy enforcer for entrenched power, but i don't see much natural leadership capability. i don't see that x factor, except as an athlete. even there, she's won gold, but she took more silvers.

OK i know there's no one to talk about this with, but i can spare a moment for some dime store analysis because the woman fascinates me a bit — she's just a total cipher. or, more charitably, she's an unknown quantity, a blank slate that lets people project onto her whatever qualities they wish to see. so let's see if we can unpack the mystery of KC a little and i'll project on her what it is i see when i look at someone with as much soulless ambition as her. after her admittedly brilliant swim career ended in 2016, she joined the IOC's athletes commission and chaired it from 2018-2021 when she became a full IOC member with a 32 year term. in 2021, bach appointed her chair of the coordination commission for brisbane (more on that later), a full-throated endorsement of her abilities. (he's also hedged on a few other women, though none of them are standing for election.) fitting for a bach loyalist and a career politician, she appears to have few scruples or values beyond press release pablum, though we can hardly describe her as totally incompetent at her jobs or totally spineless. like any good politician, she's calculating to a fault and inoffensively middling whenever possible. the woman doesn't ask for a glass of water without getting her words checked by a global PR firm twice. but she has had an interesting career, which is instructive in itself. she cut her teeth as an athlete's rights champion while chairing the commission, helping to implement a rights/responsibilities charter, and took some strong steps to amplify athlete voices...but she's never used her own voice to say anything particularly impactful. (except when she came down firmly against podium protests that is!) one journalist at sports examiner describes her resume thus: good politicians always have a wedge issue, and somewhere along the way a six-figure PR consultant came to a stunning and profitable realization: KC is a woman! so, naturally women's rights became a vague interest, though it's nothing you could describe as feminism, and you can just forget about anything more political than that. (the linked op-ed is mainly just solipsistic complaints at how difficult she, KC, has had it career-wise as a woman). as an athlete, she never considered speaking out against human rights violations in zimbabwe or the mugabe regime because she valued her career too much. (forgive the over reliance on ITG reporting, they're the only ones who cover her as a beat.) politicians must also, at least once in their lives, show actual leadership capability, mostly so they can refer to it anytime someone asks them for an example of actual leadership capability. in KC's case, she's gone to the mat against corruption/sexual harassment in her country's football association, succeeding in getting them banned by FIFA briefly. a fiery speech in parliament made her a few enemies, but like any good careerist, she only really cares about staying in the good graces of no. 1. no, not thomas bach. we're talking zimbabwe president, emmerson mnangagwa. you won't hear a word from her against his checkered regime: in fact, el presidente likes her so much, he reappointed her last year to cabinet position (minister of youth and sports) that she's held since 2019. in 2020, he reallocated a mugabe farm to her and her husband (nice to have friends in high places, kirsty!), a move made her a few enemies too, but mainly among opposition groups who wouldn't be inclined toward a gov't cabinet member in the first place. she and her husband dismissed it as a non story. she's married and has a kid, which is nice i guess, but i really only mention this to gossip shamelessly about her layabout husband, tyrone seward. we don't know much about him, except that he nearly drowned as a child and then went on to manage kirsty's SWIMMING CAREER lmao before paying her father a dowry to marry her. in fact, his entire career has been entirely devoted to gripping kirsty's coattails with all his might and refusing to let go. pretty good ROI for those cows and chickens if you ask me. (that's not like african racism or anything, the dowry was literally cows and chickens). take a look at this one sentence biography: "Tyrone Seward is a Zimbabwean and co-founder of the Kirsty Coventry Academy for swimming." oh, work! did someone say real househusbands of harare? at bach's behest, KC has most recently moved into an executive "coordination" role between the IOC and OG/YOG hosts and is knee-deep in pulling off both dakar and brisbane, making sure the venues plans come to fruition and they deliver on their promises — so good luck to her!! half of me wonders if she's bit off more than she can chew with that one and is looking for a promotion not only as the logical progression of her manic, sociopathic type A ambition, but also to be able to delegate the actual work of overseeing the olympic games and focus her energies on the equally important presidential tasks of social climbing with the royal families of the world and flipping a coin to see if the IOC cares about doping violations this week. so, what's the upshot: would KC make a good IOC president? anything's possible, i suppose. you don't win individual olympic gold by accident (except you, steven!) and she could easily earn a third one in speed climbing if the course were an IOC career. but it troubles me that KC doesn't seem to stand for anything of consequence... she's "for" women's equality but she's happy to blind eye human rights abuses. she can denounce corruption, but only when her overlords permit it. she's press release progressive, but no one's accusing her of going "woke." she's charitable, but in true noblesse oblige, only in ways that personally benefit her. and most importantly, may we all be blessed to find someone to love us as much as KC loves a dictatorial regime — a good skillset if she somehow has to navigate the nightmare hellscape of xi, putin, trump and the french right at once. in short, she may be perfectly suited for this particular global political moment, leading a feckless IOC that resents a changing world too much to adapt to it. she's perfectly bachian — with a few extra medals. it's disappointing for those of us hoping for greater change that her candidature is as strong as it is. we could probably do worse, but we could almost certainly do a whole lot better.

on one hand, flourishing in both a mugabe and post-mugabe regime probably took some canny political acumen. on the other, rolling over for dictators to obtain personal profit is not among the key attributes i would wish the leader of the olympic movement to possess.

you would.

i'm sick of the lies; i'm sick of the gaslighting. i just watched a wonderful SOG in paris and sadly came away convinced it's all lost a bit of the overall magic. meanwhile, a COVID olympics in china with fake snow was as exciting and diverting as ever, and what magic was lost will surely be back with international crowds and free movement. it's sad to say the SOG has become an over-exalted, bloated mess — a tedious mix of the outdated (pentathlon), never-ending multi-round team sports (volleyball, field hockey), and new arrivals that invite more ridicule than excitement (breaking, freestyle bmx). to say nothing of the sports like surfing or sailing that cannot be seamlessly hosted by landlocked cities and require — fittingly enough in the case of france — so many sporting colonies vast distances from the main cluster. these days, a casual viewer cannot hope to watch all the summer sports without devoting their lives to the olympics, leaving most in a state of permanent disconnect with the event or else watching individual sports in isolated silos. complete chaos. meanwhile, the WOG has grown but much more successfully, and it's hard to believe sports like curling and snowboarding haven't been with us since chamonix. maybe only the acrobatic events (aerial skiing; big air) seem overtly modern, but they stay sufficiently grounded in the common ice/snow theme to settle in perfectly like just another of layer ice in a skating rink, gradually freezing itself level by level to form a cohesive whole. the fact is both these things are true: the WOGs are a leisurely, frolicking snow day for rich cold-weather countries born out of a legacy of oppressive eurocentrism that is mostly fading in the face of a more globalized future AND it's the most perfectly designed and executed multi-sport event ever conceived (perhaps excepting the original, ancient olympic games, whose only real failing was a lack of international broadcast television coverage, a most american invention that was sadly beyond the greek imagination). sure, winter sport lacks the democratizing, humanizing features of football and track&field. i'm aware that it takes a maddeningly specific combination of geography/infrastructure, money, and culture to succeed at the highest levels, which few a countries possess naturally (austria; norway), a few have succeeded in fostering (japan, USA/canada), and a few are spending big to blatantly force for geopolitical clout (china). most countries, i'm sure, find the WOGs completely baffling on a level so fundamental it's probably not even possible to correct — a drawback for sure but not a fatal one. YET, strictly from the standpoint of a disinterested viewer with no real cultural attachments to sport, the WOGs are the perfect distillation of a global multi-sport event in that it's very well attended/watched in the countries that send athletes, much smaller (and easier to absorb by viewers in pieces or as a whole), and thanks to the ice/snow limitation THEMATICALLY flawless (FIFA's single-sport world cup is similar in some ways, and also succeeds over the SOGs for these reasons). somewhere along the line we lost the thread with the SOGs and the IOC is only interested in growing them ever larger in ways that don't matter at all (e.g., new venues, huge affairs like golf, pointless "youth" oriented sports), instead of the cheap and effective ways that do (e.g., dominica/st. lucia winning first-ever gold medals in paris). the WOGs aren't quite at that level of over-bloat, though i sometimes fear they may be trending in the wrong direction. climate change and rising costs may still pull it back from the SOG abyss, and toward greater global participation, which should be the main growth-oriented goal, together with sustainability. finally, we must end this "both are good in their own way" nonsense!! we must come together to admit that we have failed the SOGs and that our superior iteration is now — and has been for a while — its smaller but cooler kid brother. i'll give you all some time to cycle between depression, anger, bargaining and denial before accepting this true reality and agreeing with me. apologies in advance for any hurt feelings this may cause.