my unpopular opinion is that they are a waste of time and effort.
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 that 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
