Quote:
Originally Posted by Turner
My bet is that the games go off without much drama - much to the dismay of the media.
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While odds are that nothing overly dramatic happens, treating the international media this way pretty much ensures that they are going to look bad in the eyes of the world.
These people should right now be cosied up to and spending time getting to know the venues, not wondering where are they going to sleep and take a shower. And reporters being expected to come up with stories, those are the stories they will go with.
It could easiliy get worse, if the conditions don't improve fast. At this point it's mostly laughs and giggles and exotic, but it will grow old very fast once the olympics start, the working days get long and they start getting complaints that the reports are not coming in fast enough and their bosses start sending messages in all caps asking WHERE'S THAT INTERVIEW?!? (Which I'm sure they get anyway.)
As for the price tag of the olympics, most likely most of that money was just stolen in what will go down as one of the great heists in history. Nothing I've seen so far seems to really compare to the admittedly very cool stuff they built in Beijing. (I'm sure the opening and closing ceremonies will be something to behold though.)
What's worse, even the Chinese government used more corporate sponsor money for their olympics than the Russians. This is pretty much all taxpayer money (assuming the reports I've read are true).
No wonder large parts of Russia are dirt poor.