Excess, not just cost, turned off Norway to 2022 Olympics

[DinahMoeHum]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/chi-excess-not-just-cost-turned-off-norway-to-2022-olympics-20141003-column.html

(snip)
Selling Norway on another Winter Olympics should have been a no-brainer. No country is more passionate about and successful in winter sports. No country has them more completely woven into the fabric of its culture.
(snip)
To understand why Norway's government gave the back of its hand to hosting the Winter Olympics – but not to winter sport or even to hosting the more modestly scaled 2016 winter Youth Olympics in Lillehammer – you need to understand its relentlessly egalitarian attitudes about pretension, self-aggrandizement and entitlement, especially as embodied by the International Olympic Committee.
(snip)
And those attitudes help explain the reasoning in Verdens Gang (VG) newspaper columnist Frithjof Jacobsen’s excellent analysis of the 2022 bid rejection, which begins:

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/ol-2022/ioc-kan-takke-seg-selv/a/23307336/ (**)

(snip)
“The Norwegian no to hosting the Winter Olympics 2022 should be a death blow to the pomposity of the IOC's apparatchiks."
(snip)
"The Olympic Games are still a beautiful spectacle, but its owners have rotted on the vine."
(snip)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

And here's the IOC's reaction after the Norwegian people and government told them to go F themselves:
http://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-statement/238610

Wow, what fatuousness.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

(**) Use Google to translate, if need be.

[kiva]

1. Colorado rejected the 1976 Olympics.

It was the right thing to do then, and sounds like it's the right thing for the Norwegians to do now.

[DinahMoeHum]

3. I remember that. "Don't Californicate Colorado". . .

. . .was the slogan back then.

The 1976 Winter Games were then switched to Innsbruck, which hosted back in 1964, and still had most of the facilities and infrastructure intact.

[kiva]

6. The pro-Olympics group won the Colorado bid

based on semi-truths and some outright lies, particularly about snowfall and the likelihood of having to use artificial snow. There were also the ever-present issues of evicting the poor to build Olympic villages and the lack of transportation infrastructure.

And yes, the "Don't Californicate Colorado" slogan worked for many years, until Colorado became...well, Californicated.

[Lochloosa]

2. They have better things to spend their money on like....

Free healthcare
Free college

[moondust]

9. And generous foreign aid.

Often ranked the most generous country in terms of per capita foreign aid.

And, incidentally, best country to grow old in. Apparently there's more to quality of life there than the number of billionaires.

[hunter]

4. Norway has a very high standard of living for the simple reason...

... they do not coddle corrupt oligarchs.

We could learn some things from them here in the U.S.A..

[Arugula Latte]

5. I wish every country would give the IOC the finger.

What an awful, awful group.

[MannyGoldstein]

7. Well done!

The IOC response is Fail.

[Marrah_G]

8. I was shocked to find out how the IOC people were behaving

As if they were royalty in some powerful country. I would tell them to go fuck themselves too.