Olympics: Behind The Five Rings

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Olympics originated in Ancient Greece, and were resurrected in the 1890's after a 1,500 year ban. Since then, the International Olympic Committee has been behind every Olympic Games. In this episode, we explore the story of how the IOC turned the Olympics into a huge commercial success and whether the cities that host the games end up winning or losing.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Tokyo Summer Olympics were supposed to happen last year.
0:28.2	COVID-19 got me way.
0:35.9	When you spend your whole life working, training, waiting.
0:46.0	For one moment, athletes were disappointed, devastating and suddenly.
0:52.7	And now, fans are disappointed too.
1:03.0	Japan's government is facing growing criticism for its handling of the pandemic.
1:11.4	Keeping fans out of the stands will save lives, but it presents the Tokyo organizers with
1:16.9	a big problem.
1:18.7	They had spent billions to build stadiums and infrastructure to host the Olympics, and
1:23.8	they are already way over budget.
1:26.4	Without ongoing ticket sales and vendor revenue generated by spectators, they are not
1:31.2	going to bring in as much money as they need to offset costs.
1:35.3	But here's the thing, even though the circumstances are unique, Tokyo is not.
1:40.8	Massive financial budgets have become normal for Olympic host cities.
1:44.7	The games always go over budget.
1:48.1	There was a study by the University of Oxford that looked at all the Olympics between 1960
1:53.2	and 2020 in fact that every single one of them for which there is reliable data had cost
1:59.1	over us.
2:00.3	This is Jules Boykoff.
2:01.3	He's a professor at Pacific University in Oregon and has authored a bunch of books on
2:06.5	the Olympics.
2:07.7	One of his most recent books is called No Limpians, inside the fight against capitalist
	...

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