I visited the 1936 Winter Olympics facilities in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany in June this year. The Winter Olympics stadium was extremely modest by modern standards. There are high school football teams playing in nicer stadiums. Hockey and figure skating events were on a modest pond (the Riessersee).
The Olympics doesn’t need to be about prestige and money. But it is. I hate the TV coverage.
Like the NBA, MLB and the NFL, the Olympics are dead to me.
The trouble is that it got so hopelessly corrupted by governments and drugs and all sorts of other related nonsense. I can remember reading in his book “The Trouble with Canada”, author William Gairdner talking about how athletes today will never ever experience what real amateur and Olympic competition was about in his days as an athlete.
The state apparently barely raised it’s head in when he competed in 1964 for Canada, yet you can just imagine what went on in the ensuing years with both the West and more so the East Bloc countries and China and certainly continues nowadays.