As the start of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, the fears of potential disasters - and/or tragedies - will occur seem to be growing. Yes, the Sochi games are the result of Vladimir Putin's insufferable ego. But more importantly, they are the consequence of the gutlessness and idiocy of the International Olympic Committee - the same organization that years ago kissed Adolph Hitler's ass and awarded the 1936 Summer Games to Nazi controlled Berlin. I'm not against the Olympics, but the time has come to sack the entire existing IOC membership and start over again. A column in the Washington Post looks at the potential for disaster that is enveloping the 2014 Winter Games. Here are highlights:
The Olympics aren’t supposed to kill people. They’re supposed to exalt them. But it’s too late to take the dangerous, despoiling Winter Games away from the thugocracy that is Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime, so the only option is to count on the man’s bulging biceps and hope it’s an adequate “ring of steel” that can keep people safe in Sochi. It’s a cold hard fact that these Olympics have become an agent of death.
Sochi already is a catastrophe, and if it becomes a tragedy too, it will be because the International Olympic Committee has become the tool of “colossal authoritarian branding,” to borrow a phrase from Russia scholar Leon Aron.
The choice is an ugly one: Removing the Games at this late date would devastate Russians who have invested national self-worth in them, and the athletes who have trained for them. Therefore the only option is to watch Sochi become a contest for prestige between two warring parties: a corrupt strongman who wants to flex his political authority, and the murderous jihadists who have vowed to strike in Sochi.
Why should the Olympics lend its prestige to either? But that’s exactly what’s happening.
The people most at risk in Sochi are ordinary Russians. They’re the ones being drained and even impoverished by these crooked $50 billion Games, and who are at greater risk of being killed because nationalist insurgents in the North Caucasus have promised to add blood to the tab. Scare stories about “black widows” infiltrating the village, and warships on alert, aren’t the half of it. Insurgents from Chechnya, Dagestan and Abkhazia have vowed to strike the Olympics, and they have the capacity to do it. In 2013 there were 375 deaths from attacks in the region. In 2012 Russian forces found a cache of ammunition just 24 miles from Sochi meant for attacks on the Games, including homemade bombs, land mines, mortars and grenade launchers. Then there are infuriated Syrian fighters seeking revenge for Putin’s support of President Bashar al-Assad. To put it plainly, Putin and the IOC have chosen to host an Olympics on the edge of a war zone.
IOC officials have long collaborated with plunderers, and treated human rights abuses as acceptable if it meant good commerce, regardless of the harm: In Beijing, dissidents were arrested and tortured for refusing to support the Games. But the IOC’s amoral stupidity and avarice finally may have peaked in Sochi. Activists have been jailed; homeowners evicted without compensation; 25 construction workers have died at stadium sites
[I]t’s not giving in to terrorism to say that it was an act of pure folly to award the Winter Games to Sochi back in 2007, given what specialists who studied the region understood. Or to call out the IOC officials who didn’t do their due diligence, and ignored all of the warning signs. As early as 2008, when a series of bombs detonated in Sochi, it was obvious that Putin was gambling dangerously with Olympic security for his own profit and purposes.
So the staging of the Sochi Games has become a contest of wills between Putin and the insurgents, with innocents squarely in the crossfire. The IOC is wholly responsible for this: It should have denied Putin the internal prestige he craves, while depriving the insurgents of a major target, by removing the Games when it was still politically and logistically possible. Now they will have to hope Putin can avert a disaster and make the Games safe, “insofar as you can be safe holding an Olympics inside a country fighting a serious insurgency,” Galeotti said.
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