The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Fewer and fewer cities want to splash hundreds of millions on building stadiums that go to rust in a few years, and the ones still willing to do so are often just using it as a sports-washing vehicle for mediocre records on other factors. It's not a good look when voters overwhelmingly cheer the withdrawl of your city's bid!
Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
Of course, the sphere around the events is a complete branded marketing festival. The thing that still sticks with me was an article about the London 2012 games that said they had people going around putting tape over the logos on the toilets because they weren't an official paying sponsor. That level of petty goes well beyond business school. They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit. Nobody is going to starve if the gyro place on the corner is a little too loose with adjectives referring to a specific holy mountain.
The Olympics used to be a noble idea: we can have international competition in a benign venue, in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots. Smaller events wouldn't disrupt or bankrupt host cities, so we'd see real interest in hosting again, and they'd be less tempting to turn into a TV Event and marketing freakshow at the expense of all else.
Maybe his idea of "let's do five cities at once" is a way to get there, although I worry it's more the business equivalent of "we couldn't scale single-threaded CPUs past 4-5GHz, so the only way to go bigger was to add more cores."
The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Fewer and fewer cities want to splash hundreds of millions on building stadiums that go to rust in a few years, and the ones still willing to do so are often just using it as a sports-washing vehicle for mediocre records on other factors. It's not a good look when voters overwhelmingly cheer the withdrawl of your city's bid!
Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
Of course, the sphere around the events is a complete branded marketing festival. The thing that still sticks with me was an article about the London 2012 games that said they had people going around putting tape over the logos on the toilets because they weren't an official paying sponsor. That level of petty goes well beyond business school. They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit. Nobody is going to starve if the gyro place on the corner is a little too loose with adjectives referring to a specific holy mountain.
The Olympics used to be a noble idea: we can have international competition in a benign venue, in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots. Smaller events wouldn't disrupt or bankrupt host cities, so we'd see real interest in hosting again, and they'd be less tempting to turn into a TV Event and marketing freakshow at the expense of all else.
Maybe his idea of "let's do five cities at once" is a way to get there, although I worry it's more the business equivalent of "we couldn't scale single-threaded CPUs past 4-5GHz, so the only way to go bigger was to add more cores."