Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 161: The Olympics, Part 1

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

sporps [international] DONATE TO HELP THOSE TRAPPED IN GAZA: https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.map.org.uk/ https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/general WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Oh boy. Oh come on, man. You've been doing this for a hundred... Oh no, it's all running. We've been sitting here, I've been prepared, I've been waiting to fire off this podcast now for thirty minutes. I just got home. I got to kiss my wife, and then run down into the podcasting mine, strap on my podcasting

helmet, and now we're here. The podcaster's life is not an easy one. I tell my wife that, un-ironically, a lot. I'm just like, the life of a potter's wife was never an easy one, and she's like, is this all there is? And it's like, yes, go to couple's therapy, you've paid it so much, but you'll be there alone. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like being a firefighter in a lot of ways, in that you kind of, you marry the job, right? Like, you're committing to the podcast, more than anything. ALICE A railroader? A whaler... STACEY That's okay, you can be in the video stuck on club with me. ALICE This is genuinely one of the most offensive

things I've ever said on this podcast, is that being a podcaster is like being a firefighter. We're nowhere near as racist as firefighters. LIAM But, I would love to smash a car window and put a monster in it. ALICE Oh yeah! That's fucking awesome. ALICE We had, we had, um, so, so, uh, last year, right, there was, um, my neighbor upstairs was out of town or something and her smoke alarm was going off. And eventually the fire brigade came around, and the joy, the gladness of heart that appeared

on their faces when they realized they were gonna have an excuse to put the door in, was... It was like Christmas morning, they loved that shit. I'm sure I've told this story before in here, but firefighters live for that stuff, and honestly, I respect that very deeply. LIAM And who can blame them? JUSTIN They love to do... and this is what sets them apart from the cops, is that firefighters only do property damage.

As opposed to bodily harm. ALICE It's not exclusively true. ALICE And this is the thing, I do have an actual take here, which is that a lot of the stuff you hate about cops is true of all emergency services, and emergency services culture, right? The thin red line stuff is not so different after all. But, uh, y'know, whatever.

JUSTIN I don't know, I love to see a firefighter break down a door, that's great. ALICE Everyone does, of course they do. JUSTIN That's a fantastic thing, yeah. Um, but, it's not what we're here to talk about today. But I have to introduce the podcast first. Hello, and welcome to... LIAM Oh, fuck em. JUSTIN Yeah, that was a bad segue to the introduction.

ALICE That was beautiful. That was great. Keep going. Keep going. ALICE The real, like, fourth emergency service podcasting. SEAN Yes, it's true. ALICE Arriving on the scene. SEAN Poorly. SEAN Yes. ALICE Uh huh.

SEAN We're here to... we're gonna spend 45 minutes setting up the audio equipment, and by then the emergency's over. ALICE And then do it wrong anyway. SEAN Yeah. ALICE But we're not gonna shoot anybody's dog, so we're still better than the cops. SEAN I can't promise either of those things. ALICE Do you not like dogs, Nova? SEAN I like dogs fine, I was just making a joke about descending to a kind of cop denominator.

ALICE Oh, no, don't do that. Achieved cop nature. One with cop. Yeah. She just meditates hard enough, the badge like appears on you. I don't know where my second monitor went. Sergeant Siddhartha Gautama. Oh my god.

An officer involved in lightening? Officer involved podcasting? Cop achieves, you know, like Samsara turns off the universe's body cam. Achieve the middle way between cop and firefighter. EMT I think. Not cop, not firefighter, but a secret third-time firefighter. Fire police. Fire police. Fire police. Yeah.

I have lived in Pennsylvania basically my entire life and I still have no idea what the hell fire police do. Introduce the podcast. They put the fire in jail, duh. I support abolition for like, all marginalized fires. Introduce the guest, at least? No, hello, hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides.

I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the firefighter who's talking now, and my pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson, my pronouns are my pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson, my pronouns are he, him, and we have a guest. Our returning champion, who you may recognize from the fashion episode, that lovely voice. First name, Nanya, last name, business, pronouns not included with this purchase.

Mystery pronouns. And we have previously been calling me Madam X. So if you feel the need to picture a face, please picture the John Singer Sergeant portrait. Um, the sick. Yeah. The other thing I was going to say, if you are someone who happens to be able to recognize me by my voice, uh, don't tell my mom or my boss you found me here, thanks!" ALICE If you think you know Madame X, no you don't. LIAM No you don't.

So, we see on the screen here, the Olympic Park in Athens. ALICE Oh, those are the Olympic rings! JUSTIN Indeed they were! ALICE Reminds me of an old Soviet joke, where Brezhnev, in his dosage, this is gonna link to a news item, is opening the Olympic games, he's delivering the commencement address or whatever, and he's like, has his little reading glasses on, he reads from a paper and he says, oh, huge applause. Oh, huge applause.

Oh, huge applause, guy comes up and whispers in his ear, like, oh, those are the Olympic rings, you don't have to read them. It's funny because it's relatable to current politicians. I was about to say, but yeah, you can see this is not in great shape. Today, we're gonna start a three part series on a very topical thing, the Olympics. It's a podcast series, it's like a little limited podcast within a podcast. Yes. This is not gonna be the Penn Central episode where you people are just like, is this the

end of the podcast? Still no, we got to make rent. And this is this is, you know, if if we're going to record this in a big, huge chunk. So you're not getting any good goddamn news for a while. It's all going to be the news of four weeks ago, which speaking of we have to do the goddamn news. Hang on just a second. Just before we get started here. And this applies to this slide, which is why I

need to say it now, there are a lot of instances of Olympic rings, Olympic logos, so on and so forth occurring in this. The Olympics are very, very tight arsed about their trademarks and have gotten more so over the past 10 years. So just to keep our asses out of hot water. Nothing that we're doing in here is claiming to represent the, um, the views of the Olympic organization or be in any way associated with them. And if you happen to know me, happen to know where I work, this also does not in any way represent the views of my employer. I am speaking off the clock, out of my own opinions.

So. ALICE It's very funny to be precious about the logo when it is literally five O's. Like, five circles. JUSTIN It truly is, but they are. SEAN Yes, any, uh, we do not represent the views of the Olympic Committee, or the, well there's your problem, Olympic Organizing Committee, which is a separate entity. Oh shit, that's just me! Yeah, thank you for organizing that.

Yeah, I mean, I will say this, I absolutely do not represent the views of the IOC, because the views of the IOC are predictably awful. Yes. Yes. We're trying to get podcasting in as an Olympic sport. You know one way in which my views differ from the views of the IOC? I don't think it's acceptable to have been a member of the Nazi party. You know another way?

That your views probably differ from those of the IOC? You think it's okay to be a trans person. Well, we just assumed that of me, I didn't actually say that, but... Oh fuck's sake. Nova! No, no, no, I'm embarking on a new career as one of the good ones. SEAN Uh, November Kelly, author of the Cast Report.

ALICE Uh... ALICE It's Baroness Kelly to you, thank you. LIAM Yeah, yes. You must address me by my title, Countess von Fingerbag. ALICE I think it's kind of insulting that she wants to identify as a Baroness when she wasn't assigned that at birth. LIAM I do think that's a good point. You're not ABAP.

ALICE What kind of hormones did it give you for that? LIAM The good ones. It's the good ones. It's in a big vault underneath a ten-downed street. ALICE Adrenochrome. Yeah. ALICE Speaking of Adrenochrome. SEAN It's time to do the goddamn nose.

Hey, we got into it under Temp- oh my god, this fucking asshole again. I'm so fucking tired of looking at this dude's face, man. For those of you on audio, it's fucking Joe Biden eating an ice cream, god fucking damn it, I'm so tired of him, man. I mean, let me lay down a mark here, that may be wrong, even by the time this episode goes out, I think his cold dead hand clings to the nomination, the convention is a kind of death march, and he gets into the election, loses to Trump, and then dies.

That's my prediction. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, uh, we're sort of slowly coming to the realization of something that was surprisingly obvious four years ago, Joe Biden no longer has a brain. Being joined in that by John Fetterman, who is of course a staunch defender of him, on that basis, a kind of like, you know, brain injury caucus. I mean, and the funny thing is, of of course Trump doesn't really have a brain either, so we're just, you know, we're watching this sort of slow motion train wreck, everyone can see it coming, people could do something to stop it, but no one's gonna do anything.

Nah, fuck you man. They, I, listen, my parents, as we know, are a communist and an anarchist, but because we live in Pennsylvania, vote Democrat, because that's... we live in a swing state, folks. And both my parents independently call me to be like, this guy needs... Joe needs to drop out. And again, when you've lost my mom, who is a very pragmatic person, you lost me too, but I just can't believe I have to fucking vote for this asshole again, god damn it. ALICE I think it would be funny if they both died

in October. LIAM I agree. I agree profoundly. The thing is, right, if Biden does drop out or die, what you're left with is most likely Kamala Harris, who is only like ten percent less evil, right, and mostly that's lack of longevity. Joe Biden has been fucking around since the 70s. SEVENTY-two, yeah. Yeah.

Whereas Kamala was just like, she's got like a couple of decades of evil shit, but she needs to rack up some more numbers. The thing that's amazing to me is the stuff that's just like, it's rape culture to want Joe Biden to drop out. Yeah, it's rape culture, it's also, we're doing racism and misogyny against Joe Biden. LIAM You can't do that to him. It doesn't work that way.

ALICE Just bizarre, like, sort of collapsing, misfolding identity politics within the Democratic party, as the whole thing just collapses. ALICE 41 gets mad at me for voting for Joe Biden, I need my VAWA funding so I still have a job. JUSTIN He will have at least left office, having achieved his goal of banning abortion for the Pope. ALICE Operation Complete Your Holiness. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

Our second Catholic president, he finally did it. He banned abortion. ALICE This is what's so insane to me about the whole abortion thing, is that, like, you have Donald Trump, and sort of like, unabatedly evil guy, right, obvious rapist, but someone who clearly has no qualms with abortion has undoubtedly paid for multiple, who is in the position of being the pro-life candidate. Whereas Joe Biden, lifelong Catholic, lifelong misogynist, probably also rapist, who is horrified at the idea of abortion, is in the position of being the pro-choice candidate, and everyone wonders why he's so lukewarm and tepid about Roe vs. Wade, and it's because he doesn so lukewarm and tepid about Roe vs.

Wade, and it's because he doesn't like it. He's not an abortion guy because he's a Catholic. And he takes that shit seriously, and he's a terrible person. JUSTIN Yeah, and I mean, also he doesn't have a brain. ALICE Also that, but even before that, y'know? JUSTIN Even before that, yeah. ALICE Yeah, so, it seems like a bad time for the United States of America, on a few levels. Yeah.

I mean, the problem with the Democrats right now is that if they keep the candidate they're screwed and if they switch the candidate I think they're also screwed. I'll buy that. I think Kamala beats Trump, but then you get into the situation of, like, you have again achieved harm mitigation, right? Things are not as bad, things are still really fuckin' bad, and the system continues to roll along for another four or eight years until, I dunno, Trump runs again?

Or... Oh god. Well, I mean, the other problem might be, you might not even be able to get Kamala on the ballot, because all these signatures have gone out already. I mean, the only way to switch to Canada, this is someone may have to f*** Joe Biden. I mean, this- LIAM You can't, Ross. ALICE We bleep the verb. We bleep. JUSTIN I'm not saying go out and do it, I'm just saying, maybe they'll have, you know,

Schumer take him out back. LIAM Yeah, old Yeller his ass, yeah. ALICE To my point, bleep all the verbs, to my point, about Trump, right, about whether it's him, whether it's someone like him, and like, four years, eight years, like, twelve years, sixteen years, is that you're not gonna do that by, like, sort of, beating him with Kamala Harris, or whatever other middle of the road, authoritarian Democrat, because he's sort of unleashed something, and I think the only sort of... SEAN I'll buy that tail.

ALICE I don't know how you look at this and don't feel like it's bleeding Kansas, and you don't feel like John Brown, you know? LIAM Right, yes. LIAM Absolutely right. With all of that said, speaking as someone who is a queer person whom the state sees as a woman living in Texas, I kinda need us to have the chance to get some decent Supreme Court picks into that office, so please don't vote in a way that's gonna make it easier for Trump to win, anyway. ALICE I don't know that there's a possibility to do that with the kind of norms that the

Democratic party have established for themselves, you know? I don't think Kamala's gonna pack the court either. JUSTIN Everyone's scared of putting in, like, a two-year-old judge. ALICE Oh, dude, I... JUSTIN You know, to put the world's healthiest two-year-old, and you have to get like nine hundred of them. LIAM Yeah, exactly. ALICE Yeah, you have to play a little bit dirty at a minimum, ideally a lot dirty, and

no one wants to do it, everyone's like, oh, we gotta respect the process with people who are like, absolutely not respecting the process, and who are dunking on you time and time again. JUSTIN As I've said many times, issue an executive order that says Marbury versus Madison was wrongly decided. ALICE Yeah, just tell them to enforce any of this shit. Like, that's within the president's remit. LIAM From the desk of Joe Biden it just says suck my ass acid balls? ALICE This is the thing, like, any mainstream Democrat,

any of them, and I include Bernie in this, right, is gonna be perfectly comfortable ordering unlimited suffering, whether that's in Gaza, whether that's on the border, whether that's domestically within prisons, right, but they won't take the time to extend that kind of authoritarianism to the people that they might have to see at a restaurant, they won't extend that to, like, Supreme Court justices, who all hate them, and are all corrupt, and would all happily see them, like, executed. LIAM Pack the fucking court. ALICE Yeah.

PACK THE FUCKING COURT. ALICE Yeah. PACK THE COURT, ABOLISH THE COURT, I don't move it into a fucking basketball court. LIAM Yeah, far from it, Mr. Madison was wrong with the side. It has a basketball court. ALICE Oh, Jesus, okay. Well, maybe we'll sit up there and think about what they've done. But, this is the thing, I feel like you come to a point where you think the contradictions

in the system can't stand. Yes, I'll buy that. I gotta tell you, on my soundboard that I'm using, thank you, Brenda the show, Amanda, who bought this for me, there's a button that just says DNR, and I wonder if I press that a bunch of Canadian doctors come in and shoot me with a euthanasia gun. ALICE Yeah, our message to, like, President Biden, President Trump, seek Canadian healthcare. JUSTIN Yes.

That may be what we have to do. ALICE I mean, the Canadian doctors wouldn't even take two looks at Biden, before setting up the fucking... JUSTIN I mean, they'll look at anyone and just say, have you considered medical assistance in death? Don't look at a fucking olympic- and they did tell a Paralympian, have you considered medical assistance in death? ALICE.

It's the thing, I kind of, like, on an instinctual, like, principled level, I support the right to die in a sort of time and manner of your choosing, but fuck me, does Canada make it difficult? JUSTIN. That's a future episode, I already put that on the spreadsheet a while back. Anyway. So, in other news...

So, you may have heard that in a few weeks, they're actually immediately at time of release for this episode, there's going to be a sporting event in France. They are planning to have some of the open water events in, as well as the opening ceremony in the river, Seine, in Paris. So there was a... The Seine is kind of known for not being a particularly clean or nice river, and so there was a massive campaign to clean it up, to make the water quality acceptable for all of this,

and, um- ALICE Yeah, Macron said that he would swim in it for the opening ceremony, and then the most popular hashtag on French Twitter was J'ai chi dans la Seine, and like, the date of the opening ceremony. I'm gonna shit in the river. JUSTIN It's gonna be a bunch of farmers who are gonna show up and they're gonna, y'know, Do the usual protest thing where they just spray manure in there Little bit more complex than that

They were planning a day. I think it was June the 23rd that he was going to get in and swim to kind of demonstrate that oh, it's cleaned up it's ready and a kind of demonstrate that, oh, it's cleaned up, it's ready, and a computer programmer as a protest made this website where wherever you lived along the Seine you could put in your distance from Paris and it would tell you what date you needed to go to the river and shit so that it would flow down to Paris and be there by the 23rd. ALICE You know, between this and the election results, France has been a little inspirational lately. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, one of the things, though, Anne

Hidalgo I think has done a lot of good for Paris, she's the mayor, and the swimmable river is like an incredible achievement that only a few places have done. I think Baltimore's trying it with the Inner Harbor right now, but they've got a long way to go. But, yeah, it looks like they may just about miss the deadline, like they're gonna have to do some extraordinary measures just to keep the river clean for like, the Olympics, and then it's

like, okay, we still got some work to do afterwards. ALICE Big kind of pool net. You know, you're sort of riding around in a boat fishing turds out of it. SEAN Exactly. They go right through the thing. Through the netting. You're gonna have to get a turd bucket. You know, the bucket you use for throw up and popcorn, you gotta use that for poop too. ALICE I still... Oh god.

I don't want to hear about that anymore. I'm sorry. ALICE It made a big, like, impact on the listeners, is the thing. KATE Can I just add my commentary that what we used in my house growing up was just the bathroom trash can, with the bag taken out? ALICE Wait, with the bag taken out? LIAM You can hose that out.

ALICE Oh, I see. Yeah. LIAM You can hose that out. Oh, I see. Yeah. You can hose it out. But you can throw away the bag. Yeah. Yeah, but it's got holes in the bottom, because we never use, like, specifically made trash can liners, we just use, like, shopping bags. With a plastic bag, yeah. Oh, okay, okay.

Gotcha. And those always get holes in them. Oh, no, I, yeah, okay, I'm tracking. I'm tracking. Yeah. So, add that to the list of bodily functions Raz is uncomfortable with. I don't like hearing that people use the same... I'm not gonna talk about this. It is unhygienic.

It is. But what about throwing up is hygienic? Amis is... True. We did discuss this briefly before we started the podcast. I wasn't here because I was too busy dying in traffic. I'm just annoyed that I've Americanized myself by saying hygienic as opposed to hygienic. Hygienic.

Hygienic. Hygienic. Hygienic. We're coming for your pronunciation of Illuminum next. No we're not. No we're not. I don't wanna do an impression of you, because I'll just fuck it up. Yeah, your voice doesn't go that deep. Oh.

Okay. I, uh, I could do a Roz impression. Uh, yeah. Uh, Roz impression is identical to your impression of your dad. Yes it is. I only have one voice. Alright. Yes, I only have one voice. All right. So should the send do your protest,

should the plastic bag with the that's leaking and bail it to a Supreme Court justice. Yeah. Do we have to believe that one, right? No, that was the goddamn news. All right. So moving on to the actual presentation. This first episode is going to be focused particularly on aspects of the planning and preparation process for the games, and how they often fail primarily the host cities, but also everyone else who is involved. And

so the first thing we're gonna talk about is Olympic bidding. Next slide please. ALICE Raising hand. This is the part, well, one of the parts that's obviously insanely corrupt, right? STACEY We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about that a lot. Alright.

So... SEAN Yeah, I think that's kind of the point. They're the Olympics. Next. All right. Yeah, that's I think that's kind of the point. They have the Olympics next until very recently. Like they just changed the process for the most recent Olympics to be awarded, which was Brisbane 2032. Everything up until then, since a very long time ago, has been done via this process. It starts out with

the IOC puts out a call for bids, and national Olympic committees respond with their cities from their country that are interested in hosting, and you get a large pool of applicant city respondents. ALICE We see all those beautiful logos here. Which really just seems like a scam to funnel money to graphic designers. JUSTIN I mean, some of these Applicant City logos are a bit graphic design is my passion, not this specific batch, but there have been some that were rough. SEAN The Baku logo looks like an Enron rebrand. I like Roms, Roms is cool.

Well done, Baku. If you look very closely at the Baku one, it's actually 20 facing one way and then 20 facing the other. I hate that. Fuck off. I like Madrids. I don't know, that's kinda sweet. I like the flip-flops.

Is that what these are? Or are they surfboards? Oh, if I remember correctly. I don't know. That's kind of sweet. I like the I like the flip-flop. Is that what these are? Are these surfboard? I want my surface laptop. It's a very abstract depiction of some like culturally significant building or something that's in Madrid, but I don't remember exactly what it is. I'm going with flip-ops. Fuck em. Coach really significant flip flops building. All right. So those applicant cities submit a questionnaire with a lot of information about their bid.

And based on that, they get scored in 11 categories. Those are political and social support for the games. The general infrastructure they need to host, the sports venues specifically, the Olympic Village, the environmental concerns for their plan, accommodation for like reporters and tourists and everyone who wouldn't be staying in the Village, transportation, security, past experience with hosting major sporting events, the finance for it, and what the legacy will be in their country.

And- ALICE Oh, are these- are these- SEAN I know what the legacy bit means. That means all the shit that you leave behind and you claim, oh, this is gonna be like a sort of center of excellence and you're gonna build a bunch of social housing and shit on top of it. ALICE Are these scorecards released to the public? Yes.

Okay, thank you. This is telling me they should just keep doing Atlanta over and over and over again. Yeah, hopefully they'll get bombed again, man. Not a great legacy. Oh, but they made money off of it, though. Okay. I think it's the most recent Olympics in memory that actually like made money for someone. I don't want Atlanta to have shit.

I've been to Atlanta. I don't care for it. You were saying, Madam X, you may or may not get real mad about. I forget if two slides from now. But anyway, so the the IOC executive committee from that scored list of applicants then picks a short list of candidate cities, typically three to five that scored the best. And then the IOC Evaluation Committee performs much more thorough evaluations, scoring and recommendations on those candidate cities. The candidate

cities themselves have to create a much more extensive bid book with all the information they can possibly provide about their candidacy. This information is then presented to all of the IOC members and the IOC membership then votes in what is called an exhaustive ballot. And the way that works is you start out with every candidate city on there, you vote for who you want. If no one candidate city gets greater than 50% a majority, then the lowest scoring city is eliminated and everyone votes again. And you keep doing this over and over until there is a city that gets a majority. And the IOC members during this process,

if you're an IOC member from a country that has a candidate city, you're not allowed to vote until your country's bid has been eliminated. The 2020 bidding process was the last Summer Olympics where this actually functioned as intended. It kind of started to break down for 2024 and 2028. We'll get into that in a bit. But the USOC also follows a similar process at the national scale, to choose the US's

candidate city when it puts a bid forth. And this image here is the logos of all the finalist cities for the 2020 Olympics. Alright, next slide please. ALICE Booooo! ALICE Oh, we got some old guys. SEAN I don't even know who these guys are, but I bet they suck. Next slide, please. ALICE BELLA-BELL and the FIFA scandal, but there- ALICE Kind of have set bladder vibes here. ALICE There are some set bladder vibes, but we will talk about somebody who got arrested

a little bit later on, but it's not one of these guys. LIAM Yay! I'm carceral, but only for the IOC. ALICE On the left here we have Juan Antonio Samaranch who was the IOC president in the 80s and 90s. And then we have Jacques, I cannot pronounce French, Jacques Roche, I'm taking a swing and probably missing there, who is actually Belgian, but he was the IOC president who directly succeeded Samorant. She was all through the 2000s and the early part of the 2010s.

And under Samoranch's tenure, the Olympic movement grew considerably. They added more sports, they added more participants in many sports, they added more countries, and they added more money into the operations of the games. So there was an impetus to make the games more sponsor-friendly and more inclusive of the developing countries. And one of the things that you see as a result of that is they were pushing to get the Olympics into new locations. Before the 90s, it had mostly been limited to Europe, the Americas, particularly North America and a little bit of Asia, like there had been some in Japan and one in South Korea, but not much of anywhere else. But you start seeing like Greece being an Eastern European nation that was considered developing

South America with Brazil, China, all of that sort of thing. And the focus in picking countries sometimes lay more on what city and what country would create a memorable event or have kind of sex appeal over what was the wisest choice in terms of finance, politics and safety. And this. So so you're like, we're going to have we're going to have we're going to gonna have, the Olympics are gonna be in, uh, I don't know, we're gonna have them in Sochi, but we're not gonna have them in Smolensk. ALICE Where do these guys wanna hang out in a VIP box, right? Sochi has nice weather, Smolensk does not have nice weather.

JUSTIN Yeah. I won't even consider Odessa. ALICE Alright, next slide please. ALICE, so now we're at the difficult bit. Yeah. Oh yes. Oh look at this. This is the boot. This is terrific.

Yeah, I remember this, I think. Oh, you're mad about this, huh? Oh, I have been living mad about this since 1999 and I'm gonna die mad about this when I'm 80. JUSTIN And it actually says I'm still angry about this. Yeah, okay. ALICE Alright. Um, so, let's go ahead and watch the video. This is going to be...

JUSTIN Okay. This is gonna be irritating. Essentially what we're all doing, for those of you listening at home, is because I can't figure out how to put the, uh the audio through, we all have to watch this video at the same time. Right. ALICE Yeah, it's like... JUSTIN Yeah, so, I'm gonna full screen this, and I assume everyone else has theirs ready

to go. ALICE Just say like, three, two, one, mark, and I'll hit play when you say mark. Okay. play when you say Mark. All right, three, two, one, go. Is that Mark from the K or C? Lives in the past. Cars drive past a succession of boarded buildings and vacant lots. The world seems far away. But the world may be coming here now that Bob McNair's NFL dream provides the stadium fit for a glittering Olympic opening ceremony. This is real important for our bid. I think it makes our bid go from being really good to great.

Houston is competing with the likes of Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC for the 2012 Olympics. That one event, Booster's claim, will make a greater economic impact than the Super Bowl and both national political conventions combined. The Asterdom complex, Asterdomain, is going to be such a wonderful area. They mentioned the Super Bowl and the political conventions because Houston had recently hosted both. Look at the exhibition facilities that they're going to have out there.

The dome will still be there. Well you guys really got the shaft in here, huh? It's one of those clusters that the United States Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee really look for. And that reborn Astrodome could mean a reborn South Main. It has the potential of being looking like another downtown. What we're hoping to do in our new design is have economic value for the stadium and the dome complex.

It's a great Texas bureaucrat voice. Not too long ago, the talk of a Super Bowl or an Olympics would have seemed like a cruel joke on South Maine. Now at last, it may be time to dream again. So this was a piece from our local NBC affiliate, KPRC, that ran in 1999, I think, to promote the Olympic bid that Houston had submitted to the USOC to become the US's candidate city for 2012. And what wound up happening was they made it down to the round of four,

and then they and I think Boston were knocked out and New York and San Francisco stayed in and eventually New York was the one that was presented, they lost to London. So the reason I'm still angry about this is because in terms of actually thinking intelligently about what makes a good Olympic bid, Houston's was pretty much perfect. It was cost-effective. It used mostly facilities that already existed. The few that needed to be built would either be temporary so they wouldn't become a long-term blight or they were something that would fill needs in the community like repurposing the Astrodome which as it turns out 25 years later we still can't figure out what to do with that. Student housing for University of Houston and Texas Southern University, forcing us to actually build a metro rail system downtown. A lot of it got built anyway because of the Super Bowl bid, but

it probably would have wound up being more extensive and more complete if we had had the Olympics. The total proposed capital expenditure for us was about $165 million, which was less than half of what the main stadium alone for London wound up costing. for London wound up costing. And- ALICE Did they do nothing with that stadium too? And obviously- ALICE Oh, I forgot! 2012!

Yeah, we were the ones who ruined your shit! I was waiting for a hook into this, so I'm like, yeah, our gain is your loss. If it's any consolation, the London Olympics became this kind of centrist totem in British politics, that the last time things were good. But on the other hand, I am glad that they caused misery elsewhere in the world. JUSTIN It seems like a disqualifying factor, if you're like, you know, you can walk up to the Olympic Committee and say, yeah, we have all the facilities already. Yeah, that's exciting.

ALICE That's boring. That's boring. I mean, then you're not creating work for all these architects. And slave labor. Yeah, I need to hire Zaha Hadid to use slave labor to build a stadium. No more Zaha Hadid. The world has moved past Zaha Hadid. I was gonna say that I don't think London 2012 used slave labor, but I don't know that that's true.

I think that we did use people, like, under threat of benefit sanctions we made them be security guards. JUSTIN The world has not moved past Zaha Hadid because she's one of the very few people who after her death, her firm retained her name. ALICE Now sculpting Zaha Hadid from beyond the grave. ALLY Zaha Hadid and sons. JUSTIN Causing misery. Threat. LIAM I do look forward to the people who clipped this out of context, just use it for

a classic, well there's your problem in the nutshell video, where it's just Nova trying to make a point about slave labor while Braz fights valiantly to bitch about Zaha Hadid. ALICE Yeah. What I've learned is I just continue talking at the same volume until one of you yields so much. I love you too, buddy. LESLIE So, because of the low capital expenditure and other kind of cost saving measures. The games were expected that if we got the bid,

they would probably turn a profit, which is incredibly unusual for the Olympics, as we discussed. I think it's Atlanta that was the last one that actually managed to do that. And before that, it had been a while. The another because they were just like, we can use all our shit. We already had another interesting factor about the Houston bid, is that despite being a city known for excessive urban sprawl, our bid was pretty compact and kept most of the metal events

within three major sites, that being the astro domain, which is the area now known as NRG Park, the campuses of the University of Houston and Texas Southern, and then the downtown Houston area, and all three of those were expected to be connected together with the light rail, like I was talking about earlier. ALICE I don't mean to gloat in any way about the London 2012 Olympics, but I do have a drop that may be slightly

related. I thought it was gonna be Royal Britannia, if it's better than I thought. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, well. It's our ancient Cody banks too. Houston was out of the running before it ever got to the question of is it gonna be the US or the UK or whoever else, we were we were eliminated at the USOC level.

But. Oh, Houston beating London. Hilarious. That would be a great victory for American excellence. But I mean, that's that's basically what the Atlanta bid did. I haven't had the chance to read this book yet, but there is some book that goes into like, excessive detail about what a bizarre occurrence it was that led to Atlanta actually being selected. But we'll get back to that. Anyway, with regards to the Houston bid, a lot of the

other events which often kind of have to be placed further afield for practical reasons would be kept closer to home. Our open water events were probably going to be in like the Clear Lake area, which is very close to our downtown compared to say Savannah, where Atlanta had a lot of its open water events. Marseille, where Paris is doing its sailing, Tahiti, where they're doing their surfing event. What? Yeah. Yeah, it's French.

ALICE Yeah, I mean, it's not just the water events. For London, one of the things was there was genuine concern that it might not be legal to do the shooting events anywhere in the UK, and they might have to do them in France. They ended up doing them in like, god, I want to say like Bisley, or somewhere like that, which is like miles out of town. TERESA What did they do for modern pentathlon, because that's got a shooting ground? ALICE I doing them in, like, god I wanna say like, Bisley or somewhere like that, which is like miles out of town. LESLIE What did they do for modern pentathlon, cause that's got a shooting ground. ALICE I think they just, like, I think they managed it here, but there were some questions about the legality of it.

I know that some of the Team GB, like, for shooting events had to train in France, for instance. JUSTIN They'd have to, if they did it in Houston, they'd have to add guns to more events. They'd have to add, like like water polo with guns. Yeah. Tom Daley sort of like, Tom Daley dives off the highboard, glop comes out of the waistband. ALICE And then the equestrian events are something

that also often has to be put further away from the main side of the Olympics because of, well, in Beijing, they did them in Hong Kong because the horse racing industry in Hong Kong meant that there was already the import and quarantine facilities that they needed set up, so it was just easier to do it there. But there have also been other Olympics where they've been placed, you know, kind of out in the country where there's actually space to do equestrian versus in the middle of downtown. Um, in, in Houston. You could have done, you could have done dressage with guns.

In Houston, um, we have an equestrian center in Katy that has hosts some nationally renowned shows and then another round of the proposal. I don't know which one was final, but I saw both the Equestrian Center in Katy and the Sam Houston Raceway mentioned as options. And then for like preliminary play of some of those tournament style sports, Houston and Texas Triangle in general, which is Houston, Dallas, and then Austin San Antonio area, has a lot of very large high schools and colleges, which have very nice stadiums and arenas which could have been used for this, even... ALICE It's very very funny, like, I know these things

are religions in Texas, and I know the facilities are world class, but like, on paper, very funny to be playing something like Olympic basketball in a high school, like, technically a high school gymnasium. I mean, they have big football stadiums. I went to the high school that made the international news for making the 13,000 seat stadium, or, is that right? Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. You know, 13,000 people show up to look at kids.

They do. Nons, non-state. Sorry. I mean... look at kids. ALICE They do! ALICE Nons, non-s, non-s day. Sorry. ALICE I mean... ALICE Like, we've said all of this on college football already, high school football, same thing, times a million. JUSTIN That's weird, it's like, you know, a bunch of fifty year old guys looking at

the cheerleaders. LIAM I don't need that. ALICE Still. Big. Ramp. LIAM Bring it on, it's a classic. I won't hear anything against it. ALICE. Bring it on, it's a classic. I won't hear anything against it.

Yeah, correct. Yeah. Anyway, so, the kind of main arguments against it that were brought up were, number one, it's hot, which what I have written here is, blah blah blah, it's hot, shut the hell your mouth, air conditioning exists, losers, if I can handle your mouth. Shut the hell your mouth. And if I could handle being outside in it for six years, a junior high in high school, athletics and marching band practice, you can handle two weeks. Honestly, you should be more worried that a hurricane will spin up out of nowhere

two days beforehand and ruin everything. And the games probably would have been scheduled more like late September, like they were in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics, to minimize both of these risks, get us out of hurricane season, out of the hottest part of the year. ALICE I mean, now, given climate change a few years later, it's not out of hurricane season and it's not out of the hottest part of the year anymore. JUSTIN You could, you could, you may as well put it

in Galveston. That's where you should have the Olympics. ALICE I want to see an entire Olympic rowing team get picked up, like, twisted. JUSTIN Just like, going all around, that would be a tornado, I think, yeah. Would the boat go vertical at that point? ALICE Oh yeah, Twister is a... JUSTIN I'm not sure.

ALICE That's the only way to find out. ALICE That's very aerodynamic, has to be. Like, mm. Be the sort of first rowing boat equivalent of those like storm chaser planes that like N.O.A.A. flies through hurricane centers. I've been out in a racing shell back when I was in high school, when there was like a thunderstorm coming. And I was like, I was like, y'know, I was like, why did the coach bring us out today?

This is fucking moratical. We're out in the widest part of the Potomac River. And there's like, there's like, three foot waves. And this is a boat that was notoriously unreliable. It liked to sink on its own for no reason. And we had to somehow row it like, five miles. It was miserable. ALICE You didn't have life jackets or anything.

Okay. I'm glad you didn't have, like, life jackets or anything. Okay. I'm glad you didn't die, because now we can do this podcast. JUSTIN Justin, lifejack, lore drop, kids. JUSTIN Oh, yeah. We were rowing from Thompson's Boathouse back to the Anacostia community boathouse after regatta. So we were also tired as all hell, because we had done a race.

And then it was like, yep, here we are, the river's a mile wide at this point, there's a thunderstorm going, the wind is terrible, everyone's soaked, it was awful. ALICE This is why you can pursue a career that's like, very indoors and warm and dry. JUSTIN Yeah, I don't have to deal with that anymore. Actually no, I love drying, that was great, I'd love to do it again, but I'm too big. ALICE Oh, Roz. RON It is. I didn't turn the fan on because you

could hear it on the podcast. ALICE Thank you, appreciate it. RON So, it was... ALICE Meanwhile I'm muting myself to eat Digestive. RON Oh, nice. RON The weather was brought up as one thing, and then the other thing that was brought up was just like, Houston isn't a city with an identity that's international, and I mean, I personally argue against that.

It's got Beyonce! Like, this fucker, Houston, Texas baby. Beyonce is like, still part of Destiny's Child, but... That's it. Beyonce had a solo career by 2012, surely. ALICE It's got the star of Austin Powers III Goldmember. LIAM Oh, great fucking movie. ALICE I don't say that shit to me, man.

You don't know the shit that I've been through. JUSTIN Like, no one can say there's no culture in Houston. ALICE Come to the Roscoe Travel. JUSTIN All of the modern art is there. in Houston. Come to the Roscoe. Artists there. You can see a Roscoe. Yeah. But we I mean, the three things that I would have said to lean into number one is that

if you want to get a little bit more flashy and futuristic about it, you can lean into our identity with NASA. Number two, if you want to be more broadly Texas as a whole, you can lean into the cowboy and the rodeo thing. Number three, if you want to take the same tack that the Houston organizing committee did wind up taking, we are demographically kind of leading the country in that the minority majority cultural makeup

that is expected to eventually be where the whole US gets, where no one specific racial or ethnic group has a majority, is something that I think Houston may have already hit, but is certainly projected to hit within the next 10 years. And at the time, I think it was like projected to hit by 2025. And so that could have also been something that they could have leaned into as their or that the USOC could've leaned into as their big selling point for the games when they talked to the IOC, is that Houston is one of the most truly international cities in the United States. We have, y'know, a large black community, a large Hispanic

community, and also large communities of various different Asian groups, Middle Eastern groups, all sorts of... ALICE Imagine pitching this to the IOC, one of the most racist organizations on the face of the planet. LIAM You have what, where? SEAN Maybe they gotta confuse with Dallas, which is a genuine hellscape and barren wasteland. ALICE Good, we agree on that. Anyway, so after Houston was eliminated, the San Francisco Chronicle ran this nasty little

article with quotes like, It's rather amusing that second tier towns like Houston, which I remind you Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, continue to huff and puff when they get left at the threshold when competing against the San Francisco's of the world, which is to say the likes of London and Paris and New York." ALICE I actually love this shit. I love liberal sneering when it's of little political consequence. Because this is just straightforwardly entertainingingly evil to me. JUSTIN They don't... like, putting up buildings is illegal in San Francisco.

You know, I'm kinda like... San Francisco is a dead-end city. They have like, 40 people there. And none of them can make rent. ALICE Yeah, well, apart from like, two tech guys who are trying to organize a kind of ultra-fascist coup, you know? Yeah, that's true. They're using that from the rent money that no one else can pay. And then another quote from this article is saying, referring to a quote from a Houston sports writer John P. Lopez, without all of its pizzazz and sexiness and popularity

and allure, San Francisco wouldn't even stand a chance, and the Chronicle says, and he's right, for without all of those traits, San Francisco would be Houston with better weather. Like it's just such... ALICE LAUGHS. Oh my god. Come on, damn. Like, jackassery. Fuck this newspaper, fuck him hard.

That's a kill shot, I'm sorry, like, that's... Oh my god. JUSTIN I'm coming at surprisingly pro Houston today. I've never been... ALICE Yeah, me too, I don't understand that. Let's just say it happened to me. ALICE Especially attached to Houston before, but didn't happen today.

Today I'm like, yeah, let's go Houston. ALICE This is winning me over to San Francisco, they're very much the kind of, like, preppy house in a sort of college film, you know, they have all the money and the attitude and the slicked down hair and shit, and for some reason that endears me. JUSTIN Do you wanna pay, do you wanna pay, uh, like, four thousand dollars a month for half a bedroom? ALICE Yeah, absolutely, I'm moving to London, absolutely.

Let's go 49ers? Question mark? ALICE RAYMOND ROLLING AROUND Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! So wrong! Wrong! You cannot hit that team. I went to Bama, all of the frat houses were preppy houses.

Oh god. Roll tide roll, baby. Roll damn tide. Anyway, next slide please. This is what y'all all started baying for the moment I mentioned Olympic bidding, so let's talk about it. The Salt Lake bidding scandal. ALICE The candidate cities bribing IOC members to

vote for them was not a new practice. ALICE Yeah, it's also not a subtle practice either, right? It's one of those things- but you can be subtle with it, you can be like, hey, this is important fact finding for us to go to all of the best restaurants and get a bunch of gifts of cultural value or whatever, but you can also do, as a bunch of other places have done, especially like the World Cup too, of just like, here is an envelope full of cash. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, what happened was, Mitt Romney invented the IOC to Salt Lake City,

and introduced them to the practice of soaking. ALICE Not exactly... SEAN No, that's exactly what happened. I was there. In the next room. Hello Willem. Hello Willem. Can I just say something to someone that I know is listening to this episode. Hi Ash, this is for you. Anyway. So, it wasn't a new practice, but it came out to the public during the Salt Lake 2002 bid process.

ALICE I'm just thrilled by the idea that the guy you get to do the jumping on the bed isn't a mor- like a kind of Shavos guy? But for the Mormon soak, y'know? Like... ALICE & TANNER Yeah, yeah, I dunno, you have to go to the like, 5% of BYU that's nominally not Mormon, I guess. And so, a Swiss member of the IOC, Mark Hodler, blew the whistle on that, and came out with how hundreds of thousands of dollars had been misappropriated to make scholarships for IOC members' kids, to pay for medical expenses, to buy them guns,

all that sort of stuff, in addition to your, like, more typical trip to the city, getting wined and dined, getting, you know, envelopes of cash stuffed under your door in the middle of the night, all that sort of thing. Eventually what happened was that ten IOC members resigned, another 10 were sanctioned. The Department of Justice brought federal bribery and corruption charges against the Salt Lake organizers, but those wound up eventually getting dropped. It came out later on in kind of all the media storm that also the Sydney, Nogano and Atlanta bids had been affected by similar practices. And it likely goes back much further than that.

There was actually some questioning for a while over whether the Sydney games were going to have to give up their right to host because it turned out that like they had specifically bribed two African IOC members, and if I remember correctly, and then they won their election as host city by two votes. Or something very similar to that. Um, and- ALICE Perfect coincidence. Mmhm. And so, after that, the IOC subsequently banned visits to bid cities by the IOC members, in stated age and term limits for new IOC members, although not for the members who were already

part of the IOC and hadn't been sanctioned, and they significantly revised the bid process to what we talked about earlier. Prior to that, it had just kind of been that they, instead of being evaluated by a specific subcommittee of the IOC, it was just any IOC member who wanted to could go to candidate cities and get information from them and, you know, envelopes full of cash. Pose and blow. That sort of thing. ALICE This is one of the, like, much like FIFA, or UEFA, or any number of these sort

of organizations, one of the best jobs in the world, if you have no morals, like, you can surround yourself with extreme luxury in return for, y'know, trading on the rights to hold these games. ALICE And a fun side effect of this is that, after they got rid of the original organizers, the person that they hired to replace them and kind of get the Salt Lake organization back under control was Mitt Romney, and that was like his first thing outside of the corporate sphere which led to him eventually becoming a politician. So whoops, we inadvertently launched Mitt Romney. Fuck. Wow.

All right. Next slide, please. So, yes, the title of this one. I remember the favela clearances vividly. That's actually going to be more in the second episode, I think. But for this one, pay attention to your fucking bid scoring jackasses is the title of this particular slide. And using Rio as an example, there were six candidate cities that applied to host for 20 or six applicant cities that applied to host for 2016. Five of them met the minimum requirement score, but only four were

passed through to candidate status, and for some reason, despite being the lowest scoring of the five, Rio was taken over DOA. It's thought that the reason that they maybe eliminated DOA was because they wanted to hold the games later in the year than what the Olympic Committee wanted to, again, for reasons of weather, but it's not really known. But the comprehensive reports that get submitted to the IOC voting membership for the second round that I talked about earlier are not public, but it's difficult to imagine that Rio fared much better with those reports than it did with the original bid scoring. But nonetheless, they won pretty handily when it came down to the actual voting, meaning that the people who were voting didn't really pay much attention to what the smart bid would be for that Olympics. Predictably, there were a lot of issues with the Rio Olympics not meeting their readiness

targets. Several major projects related to the Games were left unfinished by the time the Games began or even several years later. And a lot of the work that was done for Rio only spruced up the touristy areas while offering very little tangible benefit to the actual residents of the city. But like I said, we'll talk more about that in the next episode. ALICE Yeah, the IOC was probably like, ah, okay,

I'm voting for Rio, cause I wanna go sit on the beach. LIAM Yeah, I wanna go to Brazil. ALICE Yeah, fully! Like, I wanna go to Rio, I wanna go to Sochi. Takes a lot of bribes to get those types of guys to go to Salt Lake Sessie, you know? ALICE Yeah. Like I talked about earlier, some of it is also just political, on like, you know, we're-

this was the first Olympic Games that had ever been in South America, and so, it's a thing of, if you're South American, who are you gonna vote for? Of course you want the Olympic Games is going to be in your continent and bringing money and viewership and everything to your area. But it's kind of frustrating because and we'll get into this later, a lot of times through a bid with, y'know, questionable actual quality is what leads to the later issues of the things not being finished on time, venues being abandoned afterwards, all that kind of stuff. Uh, next slide please.

ALICE They're gonna commit to the bit, they're gonna start putting the Olympics in really weird places. ALICE Yeah, just get real fuckin' weird with it. Absolutely. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Like, uh, Tierra de Fuego, or like, we're gonna put this on, like, one of the tiny Pacific islands, or like, uh, or the South Indian islands. ALICE Yeah, the Korean demilitarized zone.

JUSTIN Oh, if you put it in the DMZ, that'd be fantastic. ALICE Hell yeah. I don't know how Dress you put it in the DMZ that'd be fantastic. Hell yeah. I don't know how dressage is gonna go, but that's gonna be fun. Oh, it's looking like the Battle of Waterloo out there, there's horse legs all over the place. We're holding the olymp- we're doing the Moncton New Brunswick Olympics. The Fort McMurray Olympic Games. Not Winter, Summer.

The Fort Mac Olympics, yeah. Hell yeah. Don't put that in 2D folks. Alright. Alright. So, um, this is a picture of the 1936 Olympic Park in Berlin that I took myself when I was there in like 2012. And this slide is a side, hey, why the fuck did they let the Nazis host? So the Olympics for 1936 were awarded

in 1931, which was before the Nazis took power. When they did take power, there was a negative reaction from several federations, including the US US which was basically the amateur athletic union at the time When especially when the Nazis decided to ban German Jews from participating fellow by the name of a Yes Was the president of the American Olympic Committee and initially he paid lip service to being a detractor He said the very foundation

of the modern Olympic Revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race. And then he went to tour the facilities in Germany in 1934, and as the Nazis do, very similar to what they did for- ALICE Oh, getting Nazi bribes! You just get a shitload of schmaltzy chocolate boxes, and looted jewels, or whatever. LORRAINE Very similar to what they did with Red Cross Observers in Theresienstadt.

They kind of managed the tour, and made sure that he only saw the good side of things, and based on that he concluded that the Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. And the next year, he kind of took a hard turn down the fast track to Yikesville and started very openly being much worse. Anyway, ultimately, the US athletes voted not to boycott. It was put to them as a vote and they voted not to. And because the US, even back then, brought one of the largest delegations to the Olympics, most of the other countries followed their influence.

There were some individual Jewish athletes who chose not to participate in protest to that decision In particular with regards to this Olympics We often remember Jesse Owens wins as kind of being a triumph over the racist Nazi ideology Because he was black and he won like four medals over a white Nazi German athlete medals over white Nazi German athletes. But he and Ralph Metcalf, who was another black athlete, were both put into the four by four, the 400 meter relay, as in place of Jewish athletes who got benched, that being Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller. And the Berlin Olympics were definitely still a PR coup for the Nazis, because they were able to use them to present their country in overall positive light.

They cleaned up a lot of the kind of... SEAN They took the Sturmkasten, the like, I don't know why I put an omelette on that cast and the like boxes, the newspaper like display stands for Desch Dürmer. They like took those off the streets for the duration of the Olympics and as soon as it was over they came back out. And took off a lot of the signs that said no Jews allowed and all that sort of thing. And in addition to that, like, just for me as someone who's interested in Olympic history, it really just fucking sucks that a lot of the oldest Olympic footage out there is stuff from Lenny Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will,

because it's like I would rather watch anything but that. But, you know, she was documenting it. So she took all of this footage and most of the other Olympics from around that time. You know, you're lucky if you get one newsreel. And so, you know, all of that's cool. But I think the IOC should have been a lot more willing and ready to yank their hosting rights and just kind of say to them, fuck around and find out., instead the IOC ejected the one member who kind of stood up to their BS and said we need to revoke the hosting rights, and they elected Avery Brundage to take his place and eventually Avery Brundage became the president of the IOC.

So ew. ALICE And he had a long, sort of like J. Edgar Hoover-like tenure throughout which he remained insanely racist. Alright, next slide please. Are we gonna mention, by the way, fucking, John Carlos and Tommy Smith? Uh, yes. Is that gonna be the future episode? That is the future episode, yeah.

Great, so Avery Brundage is a specter haunting this podcast. Yes. All right. Um, so now we're talking about the IOC and its relationship with the concept of marketability. So go ahead and next slide. Um, a lot of Olympic sports are rather unique compared to what you see as regularly popular in a country. You know, for example, most of the world, their favorite sport is soccer. Here in the US, our favorite sport is great iron football. ALICE Yeah. And so the Olympics are the only time you can like watch some like archery or whatever on like sort of mainstream TV. And my favorite thing- SEAN Yeah, gonna see some curling.

ALICE Yeah, well my favorite thing watching the Olympics is whenever you get into something and within, like, having seen half an hour of curling, you start following on from the commentators being like, oh he's fucked that up badly. As if you know anything about curling. SEAN Yeah. So yeah, so archery, curling, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, fencing, hugely fencing, women's beach volleyball.

Thank you, Ross. All that kind of just random stuff that you're not gonna turn on the TV on any particular Saturday afternoon and be confident you can see it. So these sports, they're uncommon, they don't have as much of a regular viewership as, y'know, a mainstream manball sport, so they don't get televised and publicized as much as the mainstream manball sports, so no one finds out about them, so they stay uncommon and unpopular.

ALICE Speak to yourself, I'm watching the Women's Biathlon and I'm having a time. JUSTIN I had an old landlord who definitely turned on the television to watch Women's Beach Volleyball. ALICE This is cowardice, Women's Biathlon. Very wiry women who can ski for like, 500 miles, and then shoot a fly between the wings or whatever. ALICE Yeah.

ALICE Yeah. Just the two eyes, actually. SONIA Alright, go ahead, and next slide please? So, kind of in response to that, because, as we'll talk about in the next episode, so much of the IOC's role in the Olympics has become just getting as much money as it possibly can to run the games. They have become obsessed with marketability, often to the detriment of the sport itself. And so we're going to do a case study on the sport of equestrian three-day eventing. So first of all, equestrian three-day eventing was created as a military test for cavalry

horses that it's kind of your ultimate cavalry horse can do dressage, jumping in the open field at speed. And this is designed to be a test of the horse's ability to like carry a message back from the front lines and then show jumping on the third day after the dressage day and the endurance day to prove that the horse is fit enough that it is still you know useful as a horse. It wasn't always that way. Some competition format changes that have happened over the years as a result of IOC decisions. First off they they came to the FBI and they said, you know, number one,

we want something that is more marketable, shorter for television. And number two, we need something that does not put as many requirements on the host city to find space to host this competition, because your endurance day of cross country, if you're running a true classic format, endurance day takes a lot of space and a long time. And so they eliminated those endurance XC phases and cut it down to just the what used to be the phase D number four out of four, the jumping test in the open field. After a couple of years, this eventually led to the entire sport

shifting to this shortened format. Another thing that the IOC said is that we're not going to give two Olympic medals for the same performance. So now instead of having... You could win the Medal of Honor for the same performance. Not anymore, but you used to be able to. Maybe you got to eat a weird horse situation. You know, it could happen. Double horse. So so now what they do is that if you are in contention for an individual medal and your team is in contention for a team medal,

you have to show jump twice. They have the show jumping round that awards the individual medals and the show jumping round that awards the team medals. And then also very recently, they've taken the teams that are used at the Olympics. Previously it was you would have four pairs of horse and rider who would compete, and you would have a drop score. So if somebody, you know, their horse got hurt halfway through the competition, or they just had a really bad round, you could drop their score, and it wouldn't count against you. And now it is it's you have three

riders and all of their scores have to count which is this also has an effect on safety. All equestrian sports are dangerous. Of the of the three that are in the Olympics, eventing is the most dangerous because you have that open jumping test at speed over large solid obstacles. As we often discuss on the show, regulations are written in blood and for eventing the old long format endurance day and the fitness of the horse and the require and the rider that you require to complete that is your

regulation. The blood was literal cavalry combat. If you don't have a horse that's fit enough, you're going to wind up getting killed. So since its elimination of the long format, the cross country course design has shifted to technical questions which are taken at speed. Since sheer fitness is no longer the separating factor in the past, you know, it was pretty straightforward obstacles and it's just about is your horse still a horse at the end of the day? This is dangerous. They're like speed running it. One of the things with jumping a horse is you have to be in control of the horse enough for a

tricky question to line them up at the exact right spot to jump. Some riders also no longer feel the need to use the most naturally athletic horse breeds that were traditionally popular for eventing such as the thoroughbred, the Irish sport horse, that sort of thing, nor do they feel the need to condition them to the same level of fitness since it's not strictly necessary to complete a three day event in the current format. This is also dangerous. If you are an eventing pair that shows up to the Olympics and you're not up to the level of competition, you could get seriously injured or you could die. And it does happen.

And so in my personal opinion, I think the growth that they're looking for can be encouraged in other ways. For example, providing funding to developing federations, focusing on offerings at the continental level, and creating training partnerships where a more experienced coach in the sport comes over and helps train new athletes from a country, all that sort of thing. It's not the best use of resources to set people up for failure, basically. ALICE That's a good look when you're shooting, like, 14 horses after the event. ALICE Oh, it's never stopped at the Grand National. RILEY That's true, yeah, it's like any normal horse race.

ALICE Just like, any time you get into the Equestrian stuff and everyone involved is like, it's not horses love to die, they're like Canadians, they love to die, their life has no value. ALICE Poor snuffles thought of ants and died. JUSTIN Alright, next slide please. ALICE Horses, man. JUSTIN Alright, so now we are talking about the cost of construction of Olympic venues and the debt burdens that host cities

often have to take on in order to do that. Next slide, please. I'm sure that everyone involved in the construction of an Olympic venue is paid fairly and at all. Well, we'll start out with the classic case, which is Montreal 1976. Canadian construction, you look at two breezeblocks on top of each other and you go, have you considered demolishing yourself? SON Please excuse my massacre of the French language in all things, but the architect for... ALICE Montreal's not far off you, don't worry.

SON The architect for Montreal Roger Taya Bear. It's the Christic Tabernacle. You're a work left. I'm going to pray for you. Anyway, Taya Bear stated that the construction of the Olympic Park and stadium showed me a level of organized corruption, theft, mediocrity, sabotage and indifference that I had never witnessed before and have never witnessed since. The system failed completely

and every civil engineering firm involved knew that they could just open this veritable cash register and serve themselves. Bringing endorsements. I mean, if he was speaking French, then it's probably something like Le Registre de Cash. The initial cost estimate for construction in Montreal was 120 million Canadian dollars. It wound up costing 1.6 billion Canadian dollars. Part of that was due to things that were kind of out of their control, like the inflation that happened to everyone in the 70s and after Munich 1972 and the massacre that happened there, unanticipated...

Which, by the way, those games had to, like, were forced to persist after the massacre by the president of the IOC, Avery Brundage. Haunts the podcast. That dude hated Jews, god damn. Oh yeah. Every run that haunts the podcast. That dude hated Jews. God damn. Oh yeah. Anyway, um, unanticipated issues, such a security after Munich that they didn't know that they were going to have to pay for that.

And I think it was 80 million that they wound up having to pay. Um, anyway, but a lot of it came down to corruption and inefficiency in their construction processes and it wound up taking them 30 years to pay off. Now, an interesting thing as a result of this is that that created such a sour political environment in the city that it launched the Quebec separatists that it launched the Quebec separatists as a, like, meaningful political party, and, you know, downstream from that there was a referendum that only barely didn't pass and all sorts of stuff. ALICE There was a shitload of, like, kidnappings and assassinations.

Just watch me! Set off a genuine 1970s urban guerilla insurgency for a minute. SEAN Montreal's so good, I love Montreal. LIAM Yeah, me too. ALICE This is the direct line between Montreal 76 and the great concavity. ALICE Alright, um, and, next slide please. This is off topic, but the article I referenced for this particular part kept referring to this stadium as the Big O, which... Hmm. ALICE I've seen bigger.

JUSTIN This is the Montreal Olympic Stadium, which is the most incredibly complex and stupid building I've ever seen in my life. I love it, it's beautiful, there's not a bad angle on this thing. It's so good, it's just amazing. It's fantastic to look at. ALICE Big looming tower. JUSTIN Oh my god, yeah, I took all these photos.

It has a... the roof is retractable, but it's retractable diagonally, which if you know how wires work, that doesn't make any sense. And that's why I think they only managed to retract it like six or seven times. ALICE We gave a stadium fimosus. JUSTIN It's only safe to be in the stadium if the snow load is under three centimeters, and this is in Montreal, Canada, where you regularly have over a foot of snow. Well, we're fixing that problem. It's got this huge cantilever tower, which is very difficult to maintain.

This was after the Olympics, the home of the Montreal Expos, the baseball team, which of course moved to Washington, DC to a much less interesting stadium. after the Olympics, the home of the Montreal Expos, the baseball team, which of course moved to Washington DC to a much less interesting stadium. ALICE Well, interesting things are forbidden from happening in DC. JUSTIN This is true, this is true, yeah. ALICE It's frowned upon in that culture. JUSTIN I don't know, one day we'll do a whole episode

on this stadium. ALICE One day we'll do a whole episode on Washington DC. JUSTIN Oh my god. What a place, what a place. I'm still obsessed with that woman who's like, suiting up the press in Gaza to go... in like the fuckin' Navy Yard. That was impressive.

To go to the Navy Yard, yeah, I was gonna say. Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say the Quiznos at 8th and M, but that's not there anymore, there's not optometrists there now. Ah, they ruined DC. I know. There's no Quiznos anywhere nearby, the closest Quiznos is in Maryland now. Gotta go to a schloss town.

Oh, the one in Chesapeake House? No, they got rid of that one. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Do you remember that right-wing pundit who, like, died of Quiznos? Yeah, she got fucking Quiznos poisoning. Her last tweet was like, I'd love to have like a raw lobster sub at Quiznos and then fucking die.

ALICE What?! JUSTIN Yeah, that's because, uh, Quiznos, you can only eat at Quiznos if you're worthy. ALICE You approach the Quiznos with an impure heart, mechanic, desk. LIAM We're moving the hoagies like a caliber. ALICE The word Quiznos Quiznos killed has come into my mind, and I don't know what to think about that. ALICE No, I just think that it's because your country

doesn't practice food safety. SEAN Oh, we do, just loosen fast. JUSTIN I don't know, I think if you go to Quiznos and you get seafood, you're taking your life into your own hands. SEAN Yeah, that's on you at some point. JUSTIN Yeah, usually I got some kind of Chipotleotle chicken bullshit, you know, that was fine. I used to eat at Quiznos all the time, back when we had Quiznos, now we only have Subway, which is objectively inferior.

Because of woke. Because of woke. Quiznos. They don't even give you a Schlotzkis. Yeah, exactly. Um. But yeah, that's what I had to say about the Montreal Olympic Stadium. This bottom photo is giving Tiny Dick huge scrotum energy.

Aw. It's true. It's sort of like, y'know, ten or twelve months on anti-androgens. I was obsessed with this building the whole time I was looking at it. And then I was dehydrated, because there's nowhere to get a place to eat. There's nowhere to eat nearby. Oh, stadiums are all like this, stadia. Like, fucking...

STADIA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A concert venue, conference center thing in Glasgow. Or if you can find something to eat, it like twelve dollars for a fuckin' hot dog. Yeah. The armadillo in Glasgow, the SECC, whichever the fuck one it is, that whole area, that whole precinct around there is just like a blasted concrete wasteland when there isn't something on.

Everything is closed, and the funniest part is that they're constantly trying to sell luxury flats with the premise of, oh, it's right near this, and it's like, there's nothing there except concerts. It's like, it's walkable. Yeah, that's definitely just gonna be like, somebody's pied-a-terre who likes to go to concerts a lot. Like, a lot. They got a nice, they got a metro station right next to it though, at least, you know,

that's nice. I mean, like, Alabama could definitely sell that sort of thing for somebody to have in Tuscaloosa for the football games, but they won't because we actually have campus around the stadium. I was picturing there for a second the Tuscaloosa metro. I went to a flat viewing in Highbury, which you may be aware is where Arsenal Stadium used to be, and the new stadium is very close to. And I looked it up on Google Maps right before I went, and it was like a street over from the Emirates Stadium, and there were flats on having viewings that looked more or less directly onto it, and I asked the

estate agent, hey, how bad does the noise and disruption get? And I've never seen anyone lie less convincingly. To just be like... It literally, it's like, once every two weeks, they only close the three nearest tube stations. It's fine. It's totally fine. And I just, yeah, I did not take that flat. What's the... what's that, uh, the one football club where the entrance is like, through a

row house? ALICE Oh, god. LIAM Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Oh, that's gonna absolutely kill me, cause I know that, and I'm having a kind of Biden moment. JUSTIN All the urbanists are obsessed with it, I'm having a kind of Biden moment. Um. All the urbanists are obsessed with it. The Minamate Park entrance is through the former Houston Union Station. That's true, yes.

Where the fuck? Houston gets one train a day? Uh, no, Houston gets six trains a week. Oh, is it Luton? Oh, god. Less than one train a day. Yeah. Uh. It's like the Sunset LimitedICE Yeah. I know this, because I... and the Sunset Limited doesn't even go down its complete route anymore,

it hasn't since Hurricane Katrina. ALICE Yeah, it is Luton Town, okay. I wasn't going insane. LIAM Take this bus to Luton. ALICE Do not ever take this bus to Luton. SEAN No, well, I will do reverse speed, if we go over 55 on Gaelic. ALICE Alright, ready for the next slide? Ready for the next slide. Alright, so, next thing is that, more recently, there's been very similar issues with host cities like Athens, Rio,

Sarajevo. ALICE Is that the bumsword? Sarajevo? It is. It is. And then this bottom left here, I think was the beach volleyball stadium from Beijing, where just... SEAN I can't believe they don't use it.

ALICE Sarajevo, eventful Olympics, you know. More eventful post-Olympics. I love to do some sniping through my bobsled track. Yes. Anyway, so, they spend massive amounts of money to construct all of these stadiums and venues and such, and then they wind up, you know, either because the sport isn't popular in the country, or because of political things that happen, or any one of a million other reasons, they don't continue to use venues, and they just kind of sit there

and rot. ALICE Yeah. And like, often, especially as you say, if the bids are like, poorly managed, they're poorly built, hurriedly built, and they're in weird locations and do weird things, and it's like, well, I'm not gonna go and see some, like, dressage or whatever. I'm gonna go and see some football. ALICE Who wasn't who hosted, I think, the World Cup recently?

They made a big shot of building one of the stadiums out of shipping containers. ALICE And, uh, Qatar, you're thinking of. JUSTIN Yeah, and they were like, uh, you could look at that structure and like, okay, there's just a big steel structure with shipping containers bolted on there. ALICE Yep. And they killed... JUSTIN It's not built of shipping containers, the shipping containers are aesthetic.

ALICE Yeah, and they killed like hundreds of indentured laborers to do that. JUSTIN Oh yeah. I think they also hired Zaha Hadid architects. ALICE Yeah, also, this is not a comparable beef to the hundreds of murders, but also absolutely fucked the schedule for international football, because they could not play it in summer because it would be, like, lethally hot, even more lethally hot, even more lethally hot. So they did a winter one, and it just, like, basically ended up with this stage where

everyone was playing international football, more or less non-stop with their domestic football, until it got to the point where everyone was so exhausted that England made it to the final of the Euros in 2024. And won, I should say. I've been doing this thing on Trash Future where it's even funnier the more markers I put down in things that we record before the final, to say, as an absolute certainty that England win. So I'm gonna put that marker down now. I hope the media hits. Devin, just put in whatever you think is most, like, amusing, if we don't, or if we do, for that matter, but like, it's coming home, is the thing.

JUSTIN Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is, you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalogue of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting

topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that.

Back to the show. In the process of preparing for this episode, y'all got me back on Twitter for the first time in months to. I'm so sorry. episode, y'all got me back on Twitter for the first time in months to end the year with y'all. And the first hashtag that I see when I open the app is, trending in US, it's coming home. Okay? ALICE Yeah, that's all of my posts. LIAM Oh, we're gonna win the Euros too? Yeah, hey, you're welcome.

ALICE How's USMNT doing, by the way? LIAM We're gonna get clop, I guess? That's how it's going, maybe? Take this manager, but be aware, he comes with a terrible curse. Are we able to play in the Euros? No, man. It's not like Eurovision where we can just sneak in. You didn't sneak into Eurovision, either!

We play in the Copa Americana. Oh, point to me! Yeah, you get your shit kicked in in the Copa Americana. ALICE Oh, point to me! You get your shit kicked in in the Copa Americana too. SEAN Point to me, point to me on the map, Nova, where Israel is within the continent of Europe. ALICE I mean, Australia isn't there either, but like, the thing is, you don't have a national broadcaster to join the European broadcasting.

SEAN What if we just showed up, like, we just showed up with guns, and we were like, okay, we'd like to participate in Euro 2024. We're gonna America, she goes up to the Eurovision. We're good! Yeah, it's the one thing we're good for, dude! We sent Luke Bryan to... Shaking his little ass for the 45 year old Bob's, yes. I had a coworker once.

Go ahead. Um, at least in gymnastics, I don't know about every sport, but at least in gymnastics Israel also plays in the Europeans. ALICE Yeah. SEAN What? Fucking nation state should not exist. ALICE They like caucus with the Europeans, because they're a European colonial project, what do you want from them playing?

Anyway, you had a co-worker. You had a co-worker. SEAN Oh, I had a co-worker. Uh, Ros knows his co-worker, Miss Y Yvette, who was a West Philly black woman. And lived, born in West Philly. Yes, lived in West Philly her whole life. Wonderful woman. Blared R&B in the store at 900 decibels.

When I worked at the liquor store 25th and South, she was amazing. But she was, she was like, what kind of music do you like? I was like, I like a lot of stuff. You know, I like, like, and she's like, do you like my music? I'm like, R&B is not really for me, But, you know, we can probably work out some sort of agreement. She's like, Okay, well, you can put on X to you the country station in Philly. And I was like, Okay, like, that would be really cool. And she's like, like, four days later, she comes to me and she's like, I love Luke Bryan, man, shaking his cute little white

ass. Apparently, she had stayed up all night on YouTube just watching Luke Bryan shaking his ass. Hey, Chris. How's it going? ALICE I always remember the, what is it, the Mr. Liam swears a lot story. SEAN Yeah, I was loading cases of liquor, as you do, and her son was back there, and I think I knocked over a case of Jameson, and I just didn't stop swearing for like seven to eight minutes, and she asked her like, 11 year old son, how was your day with Mr. Liam, and he just looks at her with like a baton death

march stare and goes, MrICE, and LIAM groan. ALICE Alright, let's keep going. ALICE Alright, let's go. Let's go. Next slide. ALICE Yeah, Nova's dying. Wow, this, Denver 76, uh, this is cool, I mean, yeah, just take the Philadelphia 76ers logo and do whatever you want with it. ALICE What if the six look like they had an asshole in it?

NARES It's okay, because it didn't actually happen. All of this that has, y'know, gone on, has had an effect on the pool of potential hosts, on who actually wants to step up and take on all of that to host the Olympics. ALICE Yeah, it's like, hey, do you wanna bribe the sweatiest richest cunts in the world? Not really. Like... world. Like, not really. Like the kind of opening salvo of this, it was important of things to come, was that Denver bid for and won the 1976 Winter Olympics. And then there was a major turn in public opinion against it.

And eventually they abandoned their bid. And it was, I think, Innsbruck that took it up in their stead. And that was the only time, if I remember correctly, so far that the Olympics have changed to a different host after originally hosting or after originally picking being awarded a host that the games actually went on like Tokyo was it was transferred to a different host in 1940 if I remember correctly but then it wound up not happening at it happening at all because of the war. St. Louis got moved to move from Chicago to St. Louis, if I recall correctly. Yeah. So. OK, then the first time in like the modern era. Living history. Yeah. Yeah.

St. Louis Olympics would be a good episode. But it kind of went downhill over the past couple of decades in terms of how many countries wanted to apply to host. You look at the history of host and it starts out with like there's nine or ten countries that apply and then it slowly works its way down to for 2024. There were only five countries that applied. And of those five, the original bid from the United States was Boston. And Boston had a very similar reaction to Denver, where they

their public rejected it. And USOC wound up switching to a bid from Los Angeles. And then Budapest, Hungary, switching to a bid from Los Angeles and then Budapest, Hungary, Hamburg, Germany and Rome, Italy, all just dropped out before the final round of voting. So I know the sucks. Fuck this. Yeah. And so Boston campaign against the Olympics was pretty big. I remember that happening.

That was like, oh, my God, these things are going to suck so bad. Get them away from us. Um, and so what's being told? Hey, people, people from all around the world are going to come to Boston. They're like, what the fuck? Cancel the shit immediately. I'm not going to be able to pack my car and have a yard. You can't park in there anyway. The new racisms they could have developed,'know, over a beautiful few weeks. Think of how many people they could've burned up on the Orange Line. Nah, there's gonna be a double decker bus full of IOC officials and they accidentally

go down Storo Drive. Oh, they got Storo'd, yeah, hell yeah! That's the end of the Olympics. Mark Wahlberg hate crimes at different nationalities every day. That's his Olympics. Just decapitating the state but it's the IOC instead of a real country. I support, I think we should do a decapitation strike on the IOC. I think this is the first good policy idea we've had.

We finally got there, 170 episodes in. Does the IOC have a second strike capability? No, it does not. So, I think so, yeah. We're gonna International Olympic Committee Friends Day. You might be surprised. Oh, I don't like that. I mean, there are people in the IOC who are shooting athletes, so. And especially if we had been talking, y'know, about fifty years ago, it used to be like in the first half of the 20th century, a lot of Olympians- ALICE Fifty years ago, I had about the same percentage of Vaffan SS veterans as the French Foreign League.

Yeah, a lot of Olympians were military athletes, because we'll get into this more in the second episode. Yeah, which military? All of them. But the bad ones are special. I'm calling them Nazis, yeah. Yeah, go for it. I'm not stopping you. But anyway, so what what the IOC wound up deciding to do was

they just took the two remaining cities, Paris and Los Angeles, and they gave the 2024 games to Paris, the 2028 games to Los Angeles, because they were like, we're not getting a whole lot of interest coming back for 2028 either. We're just going to make things easier on ourselves and do this. This is primarily a bit of valuation problem in that, again, the result of picking cities that are not the best choice to host the Olympics is that you get cities that don't do a great job of hosting the Olympics and then they have buyer's remorse and that kind of becomes a that buyer's remorse becomes what the public thinks of when they

think of, oh, we could host the Olympics. Oh, well, we're just going to be in debt forever. Um, but there's continue to go down to increasingly smaller and smaller cities, you know, to, uh, to figure out who, who is, yeah, no 2032 Olympics, Roanoke, Virginia. Well, the star city! Well, the star city! However, with regards to the Winter Olympics in particular, climate change also plays a role in that there are fewer cities and projected to become even

fewer in the future where hosting the Winter Olympics is even gonna be physically possible because there's just not gonna be snow that's reliable for staying around long enough. They already machine blow a lot of snow to kind of support the Winter Olympics and make sure that weather doesn't get in the way, but it may come to a point where, you know, Winter Olympics athletes don't really have many places that they can train. However, credit where credit is due to the IOC in that in the very, very recent

timeframe, they have changed how Olympic bidding works to be a little bit more foolproof in that now what they do, I think I have a slide specifically about this later, but now what they do is they do that committee evaluation and the committee picks the city that they think is best, and then it just goes out to the IOC membership as a referendum, that either yes we're gonna host it here, or no we're not. Instead of it being, uh, vote for the one who gave you the most money! Sort of thing.

ALICE Just being like, do you wanna go to Roanoke, Virginia, yes or no? LIAM Yes you do! ALICE It's so great, there's so many things to do, there's lots of breweries. The downtown's like nice and walkable. You can get real lost in the woods. You can see the big abandoned Norfolk Southern skyscraper

because they move on the fuckers. Yeah, those fuckers. What else can you do to run out? Well, you can visit. Stars and the games used to be there. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Yeah. Back. I said their names on air. Hi. Hi. And Linda and Uncle Robert. Yeah.

He can do it. All right. All right. names on air. I and Linda and Uncle Robert. Yeah, he can do it. All right. All right. Keep it moving. Keep it moving. Keep her moving. All right. Can I I cannot hot edit this because you exported it to PowerPoint. I just realized that this next section would have been better titled as more like timelines in general than just construction. I like we'll do it live. We'll do it live. We're doing it.

Why? So it's just timelines now. Yeah. Thanks, John. That. All right. Next slide, please. Oh, what the fuck? Yeah, historically, there have been several notable cases of down to the wire preparations for the Olympics. That tweet on the left there is from the Sochi Games, that is a reporter who is talking about,

this is the hotel that he was giving, and as you can see, or that he was given to stay in, and as you can see... Fantastic Russian construction. Yeah, it's not in fantastic shape, and there were several hotels, I think the Athlete's Village also had issues similar to this, all that sort of thing. Top right, that is one of the Athens stadiums that was still under construction, I think this was a matter of months before the games and they were concerned- Just like building the athletics track ahead of Usain Bolt as he starts running.

Yes. They all gotta get down. Yeah, doing grommets, sort of model train track thing from the wrong trousers. Yeah, just putting the track in front of you. And then bottom right, there is a picture taken by one of the Jamaican athletes at their Olympic Village accommodations in Rio, where you can see that the sink bowl has just fallen out of the counter and crashed on the floor. It was.

And in fairness, this has happened in my apartment as well. This is an undermount sink problem. I think undermount sinks are actually one of the worst things that we've developed as a species. It gives the opportunity for so many problems. For the trade-off that, okay, now I can use a paper towel to clear off the counter a little bit more easily. I hate undermount sinks. I believe they're the work of the devil. I don't think this is... I just...

Not of God. Yeah, exactly. They're just bad. They're just... Just give me... like I'm fine with the little bit of gritty mess that comes around a regular sink. It's fine. It I anyway, I don't like undermount sinks. They just they will do this to you eventually. They're holding a clue.

Don't you get the same shit underside the lip on the inside of the sink that you would get on the bring around the outside anyway? Like you're just moving the problem to a different place. Yeah. But anyway, so as of May 2014, which was a little over two years to go till Rio, they had. There was a report that came out that they had 10 percent of their preparations accomplished.

The normal progress that far out from the games is sixty percent, and the lowest it had ever been up until that point, and the games still happened was forty percent, and that was for Athens in 2004. So there were some major concerns about whether Rio was gonna be able to happen or not, they were like, querying London to be like, hey, could y'all on short notice maybe hold the games again? All that sort of thing. ALICE I think Sochi also had like, I remember

something from Sochi was like, there were pictures of the bathrooms in the Olympic Village had two toilets in them. ALICE Oh, facing each other for like, a convo. JUSTIN Oh, facing each other, yeah. ALICE Well, I also... yeah. I like the poop door. Before the tornado came through in 2011, I could've showed you a Krispy Kreme in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had much the same sort of situation going on, but... I think what happened- That's the most worldwide-ass sentence I've

ever heard. I think what happened with that was it had originally been stalls and they took the wall out to make it ADA accommodated, but I don't know for sure. The Russian ADA. Are you brave enough to dual poop? There's a lot of people who were involved. They were really shoehorned in Nintendo DS controls into a lot of weird things. There's a lot of people who were involved in constructing and finishing a bathroom with

two toilets facing each other. And no one stopped and said, why are we doing this? I mean, this is fine. This is fine. That's right, it says, we're modern. We're all adults here, we can watch each other poop. ALICE I mean, to be fair, if this isn't the Athlete's Village, they do multiple times over the course of the games have to let somebody watch them piss, so.

ALICE Mmhm. That's a good point, yeah. I couldn't do that. ALICE Alright, um. ALICE Nah, I don't want to piss in front of anybody. You always go in the stall. I mean, progress the episode, I'm dying. ALICE.

Yes please, sorry. No, my sweet girl. JUSTIN. Next thing, is that sometimes you also get just random October surprise shit that happens. So for some examples here, we have the ticket scandal for London, where a short amount of time before the games, it came out that some of the national organizing committees that had been allotted a certain amount of tickets to the Olympics to sell to people from their own country were instead selling them on the black market for vastly inflated prices. And that threatened to taint the image of the games in people's minds. It was a huge scandal at the time. The pool in Rio, which at the beginning of the Olympics turned green, turned out that what was going on there was

it was an algal bloom, and somebody had, instead of putting chlorine into the pool, they had put the chemical that dechlorinates your pool, I can't remember what it's called. ALICE The extremely dechlorinated pool. Yeah, and this led to Dilma Rousseff and Lula losing the mandate of heaven and Lava Hathorn and all of the rest of it, so, you know, a very bad decision to do that. STACEY Potion of Turn Your Pool Acid Green. ALICE Yeah, potion of turn your government fascist. STACEY And what they wound up having to do with that was halfway through the Olympics

they had to completely drain, refill the pool, and rebalance all the chemicals, because to do synchronized swimming in there, they needed to have clear water so that the judges could see under it. ALICE Just like, oh, oh, they're very synchronized in the merc, you know? SEAN Yeah, oh, they're not coming up. Oh. Oh, that's bad.

ALICE And then, some of you may remember, uh, earlier this year, there was suddenly a big kerfuffle in the news about Paris being infested with, uh, bed bugs to the point that it would cause problems with, yeah, with everyone, uh, showing up for the Olympics, possibly taking that back to their home country. Um, as it turned out, that was kind of blown out of proportion by the Russian disinformation apparatus, but you know, still one of those things that you get to the 11th hour and you're like, oh shit, what are we gonna do about this? Another one that I don't really have a good

picture for is that in June 2016, the doping control lab in Rio got suspended by WADA, so they were looking at potentially having to ship everything like, 2300 miles to Columbia to verify test results. ALICE There's like, intra-continental flights full of piss jugs. ALICE Yeah. ALICE What the fuck it says. SEAN I disappeared for a second, all this talk

of piss made me had to go piss Okay, that's fine. Yeah, that's how I do it. I just sneak out then you guys like to leave diets like no I mean the pissing or eating noodles. Yeah We are we know yeah, I'm very weak Because I'm presenting anyway because I'm presenting. Anyway, so, you know, you might wonder what causes all of this sort of stuff when you have eight goddamn years to get your shit sorted after your bid is picked. And my answer is basically follow the money. Yeah. Yeah. So next slide, please.

Talking about potential solutions, these are not in any way expected to be, you know, panaceas, but they're things that could at least improve the specific issues that we're speaking about here. Next slide. So there have been, like I mentioned earlier, some changes in how Olympic bidding and site selection are done and changes in the criteria that they're looking at. The bids are now evaluated by a smaller committee which chooses the best one as a preferred bid. The main IOC membership is only involved in that they have a referendum to approve or deny the

preferred city or you know moving on to the alternative if they deny the first one. They no longer choose between the finalist. So, you know, you did it. You paid attention to your fucking bid scoring jackasses. This is very much the meme of the guy celebrating very hard after winning third place anyway. The long term effects remain to be seen, but the upcoming LA 2028 Olympic bid was very much sold on similar advantage to what Houston was bidding on for 2012.

And just this past couple of weeks, they released that they are making some further adjustments to their site plan, which will kind of push even harder on that. For example, they move the Equestrian from like a site that they would have to build in a public park to being at Galloway Downs, which is already a very high quality Equestrian facility that hosts a lot of FEI competitions. It's kind of the obvious place to put it. And so, you know, we'll see how that winds up affecting things in 2028. But I think it's a positive move. Next slide, please. They got to put up all those oil derricks for the rowing event again, though, you know, from the last one. It's a great photo. Another thing that they can do is multi site bids. And this is what Milano

and Cortina Italy did for 2026. Where instead of having it in one spot and building everything that you don't already have, you can use existing sites that are spread out over a wider area. You can use existing sites that are spread out over a wider area. As I mentioned earlier, this already kind of has to happen to some degree, a lot of the time with equestrian surfing, sailing, things that need water. But there's been talk even above and beyond what Milano and Cortina have done of like, for example, when it came out that the US was going to bid again for 2028, an idea was floated of the entire Texas Triangle, Dallas, Houston, and Austin, San Antonio bidding as one. And there have been other similar things to that. Next slide, please. I mean, they got so much they got so much stuff already, I mean, you know, you may as well use it. LIAM Dick pound.

ALICE Dick pound. LIAM Dick pound. LIAM Dick pound. ALICE Dick pound. LIAM Dick pound. ALICE I'm so old I remember when this was called a Chastity Cage. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Dick pound.

ALICE So, the most critical thing is that the IOC have to stop being such a bunch of giant dildos. It's gonna be hard with a guy named Dick Pound, I gotta tell you. I included Dick Pound for the site gag. He's actually one of the fairly decent ones. He's a Canadian or was a member for Canada until like 2021 and he was involved in the institution of the World Anti-Doping Agency and in the takedown of the 2002 corruption But you know can't resist a dude with a funny name

Goes right up there beside NASCAR racer dick trickle for why did your parents give you this name? All right, dick trickle. Yeah All right, um next slide that's the end of our JUSTIN I was about to say, what did we learn? ALICE Burn the IOC and salt the ashes, give all their authority to me. LIAM Yes. ALICE Correct. ALICE The world waits with bated breath for Olympics, Stalin. LIAM Yes.

JUSTIN It could be, it could be. Dick Pound. ALICE Dick Pound. ALICE You know, the power is there for you to seize it, Dick Pound. SEAN Nova, do you wanna drop off and we'll do Safety Third, so you can go to bed? ALICE Uh, no, I'll stick around for it. I'm a woman of commitment, y'know.

SEAN We have a segment on this podcast called... ALICE He didn't ask me to take that oath, but I did on my own. SEAN We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. ALICE Shake hands with danger. SEAN Hello, November, Roz, Liam, and possibly guest. That's hedging it and we don't stand for it.

Trans woman eagle scout here. You can call me Jay. You can call me Jay. You can call me... Anyway. I have endless stories about the stupid shit we scouts would get up to, many of them fire and or knife related. For this story, however, I could place the vault squarely at the feet of the Boy Scouts

of America, soon to be called Scouting USA or some other bullshit, the cover up years of sexual assault, I forget, and maybe also the US military. ALICE Two great institutions, I'm sure. LIAM The two spin it together. great institutions, I'm sure. ALICE I was at the 2010 Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree. LIAM Oh boy. JUSTIN The subsequent Jamborees will be hosted at the newly acquired Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve. ALICE Yeah, it's called that because two women have a conversation there that isn't about

a man. JUSTIN That's Bechtel, not Bechtel. LIAM Fuck! Shut up, you stupid! JUSTIN Bechtel, not Bechtel. Fuck! Shut up! Bechtel is the engineering firm. It's Bechamel, it's one of the mother sauces. I fucking hate you. Which was on land newly purchased by Boy Scouts of America in West Virginia and announced

at this Jamboree. Like so many Boy Scouts of America events, this Jamboree was largely a thinly veiled recruitment event for and funded by the US military. ALICE I love those. I mean, I ran into so many in America I never joined the US military. America's Army, remember that? SEAN Yeah, my parents tried to get me to go to the Jamboree. That was a campout I was able to successfully avoid. I hated the Boy Scouts, it was miserable. ALICE Once again, I'm hoisting a big trans flag

and a question mark in the background. JUSTIN It was hosted at Fort AP Hill, a military base used to train all branches of the US military. ALICE You're named after one of the worst Confederate generals if I'm not mistaken. JUSTIN That sounds about right, yeah. They got a lot of those. Well, they got rid of the worst Confederate generals, if I'm not mistaken. JUSTIN Sounds about right, yeah. They got a lot of those. Well, they got rid of the Confederate names. ALICE Yeah, they did. They did. So now there's like

four Kvazos and stuff. JUSTIN For about two weeks, 43,434 scouts and leaders camped out on patches of lawn grass all over the bays. It was a logistical nightmare as most troops had to train just ahead of time so they could haul most of their gear several miles to their campsites from coach buses they took across the country. This was supposed to be a high adventure, which supposedly denoted some heightened requirement of maturity both physically and mentally and typically were supposed to be for older scouts.

But this being one of the more expensive ones, they'd take about anyone who had the money, so scouts ranged from age 13 to 18. It was more like an outdoor scouting convention than any other high adventure. ALICE Sounds absolutely horrible. JUSTIN Oh yeah. Unsurprisingly these grounds were not built with the infrastructure to support nearly 50,000 extra people on the lawn for two weeks every four years. Additionally, they had this jamboree a year early, so it would be on the Boy Scouts of

America Centennial, and I guess they tried to make that a big deal. I'm sure this all contributed to some cut corners. Instead of permanent outdoor showers, and kaibos, we had porta-potties. We did laundry in 12 gallon buckets with a plunger. Troops were responsible for bringing them themselves. But you know, half the scouts there didn't use them once. ALICE Oh, you... I don't expect the- I know there's a sort of militarism thing here, but I don't expect the Boy Scouts to be on deployment, man.

I don't want you to be in the kind of uniform that stands up on its own. JUSTIN This feels like World War One. Here's the thing, I almost probably wound up here. ALICE Batin' Powell jerking it in heaven. In heaven? In hell, clearly. LIAM In hell, yeah. No, I was 17 at the time.

I was well past the Boy Scouts, I think. LIAM Oh, Jesus. JUSTIN Right. Forty ten? Yeah, I would've been 17. LIAM You would've been 17, but... ALICE Yeah. You were born in 93.

LIAM You and me both. ALICE I always forget that you're younger than me. LIAM Oh, well... LIAM Yeah, you're older than both of us. ALICE No, I'm the oldest person here. LIAM Ross, get on with it! JUSTIN I'm getting on with it. ALICE You young folks.

JUSTIN Yeah. There were concrete pads with a small water supply that they would build with plywood and 2x4 makeshift shower stalls around at most campsites with ice cold water. The black, plastic, thin tarp curtains stable to the walls didn't reach the ground, so you might expect to walk in on something like another scout sitting on the floor in a cold shower jerkin' it. Don't get me started on homoeroticism in the scouts."

Again, Robert Baden-Powell looking up from hell, also jerking it. JUSTIN Why would you sit on the floor of the shower to jerk you? ALICE Yeah, that's a little confusing to me. Yeah, you're gonna get every disease. JUSTIN I would avoid the floor in the Boy Scout camp. I would not... ALICE Especially in the shower. You're gonna get fungus.

Yeah, you're gonna somehow get athlete's foot in your ass crack. Get athlete's ass. Onto the incident. This being a high adventure Scout event meant they had to set up a lot of exciting activities cheaply and quickly. Yeah, what do you think the guy jerking off was doing? Oh my god. Oh Jesus Christ.

He found a Sears catalog and went to the underwear shop. Went to town on himself. There are four instances of each activity set up in different areas of the campus and they all had the same stuff. Action Alley featured team obstacle courses you were supposed to finish together. One of the obstacles we encountered consisted of two large wooden poles similar to large utility lines about 30 feet apart with two inch thick steel cables between them. One about eight feet off the ground the other another six feet above it.

It had small, single steps you had to climb up the backs. The cables were secured to a big bolt sticking through and out the back of the poles and they were secured with nuts on the back. There were small platforms to step on once you were up and you clipped yourself in a harness to the top line and you crossed between them." See a you know, team building, high ropes course, you know, the whole thing. Yeah, the general miserableness. Um, there were some messages about teamwork and we all had to get across as a group. And we had a lot of fun fucking around, as you would expect, a group of 14-15 year olds

with limited supervision. As this course was relatively unsupervised, one of our group, who was the last getting down, missed a step, managed to grab onto the pole and slid down. Unfortunately, he might have been better off falling the six foot drop because he grabbed himself right on the bolt and it tore a decent gash across his chest. And it had managed to dissect one of his nipples. SEEMINGLY CLEAN IN HALF. ALICE.

God. Damnit. JUSTIN. Although I'm sure he was in shock, he was in pretty good spirits once the medics arrived in a golf cart. ALICE. Yeah, I remember that scene from Furiosa, too. JUSTIN.

And we soon roasted him for ripping his nipple in half. He got stitched up fine and joined us back at camp that night. I'm pretty sure his name was John, but for the rest of the trip the whole trip called him Ripple. LIAM Ripple the Nipple, yeah of course. JUSTIN Shut up to Ripple if you're listening. I hope you're doing well, and can look back on that memory with some fondness as well.

ALICE You are fucking eligible for a National Defense Service Medal. NARESH I'm once again wondering if there are significant differences between how Boy Scouts structure troops versus how Girl Scouts structure troops, because I have to say that in my 12 years in Girl Scouts, there is not... Like I knew everybody in our troop by name, we weren't that big. So how do you have somebody in your troop that you've never met, don't know their real name?

My troop had, my troop probably had like a hundred or something people in it. Yeah, it was big. They were all pre-military little shits and all their dads work at the Pentagon. We've got like 25 at our biggest. You've got one more paragraph here. Yeah, we can be okay. I could talk about this event for hours insane and also military presence everywhere. Got to be one of the biggest recruitment events ever included are some photos of similar rub

courses. I didn't include those because they sent too many photos. I was like, I'm gonna curate these a bit, you know? Also the most insane and or funny photos including custom Boy Scouts of America Remington's Exxon Mobil astronaut talk, Mike Rowe and Switchfoot, openly horny Scouts, fighter jets, and the army Black Daggers parachute team flying the POW missing an action flag. Among the memorable moments for me was the Islamic Mosque tent, as opposed to the other kind of mosque, where I went one Sunday morning instead of one of the dozens of churches, and the Imam made fun of us for coming on the wrong day, and then told us about the Five Pillars of Islam. Which is a good bit, I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bucks, that's the Boy Scout jamboree for ya. Incredible. Do not get your nipples ripped off, and then don't join the US military, because then you can get a lot worse than your nipples ripped off. JUSTIN This could've been me. This could've happened to me.

LIAM Oh thank god it wasn't. Alright, wrap the shit up. JUSTIN Alright, that was Safety Third. ALICE Shake hands with danger. JUSTIN Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? ALICE No, bye. LIAM Don't try to find me.

LIAM Alright, end it.