Howabout Taupo for Austerity Games?
COMMENT
It’s Taupo time. We need an Austerity Games. And so I amadvocating Taupo to host the 2024 Olympics. Now I know many of you will think I ambeing entirely facetious, but I amnot. The Thomas Bachs of this world have conned you into thinking it’s an absurd idea. They will tell you that Taupo hasn’t got the infrastructure or resources to host an Olympics. But that rather depends on your definition of the Olympics.
If you define the Olympics as a sporting competition open to the best of the world’s athletes, if you define the Olympics as to the young people, for the young people and by the young people, then anything is possible. Even Taupo.
The modern Olympics has become a junket of inept officials wasting obscene amounts of money in order to bankrupt a city, parts of which will turn into a wasteland as soon as the blazers pack up their costly charabanc.
Let’s get rid of the idea of building an Olympic village specially for the athletes. It is a ridiculous waste of money, the legacy of which is dereliction like the athletes’ swimming pool in Athens which is now full of stagnant water and rotting garbage.
Why not put up everyone up on giant camp-grounds. Us kids all love it at music festivals, so I can’t see much of a problem at the Olympics. It might be a bit hard on Mark Todd’s back, but he’ll muck in. He can bring a camper van. Some will camp and some will glamp. I amsure the odd farmer will lend a paddock for the Olympics.
At the moment the candidates for the Games in 2024 are Paris, Rome, Los Angeles and Budapest and you can rule all of them out by one criterion or another. In fact Hamburg has already ruled itself out, before we even get to the vote, to be taken in Lima next September.
Paris is sadly under a high threat of terrorism due to the country’s fracturing immigration policy. Nobody in their right mind could possibly want to travel into Los Angeles airport. Rome’s mayor doesn’t even want the Olympics in her city because they can’t afford it.
And as for Budapest. Apart from the fact that we couldn’t possibly go to a country that has a canoeist who goes much faster than Lisa Carrington over 500 metres, there is the matter of prime minister Viktor Orban, known as the Viktator, a man who courts Vladimir Putin and erects razor wire border fences.
And so I come back to Taupo. Now some will say that Owen Delany Park only has a grass running track. Well, what’s wrong with that? Retro is cool. OK, so there wouldn’t be many world records, but can’t these Games just be about enjoyment.