As my father used to say: “Never give credit to malice and forethought that which can be so well be explained by ignorance and prejudice.” It never ceases to amaze to me the how the older I get, the wiser he becomes.

As a good friend’s father, a Taiwanese military intelligence of officer who fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1948, one told me: “Western people will never understand China. They see China only through western eyes. For all but a very few years of our 3000 years of history most people in China went to bed poor, hungry, and in fear of their life every night. Today they go to bed after dinner, with a roof over their head, and with the belief they will be safe through the night. Western people will never understand that sometimes that that can be enough.”

Hiliarious Sinophobia btw. The majority of commentaries on China and the games haven't a historical clue, and even less of an understanding of contemporary China. Your cold war evil empire narrative is outdated here. I suggest you educate yourself before doing the old hackneyed ChiCom is bad, baaad! dance. It's getting almost as tedious as Bush Derangement Syndrome now.

I’ll make the futile pitch I make every four years: it’s long past time to give the Olympics a permanent home, preferably in Greece

Sounds like having every leg of the Amazing Race show always take place in Peoria. A big part of the viewer interest is getting at least a small feel for a new place.

And having been to 9 of the last 11 summer host cities, some of them both before and after the Olympics, there is certainly some local infrastructure benefit that was often badly needed but wouldn't have happened but for the cash infusion from the games.

All that said, Berlin 1936 was obviously a very bad choice.

Good point. But I have better idea that will be simpler and more cost-efficient - instead pay huge amount of money for the broadcasting rights, simply use the money to make US-only Olympics. All foreign countries and foreign athletes are banned. So we will have not only world champagne of basketball, baseball, American football, we will also have world champagne in table tennis, diving, and badminton. Every gold, silver and bronze.

What happened?
How can we lose gold count to China, a third world country?
Let’s have a national holiday of mourning. No one objects I bet!
Let’s have a national contest of the best excuses of winning so less gold medals.
It has to be the BEST, so it could worth a gold in this category.

What to do?
Borrow more money from China to buy foreign coaches…
No Speedo to Australia and China.
My secret weapon is to import 8 Jamaican runners. Money talks!
Bribe the judges (a little harder as everyone hates us but money talks again).
Change all the rules to our favor: 5 medals for basketball, 1 for table tennis, 0 for diving…
All tiebreakers must go our way as our sponsors own the Olympics.
We will amplify their “shortcomings”:
copying our advance lip sing technique, working too hard, starting before you can walk…
The Chinese must have put slippery jell on our batons and/or the gym apparatus.
Develop a dope that can take out all dope traces from our body.
“One country, all medals” is our new Olympics slogan.
The more wishfully we think, the closer we succeed.

How to heal now, really?
Write to Dear Abby for starter.
Bronze is the same as gold if not better.
If you do not believe me, ask any blind person here.
It is harder to get a bronze as we have to LET two others to win.
We’ll train our athletes for the bronze from now on.
NBC should interview bronze winners only as they are the real winners.
Actually we’ll be happier to be #3 and build a better relationship with other nations.
Stop laughing. It is a fact!!!
Phelps, we love you more with 8 bronze medals - it is no easy job to let 2 and ONLY 2 pass you 8 times.

If everything does not work, turn ugly.
Ask McDonald’s and KFC to give away their “food” (better than opium) to China FREE, so their next generation will be so fat that they cannot walk to the subway station.
Send soldiers to grab the medals, esp. gold. Hey, we have the best offense.
Will the world be better if we only fought for gold medals only (bronze medals in our case)?
What an Olympic spirit to celebrate the winning of the bronze!

-- The author is Tony Pow. 8/22/08. Created for fun. No politics. No dumb nationalism. No ego. 90% false, 10% true. 100% fun. Hope no offense to you. Please feel free to distribute/change... ---

Seems to be some conflict...

"Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics , Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a coporation deciding where to do business you're starting to think, "Beijing looks like a pretty good option.""

should the IOC be in the business of bolstering autocratic regimes as allowing China to host the Games clearly has done?

Well, there seems something of a history there, aside from China, given these locations and dates:

1936 - Berlin, Germany
1980 - Moscow, U.S.S.R.
And even now, there are plans to hold the winter games in 2014 at Sochi, Russia

I'm sure the IOC views itself as being apolitical, rather than giving credibility to totalitarian regimes, in much the same way as the press views itself as 'neutral'. But just as the press and the public are coming to grips with the effective bias exhibited by the press, perhaps they will start addressing the similar problem the IOC has?

I’ll make the futile pitch I make every four years: it’s long past time to give the Olympics a permanent home, preferably in Greece near the place where the original Games were held more than 2,000 years ago. It will never happen, of course. All those IOC officials being wined and dined by countries eager to host the Games

Issues;

The winter games, for one thing; there's no appriciable snowfall there as I gather it.

Second, what is to prevent Greece from becoming a dictatorship at some point in future? Certainly, we've seen other countries we never expected to go down that road suprise us.