The Olympics are clearly not about sports or games or activities, since each of the events has a world championships each year and are wildly unpopular. The Olympics are about the following: 1) nationalism, 2) media sensationalism, 3) sport-porn/montages.
[What is being referred to when one says the "US team" or the "Canadian team"? What, exactly, do the American lugers have to do with the American biathletes or ice dancers? Exactly nothing. Except for the most ridiculous looking berets.]
Why are all these events in one place? It's stupid. You wind up with a pile of buildings and structures that get used for 2 weeks and then sit fallow, probably housing the homeless and a couple of lousy youth hockey teams, until they are torn down to make way for a high rise condo development or, hopefully, a Wal-Mart.
The correct way to structure the Olympics would be to not have a host city. Make every sport played in a different location. It helps alleviate, among many others, the following problems: corrupt officials, transportation gridlock, hotel scalping, hordes of slackjawed pin collecters converging on the same pile of hot dogs (they will have different piles).
This would also, hopefully, relieve the bizarre sense of nationalism that gets attached to the games. Also, I'm being a bit unreasonable here, but it would be nice if they got rid of the opening and closing ceremonies which by any measure have nothing to do with sports and would only be missed by people who are interested in figure skating or gymnastics (along with diving, you'll notice that each of these are decided by a scoring system that closely resembles "Am I Hot Or Not?").
