It would then pretty much be the last 5 mega-venues (Beijing, London, ...) that could tanke turns re-doing it. Which would be a good thing.
Next option is not having it in one place. It can be a global event. It wouldn't matter if athletics is in Berlin while all the cycling is in Madrid. Would only be worse for on-site fans.
A distributed Olympic would just be a synchronised "World Championship" (events that would then lose all significance, btw, further shrinking budgets). Not gonna happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/28/...
As such, any proposal based upon rational analysis and sound engineering must be rejected out of hand, because it does not account for kickbacks, baksheesh, palm-greasing, boondoggles, junkets, tribute, or straight bribery.
Once you adopt this view, the Olympics work perfectly, year after year, without fail. The public still benefits, because ordinarily corruption and profiteering of that magnitude requires a war, which can at times get out of hand.
What will it become if confined to one city? An experiment in finding boundaries of vanity?
I remember the lead up to the Sydney Olympics and no-one seemed to want it - then it arrived and it was an amazing 2 weeks long party and everyone loved it.
Beijing on the other hand was the converse - everyone was expecting it and looking forward to it and then it came and the city went in to virtual lockdown.
You never know which way it's going to go.
http://maritime-connector.com/worlds-largest-ships/
How do you think this compares with a typical land-based Olympic venue? What other challenges make this idea absurd and ridiculous?
Fun story: I was talking to some Shell people a few years back, about the potential troubles with LNG sloshing in process equipment due to waves. I asked them, why not just make the ship big enough that waves don't affect it as much? They looked at me very strangely for a few seconds before explaining just how big it already is.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10...
They already hosted sports events (see the "sport" section of that wikipedia page).
The United States has hosted eight olympics and there are about that many countries that never have. London has hosted it three times, Madrid ever has. And so on. The current method is already distinctly unfair. So I don't see how centralizing it into its own nation, like it once was, makes it worse than now.
Probably because there were three other games--Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian--that were held at other sites around the Hellenic world? And the "world" was small enough that the sites of each didn't feel inaccessible to (much of) the citizenry of the competing states?
(I find the Olympics generally disappointing and I have no love for them as an event, but a partial view of history doesn't really help anyone.)
Many countries and cities who have actually asked their people whether they want an Olympics in the last few years have voted no, for example Oslo in Norway and Stockholm in Sweden.
If the IOC runs out of countries willing to host it, then perhaps the host cities will be able to temper how much they want to spend on it. The Olympics don't have to be so elaborate.
Not for one moment do I think the Russian people freely chose to host the recent winter Olympics at a summer beach resort, where metric tons of ice and snow were trucked in, creating the Olympics equivalent of Kleenex in the most obvious one time use venue in recent memory. And the IOC went in on this total scam artistry too instead of having a WTF moment, so they are not just implicated, they're the ones who facilitate this nonsense. I refuse to believe Russians are proud of the abject stupidity that was the Sochi Olympics, even setting aside the rampant bribery and cheating.
I'm not particularly a fan of the Olympics, but I can see why cities bid against each other to host it.
The only way the host country makes money from the Olympics is if tourists spend enough money on lodging, food, etc. That pipe dream hasn't worked out well for several countries who've recently hosted the games. The deal is so bad for the winter games that few countries are bidding it anymore.
It's only recently that more people are realizing that the numbers don't usually add up. Even then, lots of people are so passionate about sports that they simply don't care about how much public money is poured into a black hole to host these events (or build stadiums). And that's not even getting into the corruption.
Building a gigantic temporary stadium does not.
Surely you aren't serious in suggesting that no economic activity of note occurs there and that these 12 states need the Olympics as a quadrennial boost to business?
I disagree. Most of the stadiums built for olympics are bringing kids to sports and introducing them to sport activities that nobody even heard before. And every national championship is held at those venues for many years after olympics.