Gold, silver and brazen

And you thought that the award of the Olympic Games to a city was purely based on the merits of the particular contender!

FP Foreign Policy in a piece "Gold, silver and brazen" explains the real underlying reasons for a winner to hold the Olympics:

"The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the 115-member body responsible for choosing the host city for the Olympic Games, fancies that it can separate sports from politics in its selection process. The choice of repressive China as host of the 2008 Summer Games seemed to demonstrate the flaw in that logic. And in July, when the IOC awarded the Russian resort town of Sochi the honor of hosting the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, the committee proved once again that logic is not its strong suit.

The IOC’s insistence on overlooking a country’s political environment is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. No matter how much IOC members delude themselves, national leaders are bound to use the Olympics for political ends. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Nazis used the Games to trump up German nationalism during a time of pervasive depression. Although Sochi 2014 is a far cry from Berlin 1936, one basic comparison holds: In each case, an illiberal government with something to prove managed to co-opt the Olympics in order to reclaim a severely damaged “national identity.” And it did so with the help of the IOC.

Already, millions of Russians have interpreted the committee’s decision as a stamp of approval from the international community. “Sochi’s winning bid for the 2014 Olympics is yet another vivid confirmation of the authority of our country in the world arena,” crowed Mikhail Kamynin, spokesman for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shortly after the IOC announced the winner."

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