(Image source: www.GatewaySucks.org)
Do the winter games seem a little indulgent in light of the devastation, poverty and desperation in Haiti, for instance?
Does it strike you as a tad insane that, only a few hours before the opening ceremonies, an athlete DIED — Propelled from his sled at 144 km/h into a series of steel beams while training on the fastest luge track in the world?
The organizers had the nerve to suggest that the luger was to blame and the corporate machine rolled right on after the shortest safety ‘investigation’ in history made way for the races to proceed the very next day.
The Olympics are a pinnacle of rich-nation excess. But beyond the billions of expense; the mega-carbon corporate sponsors and greenwash; the nationalistic mindset they feed; and the local social inequity/environmental destruction they cause…
They are among the grandest manifestations of our collective denial despite the clear, present, accelerating global threat of the climate crisis.
Before the 2008 Beijing games, China engaged in cloud-seeding(!), among other things, to try to minimize their extreme, coal-induced smog.
After the warmest January in Vancouver on record, 2010 organizers have had to spread straw bales to build up the courses, truck and helicopter snow in from another mountain 257 km’s away, and refund tens of thousands of tickets because of bad weather, lack of snow and spectator safety concerns.
With billions of people in emergency need around the world, not only have the social/ environmental costs of gratuitous spectacles like the Olympics become far too high, but the moral negligence behind what they claim to represent has become far too deadly.
MORE
- Video — Anti-Olympic Convergence, Day 1
- Video — Democracy Now: Olympic Resistance
- Video — IEN, CoC, RAN Press Conference: Olympic Greenwash
- Resource — Olympic Resistance Network: Fact Sheets & Flyers
- Resource — Olympic Resistance Network: The Truth About Olympic Sponsors
- Rabble — Collected on Vancouver 2010 Olympics
- The Dominion — Vancouver 2010, a Special Report
- Article — Olympics Can’t Mask Country’s Human Rights Record on Indigenous Peoples
- Article — Critics Slam Dangerous Luge Track
- Article — Protesters Set Up Tent City in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
- Article — First Nations/RAN Protest RBC (Olympics Sponsor/Tar Sands Financier)
- Article — Frontline Voices Confront Olympic Greenwash
- Article — Vancouver’s Olympics Head for Disaster, Douglas Haddow
- Article/Video — Trucks Hauling Extra Snow to Cypress Mountain, CTV
- Article — Climate Change Blamed for Olympic Snow Shortage, CBC
- Website — Olympic Resistance Network
- Website — Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)
- Website — Council of Canadians: 2010 Olympics Compilation
- Website — Rainforest Action Network (RAN)
- Website — www.GatewaySucks.org
- Website — www.2010climatecrime.org
- Website — Vancouver 2010 Olympics, Main
- Wikipedia — 2010 Winter Olympics