Rio's & US Taxpayers' Gain: The 2016 Olympics

It looks like Wonderboy confidant and aide Valerie Jarrett will have to find a new source of retirement income.

With the IOC's recent choice of Rio de Janiero for the 2016 Summer Olympics, Chicago's bid for the firehose of cash with which to pay off all and sundry connected to Dick Daley's machine ran out of gas. Thus, slumlord Jarrett, and her friends, won't be able to skim large amounts of that Olympic financial stream for themselves and their friends in government, labor and who knows elsewhere.

The manner in which Chicago lost its bid was also extremely humiliating. The US city was the first one dropped, getting only 18 votes out of 95 or so in the first round.

So much for Wonderboy personally travelling the globe to repudiate his predecessor's world view and apologize for so many great American accomplishments.

What the First Rookie got from the peanut gallery in Copenhagen was a swift, hard kick in the teeth. And you paid for it- the two jets, Michelle and her makeup artists, etc.

In all honesty, if Olympic games are to continue to be held around the world, then it was way past time to hold a game on the South American continent.

On the other hand, Rio has its hands full now. I was cycling with an Argentinian-born friend yesterday who spent considerable time in Rio while earning her PhD in bio-chemistry. She remarked that Rio has "a lot of cleaning up to do" if they are ever to get the city presentable for the world stage that is the Olympics.

Somehow, too, I suspect that graft and corruption in Rio will certainly rival that of Chicago. God knows how much they will skim off of the notional spending for the Games. But at least that's not the US taxpayers' concern, anymore. We dodged that bullet when Chicago was dissed in the first round vote.

There is, however, at least for me, a surreal quality to the age-old idea of a new venue for the Games every two years.

In a week when Indonesia and Samoa were devastated by an earthquake, killing thousands and causing billions of dollars of damage, it seems extravagant and decadent for the IOC to be designating some city to incur debt of additional billions to throw an athletic-centric party for two weeks nearly a decade from now.

For some years, I've had the following notion. Why not establish two permanent sites, one each for Winter and Summer Olympic Games, in two relatively calm, smaller countries? The IOC could issue bonds to fund the capital costs, in conjunction with the host countries, using expected revenues over the coming decades to pay the indebtedness.

Meanwhile, the host countries would be responsible for performing the maintenance on the facilities, and supply the quadrennial labor pool to operate the Games.

Athletic records would be more comparable, since they would be set in the same venue. Recurring logistical headaches, such as housing, security and transportation would have fixed solutions, improvements to which would continue to bring benefits to each subsequent Olympics. We could also expect a sort of learning curve effect on the relative efficiency and costs of operating the Games each time, since so much about them would remain the same.

Individual cities across the world could still bid to host each year's Games, in effect becoming the manager for that event, undertaking to choose the variable athletic events, arrange media coverage, and various other ceremonial events.

Gate and media receipts would be shared between the facilities/country, IOC and hosting city according to a fixed formula, assuring funding to maintain and improve the facilities and service the debt.

How many billions would be saved by this arrangement? Money that certainly could be better-used for so many causes that tug at the heartstrings of viewers of natural disasters like last week's quake.

It simply seems silly and wasteful to me to continue to see billions wasted every two years on Olympic Games, when it would be so much easier to just establish two permanent venues.