I don't usually get excited by the Winter Olympics . Most of the sports look like fun to participate in but not that entertaining for spectators, New Zealand never does very well, and the grapes are probably sour. But the Sochi Olympics are shaping up to be a particularly dire event.
It is traditional for the run up to the olympics to be filled with hand wringing press bemoaning the lack of preparation and political maneuvering of the host country, but Russia's effort seems unusually corrupt even by olympic standards. Not to mention the weird anti-gay issue. If you didn't want a bunch of homosexuals visiting your city, you picked the wrong event to host.
I don't usually quote other blogs here, but this post by John Scalzi sums up my feelings:
The Olympic Games are what they are: a floating, rotating boondoggle-shaped shitcake of graft, venality and cronyism, with a spotty icing of athleticism spread thinly on the top to mask the taste of the shit as it goes down the gullet. Barring some sort of active revolution, that's not going to change. Sochi's problem is that this time, they heaped extra shit into the cake and skimped on the icing, and what icing it has is also made of shit.