There’s the yellow water. And then there’s the wider environmental damage:
In the rush to complete what ended up being $51 billion in construction in just five years, Russian’s Olympic Committee has played fast and loose with the environmental standards it once promised to uphold. To take just one example of many, Olympic organizers make much of the fact that Russia’s first green construction standards were implemented for the Games. But at the same time, authorities have also reversed legislation protecting national parks in order to allow for those green buildings to go up. As a result, construction of the Olympic village ended up affecting over 8,000 acres of Sochi National Park, a strictly protected UNESCO World Heritage Site.
As the global news agency AFP recently reported, the area’s sensitive wetlands, home to 65 species of birds, were buried under six and a half feet of crushed rock, while reptiles and brown bears have reportedly gone missing from surrounding mountain areas. Water pollution in the Mzymta River, once a major spawning site, threatens a fifth of Russia’s Black Sea salmon. And while Olympic organizers boast that they’ve planted 1.5 million new trees — three for every one that was cut down — Suren Gazaryan, a zoologist and environmental activist who was forced to flee the country, said that the scattered planting can in no way make up for what was lost.
It goes on. As one sustainability consultant has said: “Sochi should never have happened in that location.”
Why did they need to build a new town for the olympics? No other mountain towns were suitable?
Fuck the Olympics. It’s a stupid orgy of corruption and megalomaniacal fascist nationalism designed to spotlight the global pecking order. Every country it goes to blows a giant wad of citizen tax dollars funding a bunch of useless infrastructure that is never used again while they carefully craft a movie set facade to project an image of idyllic life in their faux countryside. All of their existing problems get swept under the rug for a few weeks, a bunch of plutocrats and hucksters pocket massive amounts of cash, and somebody sets a new record on a ski jump or a pole vault. Sporting endeavors and the amount of importance society lavishes upon them are already silly enough without the narcissistic pageantry of an event where everybody tries to show off for the whole world. It’s such a waste of resources and energy it makes you wonder what would happen if the world ever came together like that to attempt to do something productive.