This is essentially what killed the bid here in Norway, those outrageous demands.
The interesting thing is that these were the IOC's demands before negotiations. So they obviously didn't expect all of this to actually happen, and perhaps even many of them to be dropped. But instead, what happened was that they fucked themselves over (the Oslo bid was supposedly the preferred one) by driving such a hard initial bargain that their negotiation partner just went "Nope, nope, nope".
Yeah, cities bidding is like investors bidding. They're looking at ROI's in more than just the monetary terms. However, if you walk into a board room and ask for a billion dollars they're going to tell you yo get out.
I think they are being tarred with the same brush as FIFA, or caught up in the — perhaps anachronistic — view of Switzerland as a haven for tax evaders.
What's anachronistic about it ? it's STILL a haven for tax evaders.
What's changing these days is rich people are renouncing en masse their US citizenship to escape the long arm of the IRS. I find it disgraceful & immoral that people elect to abandon their responsibilities as citzien to save a few pennies.
Switzerland buckled under US pressure, but what applies to the US doesn't apply to other -smaller- countries around the world , where funds of dubious origins continue to originate from & the money-laundering , let's call it what is is, business keeps on trucking as usual.
I find it disgraceful & immoral that IRS still wants you to pay income tax on your income abroad, even if your only tie with the motherland is "America" on the passport.
This one particularly stuck out "Traffic rules and traffic lights must be adjusted so that the Olympic traffic is prioritised. Meanwhile other traffic should be limited; IOC proposes closing schools and encouraging the local people to take holidays."
who do they think they are? the pope? Obama doesn't get schools closed for him. Does Putin?
Most ridiculous Putin's requirement is to weld all manhole covers.
In 2013 Putin decided that he dislikes drivers' booing and started to fly to Kremlin by helicopter. To build new landing site he removed huge part of Taynitsky Garden.
Interesting. For traffic/congestion reasons, Manila, Philippines had (has?) this on a permanent basis, not just for a special event. Your license was coded so that police could easily see if you were allowed to be on the roads that day (otherwise, it was public transit for you).
According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract. Either way it seems that he was a bastion of reason and moderation compared to these IOC goons.
> According to David Lee Roth he just put that in so he could see if the venue actually read the contract.
And he provided the reasoning for that in his bio:
> Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.
> The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."
> So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
I thought this just descriptive, but (allowing for translation) it's the IOC's own words:
http://whitelines.com/news/norway-withdraws-bid-2022-winter-...