‘Worst Games Ever’? A Lack Of Historical Perspective Strikes Again

Monday, Lawrence Donegan, a golf reporter assigned to cover the Winter Olympics for Britain’s The Guardian wrote a column stating that the Vancouver Games were on pace to be historically bad.

↵↵It is hard to believe anything will surpass the organisational chaos and naked commercial greed of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta or the financial disaster of the 1976 Games, which bankrupted Montreal, yet with every passing day the sense of drift and nervousness about the Vancouver Games grows ever more noticeable.

↵↵While Canada and the United Kingdom (or Great Britain, as they’re called at the Olympics) may share a Queen, they naturally don’t share the same view on this topic.

↵Bruce Arthur of the National Post writes that even though things haven’t run smoothly in Vancouver and there have been some inconveniences, bad weather, and yes, the death of a competitor, some historical perspective is required.

↵↵But if you’re scoring the rest, you want to judge these Games as worse than Munich, where athletes were taken hostage and killed? Worse than Atlanta, where in addition to logistical nightmares -- and the fact that they gave homeless people one-way bus tickets -- a bomb actually went off?

↵↵An editorial in The Globe And Mail went a step further, reminding readers of the many issues the host city for the 2012 Summer Games will have to contend with.

↵↵It is somewhat revealing that The Times of London asserted in a headline this week that “London 2012 can’t be worse than the Vancouver Games this winter.” By Mr. Donegan’s standards, an Olympic Games in a city characterized on a good day by wretched traffic congestion, debilitating security issues and inclement weather could very easily be much, much worse.

↵But we shall wait to pass judgment.

↵↵You may want to file and save that paragraph for easy access two and a half years from now.