This month, the Summer Olympics are taking place. The Olympics as a whole are the largest sporting event in the world. Almost the entire world competes in them and watches them at home. Some are lucky enough to sit in the titanic stadiums where the greatest of great athletes compete for Olympic medals.
Originally, the Olympic Games took place in Ancient Greece, where the wrestling portion of the Games were between naked men who fought to the death in front of spectators, in an effort to please their gods, for which the Games are named. Mount Olympus was the mountain where the Greek gods were said to live, and the games took place at its piedmont.
The modern Olympics were first held in 1896 in Athens. Since then, every fourth year has been a year of the Summer Games, except for during World War I and II.
This year's games are being held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the second-largest city in Brazil. It is known by most people that Brazil has a history of corrupt politics and violent crime, as well as an enormous wage gap between the wealthy elite and the dirt-poor rest of the country. In 2014, almost 60,000 people were murdered in Brazil, making it the deadliest place on Earth outside of the war zones of Syria. Just last week, some human body parts including a severed foot washed up on the beach where the Beach Volleyball games are going to be played. The water pollution is so bad that athletes who will be swimming in the heavily polluted water have been advised to keep their head above the surface to avoid being poisoned by accidentally swallowing the disgusting slime.
Protests against the corrupt government have been going on for a while now, and just last weekend, there were at least 10,000 protestors marching in the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil is not economically fit to host the Games, either. The Rio Olympics will cost the government of Brazil 20 billion dollars, and will only return about four billion. The outskirts of Rio de Janeiro are home to large shantytowns called favelas. Crime in these favelas is so extreme that paramilitary police forces are sent in with full military gear and weapons to arrest criminals. Many people are killed in these raids, mostly criminals and anyone who really gets in the way. These kinds of events are not uncommon in South America, where plenty of paramilitary groups and armed political or criminal factions exist from the jungles to the bustling city streets.
Remember that while the world watches the most prestigious sporting events in the world, those very games are being held on the backs of some of the poorest people in the western hemisphere. A country that is plagued with corruption, murder and drug trafficking due to the vast majority of the population fighting over the scraps from the wealthy elite is not a fair representation of what the world should look like. The Olympics should take place only in countries that can afford it.
The same goes for the FIFA World Cup after next, which will be held in Qatar. In the process of building stadiums to hold the games, migrant workers have been practically enslaved. Amnesty International estimates that 90% of the workforce on the stadium construction are migrant workers. Qatar is not a country that should be holding these games, but FIFA rakes in the dough off the backs of these World Cup slaves. FIFA and the Olympic Games have a lot in common in this respect.
