I suppose I am going to sort-of go against my stated opinion of funding for professional vs. amateur sport here, since I am going to claim that the Olympics aren't entirely bad. At least the lower profile winter games aren't entirely bad. (Yes, I classify the Olympics as professional sport. Even when professional athletes were denied, it it hard to deny that the training many countries offered to their athletes would qualify as professional.)
I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did.
But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up.
As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.)
Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.
> I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.
The recent Winter Olympics in Beijing used the swimming stadium from the 2012 Summer Games for curling. I assume they just put a floor over the pool(s?) with cooling loops in it, and possibly some of the machinery in the emptied pool itself. Maybe they did it the same way in Vancouver?
I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did.
But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up.
As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.)
Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.