Sorry if you're getting sick of this theme, but there
is just so much good stuff on it.

SH


Olympic Trivia

1. The German Nazis invented the Olympic torch relay,
for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

2. IOC president Samaranch is a fascist. He wore the
blackshirt of the fascist Spanish Falange as recently
as
the 1970s. [He was also a minister in Franco's govt, a
fact he has publically stated he  does not regret -
Scott] Olympic Officialdom has a long tradition of
fascists in its leadership. Avery Brundage (IOC
president 1952-1972) told a USA audience in the 1930s
that they could learn much from what Hitler was
doing. Samaranch was at this time a supporter of
Spanish dictator Franco. The IOC spent US$1.75m in
1999
on public relations to polish up Samarach's image.

3. Every gold medal "for Australia" costs $30m of
public money

4. The IOC gave the Olympic Order to dictators Eric
Hoenecker and Nicolai Caucescu.

5. SOCOG has signed up 40,000 volunteers to work at
Homebush during the Games. These saps will work
their butts off for nix, while SOCOG CEO Sandy
Holloway draws over $400,000/year in salary, or around
$18,000 for the 16 days of the Games. The four highest
paid executives of SOCOG receive over $300,000 per
year. SOCOG's total executive salary bill is over
$5,000,000 per year, all of it paid out of NSW
consolidated
revenue. (No wonder the NSW government claims it can't
afford to pay the teachers.)

6. SOCOG is promoting the sale of Olympic Barbie Dolls
in its official newsletter: "BARBIE DOLLS GET
INTO THE SWIM. Barbie has been making a splash in
toyshops worldwide with the release of Swimming
Champion Barbie (rrp $44-95). Dressed in a Sydney 2000
swimsuit, Swimming Champion Barbie can actually
swim and comes with her own gold medal. There are also
Olympic Fan Barbies (rrp $29-95) representing 11
different countries. Why not collect them all?
Purchase the dolls from Olympic Stores, K-Mart, DJ,
and
selected toy retailers."

7. The I.O.C. itself estimates that the Salt Lake City
bidders spent $800,000 on bribing fourteen I.O.C.
members. Australian IOC delegate Phil Coles was
suspended for accepting $65,000 in Bribes from Salt
Lake
City. The Salt Lake City Organising Committee
officially budgeted US$500,000 to bribe IOC delegates
for
votes, but seems to have gone significantly over
budget.

8. In 1987 the Australian Federal Government passed
the Olympic Insignia Protection Act, to give the
Australian Olympic Committee exclusive rights to
display the rings and the torch in Australia. In 1998
the
NSW State Government bought this right back from the
AOC for $100,000,000.

9. Shortly before the 1968 Olympics, US Vice President
Humphreys lectured US athletes that they had to
win more gold medals than the Russians. The US was at
that time bombing the living daylights out of
Vietnam, to prove that it ruled the world militarily
and economically. To the US establishment, the Olympic
games were merely a propaganda episode to this war.

10. Shortly before the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games,
demonstrators outside the stadium protested at the
money that was being wasted on the event. Mexican
police machine-gunned the demonstrators, killing 250.
IOC chief Brundage declared "the Games will take place
even if I have to be there alone with five south
Africans".

11. In 1972 US runner Greg Hunter was asked what
winning an Olympic medal meant to him. He replied
"Millions... just millions".

12. Although Germany was excluded from the 1920 and
1924 Games, by the 1930s the IOC leadership had
decided Germans weren't too bad providing they were
Nazis. They awarded the 1936 Olympics to Berlin.
They defended Nazism against a boycott movement that
said the Games should not be held in country with
openly racist laws. The IOC also expelled a USA
delegate who dared to suggest that the Games should
not
be held in Berlin, because of its racist policies. His
crime, said the IOC, was to "bring politics into
sport".

13. In 1980 Malcolm Fraser was putting the weights on
the Australian Olympic Committee to boycott the
Moscow Games. The Sydney Morning Herald supported him
with an editorial saying "The persistence of the
notion that sport is above, or can be separated from,
politics is remarkable. Those who adhere to it are ...
living in a dream world".

Produced by the Anti-Olympic Alliance
www.cat.org.au/aoa/
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"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon?  And how
could I try to doubt it?  First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle.  Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it.  It would not tie in with anything in my life...  Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday.  We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games"      - Ludwig Wittgenstein

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