French police raid Paris 2024 organizing committee office, spokesman says | CNN

Not really all that surprised.

Caveat up front, I know very little about the following opinion. I have studied it in no appreciable depth. I have seen a few news reports and read a few others over the last 20 years or so.

Caveat out of the way, everything I have seen or heard about the location awarding process for the Olympics says that the process itself is rife with corruption and bribery. If we REQUIRE our national Olympic organizing committees to be corrupt in order to be AWARDED the games, why should we expect them to go straight once they "bring them home?"

And from what I have seen, they have historically NOT been. The process of preparing for the games, including the massive influx of money for building structures, improving infrastructure, and even security, is all subject to rampant corruption. In pretty much every place the games have gone in the last 30 or so years.

Did anyone really expect Paris to be different? That is not a knock on the French. That is just looking at history for the recent Games. I do not expect it would have been any different in the US. After all, we had our own scandal involving the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002.


I still believe that the Games themselves are a pure and noble pursuit of competition and unity. But everything behind the scenes that goes into putting the Olympic Games on is ripe for corruption, graft, bribery, and sometimes worse.