Working in Montréal today --Olympic blues

Good morning folks and folkettes,

I will be working in Montréal today.  See some of you there, others.. not so much.

I read today buried in a back page that the Olympics venues constructed for the Beijing hosted games today sit empty and losing money.

I thought, "how can that be?" .. "why, after all an Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby!".  Oh wait.. that wasn't me, that was Montréal's Jean Drapeau mayor of the fine city from '54 through '86 with a break of a few years in there somewhere.

Now Drapeau was a great mayor, built the Metro, brought baseball to the city, but the '76 Olympics.. niet!  After the revealing of the colossal loss in the budget newspapers ran a Mosher cartoon of a pregnant Drapeau on the phone, "ello, Morgentaler?"

So back to Beijing, like Athens, Montréal, Sydney, what of London?  Will the London Olympics lose money?  OF COURSE IT WILL.

What I can't figure out is why the lie of profits to be made and why do people believe it?

Hell, Vancouver even explored new ways of losing money, does any one remember the Olympic RV Trailer Park? Yeah, it lost $70,000 too.

Try this on for size, the London Olympics is counting on 1 in every 10 Americans to visit the London this year.  huh?  The prediction is only 12 million tourists during the Olympics, mostly from Europe, so when are these 30,000,000 visitors from the U.S. going to show up?

Are they expecting 3,000,000 Canadians?  I actually don't know anyone that has mentioned that they play on heading across the pond, so where does this fantasyland number come from and why do the Brits believe it?

Have a good day.