Former doping commissioner Jan Hnizdil has criticized Prague’s bid for the Summer Olympic Games in the daily Lidove noviny.
Prague Mayor Pavel Bem announced March 13 that the city was ready to conclude its three-and-a-half years of planning to host the Olympic s by bidding for them in 2016, 2020 or 2024. Prague City Council is scheduled to vote on a preliminary bid by March 22, and then submit an official bid to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
But according to the Prague Daily Monitor, Hnizdil says Prague has enough foreign visitors and does not need the Olympic Games to “raise its publicity”.
He writes that councillors say the Olympics would help build new stadiums, boost Czech sport, raise the publicity of Prague and the whole of the Czech Republic, secure revenues and upgrade local infrastructure, but says that all of these arguments can easily be challenged.
Hnizdil, a doctor, adds that the Olympics have no longer anything to do with sport as an activity benefiting people’s health, and says they definitely would not encourage people to active physical training as most people would end up as viewers at sport stadiums or in front of TV screens.
Hnizdil also says a three-week Olympic event would leave a “heap of waste behind in Prague, along with sport premises that would be of no use to the locals”.
He said several previous Olympic Games have incurred “huge losses and debts”, and the possibility of spending 510 million crowns of taxpayers’ money on Games preparations and another 135 billion crowns on the Games would be “an inexcusable gamble”.
