More on the Urban Olympics…

I was thinking more on my last post – about the modified Olympics, which I’ve decided to call The Urban Olympics – and realized that I was still a bit in the old-boy mentality. The world has changed a lot since the Olympics started (even the 2nd incarnation) and in many ways it is much small and more inter-mixed. With this in mind, the thought emerges: Why does there have to be ONE host country?

As it stands now, the Olympics are won by a single host country who then develop several sites around their country for the various venues, each hosting one or more events. However, as the Urban Olympics is more about games and the average person and global community, and not so much about big money, corporate sponsorship, national pride, etc. Why do the venues have to be in a single country?

So my idea is to have the Urban Olympics coordinated by internet. A web site is established to give information on the events, venues, competitions and results. If popular enough, the event could even take place each year, however, initially, getting people involved may require the event to occur every 2-4 years. Alternatively, the games could occur over a period of 2-4 years with different events scheduled at different times throughout the “game period”. After all, we’re being non-conformist about location and events, why not about time also?

So, administratively, the games would require interested people in many cities around the world. Keeping some sense of internationality would require: judges of at least three nationalities and, ideally, competitors from at least 5-10 nationalities. Nationalities, in these cases, would be judged by the passport you hold.

However, why be conformist (*again*). After all, the world is a global village, we should be promoting harmony not alienating competition between nations. Therefore, another possibility would be to randomly distribute “game-passports” and have people compete under those nationalities. Or competitors could swap nationalities for the games, or one could compete under your “ethnic passport” (these would prevent the problem of too few competitors for too many countries).

In the beginning, the games would be located, most likely, in highly multicultural, multiethnic cities, simply to get enough interested parties. Good candidates would probably be European capitols or large North American cities and the larger Chinese and Japanese cities, although any city that could get enough interest would obviously not be excluded and I’m sure any high-tech city likely has a significant multiethnic component (Soeul, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv...and many more). Later on I could even foresee interested parties going on vacation to a country and participating in the games while there. However, the idea is not to have dedicated, career athletes who travel from site to site just for competing.

The major focus initially would be to get enough interest and to have fun, interesting games.
So what do you think? Any takers? Watch for further developments...

Void Surfer