On September 19th, the Rio Olympics and Paralympics were completed. However, Brazil was embroiled in a dispute. Before the Olympics started, it had a public safety problem because there were 700 slums called ‘favela’. Furthermore, one of the citizens interrupted the sacred-torch relay. He tried to take the sacred-torch from the torchbearer. Moreover, there was an outbreak of a virus, which is called ‘Zika’. Therefore, some athletes refused to participate in the Olympics. However, these were not the  problems of only Brazil; there have been many problems in every Olympics.
  First of all, there were judgment problems. In the 2004 Athens Olympics, the gymnast, Yang Tae-yeong, performed his routine flawlessly but lost to Paul Ham, who had lots of mistakes during his performance. The International Federation of Gymnastics acknowledged that it was a biased judgment, so it gave severe penalties to 3 referees of that event. In the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, a short track athlete, Kim Dong-seong, finished first, but he couldn’t take a gold medal because a U.S. athlete, Anton Ohno, acted like Kim Dong-seong pushed him.
  Sometimes, copyrights can be problems. The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics has been embroiled in a plagiarism controversy because of the design of its logo. It is really similar with the logo of ‘The liege theater ’, which was designed by the architect Oli Devi. In the 2012 London Olympics, the Korean national anthem couldn’t be played because of a copyright problem, so it was changed to a song which was shorter and faster.
  Furthermore, there have also been environmental problems and financial problems. In the 2018 Pyeong-chang Olympics, according to Jeong Gyu-seok, the Policy Team Leader of Green Korea United, 60,000 trees in Mt. Gariwang have been logged to build stadiums for the downhill ski run since 2014. He argued, “They should repair and use downhill ski run stadiums in the Muju resort, which had been built by destroying a national park, Mt. Duk-yu, instead of building new facilities by logging trees on Mt. Gariwang.”
  Like those problems above, there are a lot of problems when hosting the Olympics. However, there were some Olympics which overcame those problems.
  The 2002 Sydney Olympics overcame environmental problems  and is operating good post-management of the facilities. People have called it ‘the environmental Olympics’ because it built temporary buildings for the shooting and archery competitions. In addition, they implemented natural gas buses and city subways for the Olympics stadiums, and they are still operating now. Plus, the 2012 London Olympics chose to use existing facilities instead of building new facilities to save money, so they also reduced its cost on post-management of facilities.
  Nowadays, the Korean government is preparing for the Pyeong-chang Olympics. Jeong Gyu-seok, the Policy Team Leader of Green Korea United, said, “If the Pyeong-chang Olympics are held in many cities and use the existing facilities, it will overcome financial and environmental problems.”

By Eo Joon-seok
js37@cbnu.ac.kr