Pick one site for the Olympics

By Arthur L. Caplan

and Lee H. Igel

As the 22d Winter Olympic Games begin in Sochi, Russia, it is reasonable to ask: What are they doing there? What has been happening in Sochi makes the best possible case for putting both the Winter and Summer Games each in a secure, Olympics-ready location forever.

The Sochi Games are likely to retire the prize for most corrupt sports event ever organized. The graft involved in turning this seaside resort town into an Olympic venue has contributed to cost overruns so large that Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken to both ripping and defending the final bill of about $51 billion. By some estimates, $18 billion of that sum has been embezzled, kicked back, and dealt under the table by officials and business people - many of them cronies of Putin. This despite the fact that four years ago, Putin's predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, ordered an investigation into allegations that bribes were being accepted by officials in the Kremlin.

Not only is Sochi the all-time graft champion, it has already proven competitive for securing a prize in the "most obnoxious attitude toward human rights" category, with Putin's obsessive hatred of homosexuality making it hard to see how any athletes can compete there.

To its credit, the United States Olympic Committee has asked its athletes to take a vow that they will not engage in discrimination based on sexual orientation during the Games. But Russia has a new law prohibiting the advocacy of nontraditional sexual relationships - read "homosexuality" - among minors. As the Games grew closer, hardly a day went by without Putin or other Russian leaders uncorking another calumny against homosexuals.

Mitt Romney, the former presidential candidate who led the turnaround of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, has said that Russia's behavior serves to "undercut" the spirit of the Games in some of the same ways that the Nazis did at the 1936 Games in Berlin. Is a nation whose leaders are making homophobia a point of national pride really the place to hold an Olympics?

And then, to top it all off, comes the issue of security.

Some of the fiercest fighting of the Second World War broke out when German soldiers invaded the Soviet city of Stalingrad in the summer of 1942. About six months later, more than two million soldiers and civilians were dead and what was left of the city was a pile if rubble. Today, that city is called Volgograd. In the past few weeks, it has been the site of two suicide bombings. The attacks there, which are thought to be the work of Islamist extremists from the North Caucasus region, aren't a first for the city. It has become a "soft target" for terrorist attacks because of its public transportation network of buses, trains, trolleys, trams, and taxis.

The Games are not that far from Volgograd, and the city will be a key transit point for many people traveling to Sochi. But that dimension is not the end of the security worries.

Days ago, seven people - three security personnel and four gunmen - died in a shootout during a pre-Olympics sweep for militants in southern Russia. Tens of thousands of government security personnel are operating in a 1,500-mile security overlay around Sochi. Now, affiliates of the extremists who hit Volgograd are peddling a video that threatens a "surprise package" they promise will result in a "martyrdom" at or around the Games.

Sadly, many nations face security problems. Terrorists, however, are attracted to the publicity that major sports events bring, as was made clear at the Boston Marathon last year, the Atlanta Games in 1996, and the Munich Games in 1972.

This all brings us to the question of whether it's time for the International Olympic Committee to hold the Winter and Summer Games at generally neutral, apolitical, readied sites. Doing so would limit the particular type of nationalism that emboldens a certain brand of terrorism. It would make it easier to "harden" each site against terrorist attack. It would also diminish the prospect of having to consider boycotts whenever a local government decided to take an anti-human rights stance as part of the events. And it would help get a handle on the enormous - and growing - costs, legitimate and illegitimate, associated with the Olympics.

Where might such locations be found? Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden suggest themselves for the Winter Games; Norway, Vietnam, Australia, and perhaps even Athens for the Summer Games. Rich nations could always help the poor if that is a challenge for selecting the right host city.

Whatever the agreed-upon locations, they need to be secure, accessible, and reliable. What Sochi makes all too clear is that the Olympics - and what the Games stand for - would be better served by settling into fixed locations, and bringing a halt to the waste of money and goodwill involved with a traveling exhibition that leaves too many broke, humiliated, or at risk.