the olympics are a huge international cultural event, one in which local concerns and needs are completely subsumed. so all the ills of spectacle (people acting like they're living, rather than actually living), of consumerism, of mass marketing, of tourism, of environmental degradation, of centralized decision making by bodies that are outside of local influence... come to a head around the olympics.
like elections, the olympics are iconic of chronic, usually less-visible problems, and seem like good times to remind people how badly things are actually going.
