Tug of war as an Olympic discipline

Dnevnik newspaper regrets the loss of the true Olympic ideal, complaining that small countries can hardly afford to organise the games nowadays: "At the end of the 19th century when the Olympic Games were reintroduced, no once could have guessed where the Olympic idea would take us. For example tug of war and fire extinguishing were important disciplines back then. ... Today the games have become a global project. ... Huge sums of money are spent in organising them, even though with a budget of 40 billion dollars the Chinese have set an example that will be hard to follow. ... Sport has now been eclipsed by a political, economic and cultural campaign aimed at showing the world how modern and how open to the world China has become. ... No one knows where the upper limit lies, but the fact is that the budgets for organising the Olympic Games will soon be impossible to top. Even now the struggle between the rich countries to stage the games resembles a tug of war."

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