Quote Originally Posted by cottmann
All Olympics have some element of fakery about them, e.g., if you look at the video of the opening of the Barcelone Olympics, you can see where the arrow shot by one of Spain's most famous archers missed the bowl containing the Olympic flame, which lit anyway. At the Turin Winter Olympics, Luciano Pavarotti lip-synched too.
For someone who's usually so intelligent, it's sad to see you lapsing into the "exception that proves the rule" mode. Of course there are isolated instances everywhere; fakery is however systemic at the Beijing Olympics. It's rather like those apologists for Thailand who dismiss the rampant police corruption as "police are corrupt everywhere" without acknowledging that in the many places they cite as examples there are institutions in place to track down and prosecute corrupt officials, including the police, but generally that doesn't happen in Thailand. The cases against the Shinawatras this year are a very small step in the right direction