How to judge an Olympics.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: EDGE OF SPORTS - Column

How do you judge an Olympic games? It depends on your metric.

If your primary concern is the games themselves coming off without a hitch, then the final assessment of the 2016 summer games in Rio should be largely positive. Somehow, the people of Rio, the Cariocas, pulled it off. Despite the worst economic crisis the country has faced since the Great Depression, they found the funds, the volunteers, and, most importantly, the will to put on a $12 billion show.

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The Olympics above all else is a made-for-television production and, by that metric, Rio delivered. We heard stories that will stand the test of time: sprinter Usain Bolt of Jamaica and American swimmer Michael Phelps built upon their legends, and new names like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Caster Semenya, and Rafaela Silva will last longer than the scandals created by immature drunk swimmers. The stories we were privy to in 2016 would rival any games we have ever seen.

Rio managed to avoid the predicted catastrophes. No stadium came tumbling down. No terror attack. No tear-gassing of Olympic fans. No Zika pandemic.

Many are also praising the Rio Olympics as a success simply relative to some of the cataclysmic tragedies that have dotted Olympic history. That's their metric. These Olympics worked because they did not contain an event like the mass slaughter of pro testers in Mexico City in 1968, or the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, or the bomb that went off in Atlanta in 1996.

As awful as Brazil's new rightwing government under President Michel Temer happens to be, no one will remember these games as comparable to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which buttressed the leadership of Adolph Hitler. Temer, who is wildly unpopular in Brazil, tried to avoid being introduced at the opening ceremony. Sure enough, when he opened the games following the parade of nations, he was booed.

For absence of earth-shaking havoc, yes, the Rio Olympics were a success. But this should not be how we judge the games going forward.

There are more important metrics that speak to whether or not we are going to have an Olympics at all-- whether the International Olympic Committee will find cities in democratic countries to host these mega-events, or whether only brutal autocracies can do the job. We need to look at debt...