AP Interview: Qatar plans 'normal' World Cup after vaccines.@robharris >> https://t.co/Rja7w8795l
— AP Sports (@AP_Sports) December 6, 2020
CNN has the European qualification draw chart from this afternoon.
Ran across this interview while doing my nightly coronavirus-related news search:
… Early in the pandemic that forced the cancellation of the European Championship and Olympics this year, Qatar was concerned about the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the first World Cup to be staged in the Middle East.
Across the world sports have resumed in front of limited or no crowds, but the vaccines have provided hope that crowds can return in large numbers from next year.
“The introduction of the vaccine and the rollout of the vaccine, it’s definitely good news for everybody,” 2022 World Cup chief executive Nasser Al-Khater said in an interview with the AP. “Everybody’s looking forward to going back to some sort of normalcy in life and especially in sports as well…
European nations on Monday will discover their path to securing one of 13 spots in the tournament when the qualifying draw is staged at FIFA HQ in Zurich. The pandemic has prevented the event being staged in the host nation as would usually happen before a World Cup…
The tournament isn’t just going to a new region, but being played at the end of 2022 rather than the usual June-July slot, due to the fierce summer heat in the Gulf nation.
“When the announcement was made for the World Cup to be played in November and December, obviously at that time there was a lot of feedback about the disruption to the different calendars of the leagues,” Al-Khater said. “One thing we learned from the pandemic is that many leagues were able to adapt.”
And the months without any football during the pandemic will put into a new perspective the necessary break in the European seasons in 2022 to accommodate the World Cup. The later tournament gives more breathing space for qualifying to be completed rather than the tournament starting in about 18 months…
Last week marked 10 years since Qatar won the right to host the World Cup in a contentious FIFA vote that sparked corruption investigations into the entire bidding process. Evidence was not found by FIFA to warrant stripping Qatar of the hosting rights…
After being awarded the World Cup, the need for mass construction projects across Qatar exposed conditions for a migrant workforce that drew condemnation from rights activists and forced the nation to provide better conditions and clamp down on violations.
“The World Cup has definitely been a catalyst to looking out into workers rights and standards,” Al-Khater said. “Not everybody is going to agree with what you say, and not everybody is going to change their point of view.”
I Don’t Want To Tell You This…
rikyrah
????????
Um, no
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I gotta say, 2022 should be absolutely fine, but I’ll believe it only when the bribes, payoffs and associated widespread scandals really get underway.
FIFA has some cherished traditions to uphold – I don’t want to be let down on this.
Yutsano
So they’re going to go ahead with rewarding a corrupt regime in a stadium being made by indentured labour to make a few sheikhs rich. FIFA needs to be ripped apart.
catclub
Since it is claimed to be an open thread:
I think the crash out of England from brexit will be epic fail. It looks like the real deadline is not Dec 31, but about Dec 14th? or so, since you still need a UNANIMOUS yes vote on the terms of the ‘agreement.’
any commenters with more acidic insights? Tony? Range Rover?
Princess
What’s the status of the Tokyo Olympics?
AndoChronic
Sure hope they can pull it off. I was in Doha in 2012 and the infrastructure build for it was staggering even back then. Still bummed I missed Cat Stevens’ show there. I was even in town. His first show in the middle east!
trollhattan
Watched the World Track and Field Championships held in Qatar and the venue was really strange. It was only partially enclosed, with a big roof opening IIRC, and they continuously blew chilled air at ground level from giant ducts ringing the field, to keep temps reasonable. (I don’t remember when they ran the marathon, two in the morning I guess.) So a ringing endorsement of joining the climate fight it was not. Imagining them replicating that stadium a dozen times to accommodate the World Cup is just madness.
Next Women’s World Cup has been awarded to Australia and New Zealand in ’23. Now that will be well worth attending, mates!
Mag
@catclub: It will be an epic fail, but it will make some already rich people that much more wealthy, so win!
Yutsano
@catclub: Tony Jay, Sloane, Robert, LilBrit, and R-Jud are busy trying to not have nightmares over what’s about to happen. I’m much more worried about Britain destroying the Good Friday accords on the way out. Ireland might be about to have a major case of The Troubles again. Or Northern Ireland says fuck this British Empire shit and there is finally unification. Oh and Scottish independence. Shit show is putting it mildly.
Kent
Having worked for two decades of my life in commercial fisheries politics, it comes with some amusement but no surprise to me that fisheries politics is one of the sticking points that threatens to crash out the Brexit deal. There is no tougher political Gordian knot to untangle than fisheries politics. The French want continued access to British waters. The British want no French fishermen, but continued access to Euro markets for their catch, which is their main market, not the UK itself. Good luck untangling that one.
Kent
They are pretending that it will go on as scheduled in late summer 2021. I have my doubts.
Kent
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Fall 2022 will be fine as far as covid goes. But there are plenty of other reasons to argue against holding the World Cup there. Just like there were arguments against holding it in Russia. And, for that matter in Brasil.
sab
@Yutsano: Maybe Northern Ireland and Scotland together? Using the Canadian dollar for currency?
sab
@Kent: Codfish wars on with Iceland again now that UK doesn’t have EU protection.
Uncle Omar
FIFA and the IOC are the only two organizations in the world that are more corrupt than the modern GOP, and not by very damned much. American college sports look pure amateurism based solely on the athletes’ safety, education, and good health by comparison with those three entities. A pox on all their houses. Oh, and fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
catclub
I think the Brits think ‘level playing field’ means the same access to Euro markets they had before. The Euro community thinks it means the same access to the Euro market as any other non-Euro member has.
If it weren’t for the imminent depression it would be funny. hijinks!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@sab:
The Scots can toss all the Windsor shit out of Balmoral and leave it on the road, like you do of any other evicted tenant….
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@sab:
“THIS wasn’t what we meant when we voted to leave. We were just told something about blue passports yadda yadda sovereignty. How were we to know that there’d be negatives?”
louc
Speaking of corrupt actions, DeSantis sent his gestapo in to seize Rebekah Jones‘ computer, phone, etc. They pulled guns on her husband and kids.
Geminid
@catclub: Tony Jay has some good comments in the morning thread.
Leto
@trollhattan: this outdoor a/c system was what they were going to use for the WC matches. It’s insane. My last deployment was to Qatar, back in 2014, and when we rotated out in March the temps were already hitting 100 by 1pm. It doesn’t matter how much a/c you blow out into the open, it’s hotter than anything you can imagine and trying to be outside for a sporting event is beyond dumb.
That’s not even getting into the fucking appalling human rights abuses they inflict upon their labor force. This is an article back from 2013 that has a ton of links detailing out the appalling conditions: https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/9753901/human-rights-concerns-raised-qatar-world-cup
I know that they’ve supposedly corrected some issues, but I trust them about as much as I trust Trumpov around a Diet Coke.
gbbalto
@Yutsano: IIRC, Pelosi and now Biden have told them they won’t get a deal with the US if they abrogate the Good Friday agreement.
sab
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I think they like the Queen. Her mother was a Scot and a wonderful person.
Glidwrith
Shit for brains didn’t bother to buy enough vaccine:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/07/world/covid-19-coronavirus/trump-administration-officials-passed-when-pfizer-offered-in-late-summer-to-sell-the-us-more-vaccine-doses
The initial 100 million doses equals 50 million people. No more Pfizer vaccine until midsummer.
GOD DAMN this fucking asshole.
NotMax
Awful lot of expense for several dozen people kicking a ball around for a few days.
//
Shakti
OT, but I don’t want it getting lost, and I don’t know to embed tweets here. It looks like the police conducted a raid on Rebekah Jones’ house. I don’t know if people follow her FloridaCovidAction.com site.
Original tweets(1st one has video; and I archived them):
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065787900145665
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065789313638400
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336066309482754049
I couldn’t find any news about this. The last news story about Rebekah Jones was this one in which she alleged Leon County is not reporting all the covid-19 cases in its schools.
.
Catherine D.
@Yutsano:
Not as long as Arlene Foster is breathing.
raven
@catclub: They were all over it this morning,
Tony Jay
DECEMBER 7, 2020 AT 7:54 AM
Meanwhile, as the failed-state of Lesser Brexitania continues its well-greased slide down the dissolution poop-chute, ‘our’ Government’s rushed announcement of a Great British Vaccine (conceived, developed, produced and provided, like most other quintessentially ‘British’ staples, by decidedly non-British sources) has been dead-catted off the front pages by the onrushing train that is the imminent Deadline of All Deadlines for the UK to devise, negotiate, and sign a comprehensive post-Brexit trade deal with the European Union. If tick follows tock and nothing very much is agreed (and let’s face it, which trans-national alliance of self-respecting nation states would be stupid enough to trust our reigning menagerie of crab-barrelling slum landlords and xenophobic wallpaste-eaters to stick to any deal for longer than a news cycle?) we will crash out of the world’s largest economic common-market without a single legally binding agreement on anything, with predictable consequences for, well, everything.
But never fear! The BBC informs me that the major sticking point preventing the UK from guaranteeing food, commerce and all the basic rudimentaries of 21st century civilisation past January 1st isn’t the ideologically rigid refusal of its Government to negotiate in good faith with those actual, real-life EU representatives on the other side of the table, as opposed to the entirely fictional weak-willed but despotic foreign mandarins they’re always outmanoeuvring so brilliantly in their beer-fuelled Brextremist daydreams. No, no, and thrice no, that would be far too partisan a line for the yoke-broken State Broadcaster to take. So instead of uncomfortable truths that might draw a raised eyebrow or a backhanded slap from a Very Important Person, we’re being fed the stale old lines that, a) ‘everyone knows’ all international deals are only ever negotiated in a mad hurry at the very stroke of Midnight, so there’s nothing to worry about, and b) the issue is the EU’s failure/refusal to fully understand that the UK has left the EU and is a sovereign independent state……..so by virtue of its sovereign independence should get absolutely everything it wants out of a trade deal with no cheeky backchat from the insufficiently Anglo.
This is what passes for ‘news’ in Tory Britain. This is what the ‘independent’ BBC is telling people. Roll on the Christmas Invasion and this year, maybe The Doctor can do us all a favour by keeping his or her nose out of our sovereign and independent affairs, because so help me FSM I am seriously of the opinion that, while a a kinetic impact with cold, hard reality probably won’t do the country much good, I can’t see how anyone rescuing us from the disaster we’ve sleepwalked into will teach us a damned thing. And of course, by ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people who voted Tory and people who didn’t vote Labour, not me. I’ve tracked down a Lilliputian great-grandmother and I am applying for dual citizenship ASA fucking P. Better to be an inch-tall and in the right than a racist right-winger who’s full of shite (Note to self – As a national motto it’s punchy but needs polish).
Still, on the bright side the Biden Administration looks like it’s eager to get on with the job while the Fluorescent Failure is doing his bit for sanity by encouraging as many Georgian Goppers as he can to spend election day in an ICU so, yeah, that’s a thumbs up from this side of the Atlantic.
artem1s
COVID aside it’s high time the nations that practice gender apartheid should be shunned by the rest of the civilized world. Time to divest completely. I don’t care what progress they have made by sending a handful of women to the Olympics in 2012. It’s not enough.
Leto
@NotMax: it’s one of the reasons the Olympic Committee reformed its rules around site selection. Most of the venues the countries built wound up doing nothing after the Olympics, while costing that country hundred of millions. I know there was one proposal that the games should rotate around a few select permanent countries that have the already existing infrastructure to host the games. But that’s definitely an issue.
Dread
“Some people think slavery is wrong, some people don’t, who can say who’s right? I don’t know… but if enslaving and abusing thousands of foreigners to enrich our country is wrong, I don’t want to be right!”
Representatives from Apple, Nike, and Coke agreed.
germy
Dan B
@louc: DeSantis is pushing his luck. Attacking white women and kids will leave a stain that will be impossible to remove. She’s more than a ‘corrupt evil’ scientist. That and the threats to the Michigan SOS during Christmas are going to come hack to bite the monsters.
The GOP is the party of rage before empathy, dogma over knowledge.
sab
@raven: The British government cannot negotiate in good or bad faith because they don’t actually have many people anymore with the training or experience to negotiate at all on these issues. They joined the EU in the 1970s. Wrapped things up in the early 1990s. Competent negotiators got on with their lives or died of old age.
Kent
Was Jared Kushner involved in this decision?
Shakti
@Dan B:
Per Tallahassee Democrat:
It seems excessive.
raven
@sab: Take it up with Tony Jay, I just reposted it.
sab
@Dan B: Due to well-intended bad choices I actually own a rental property in Wadsworth, Ohio. Been there once. Don’t like it. My husband drove out to see the tenant today and deal with a repair issue. We really like the tenant.
Trump signs everywhere. If we ever need to sell the property we might just torch it and deprive them of tax revenue
Cute town, but still don’t like it. Trumpers everywhere
ETA House is also cute. I would love to move there or pass on to a kid if it wasn’t in Wadsworth.
NotMax
@Kent
“I have a cunning plan. Send in the military to seize the shipments at the border as a ‘national security’ measure and that way we don’t have pay a cent for the goop. Win-win, am I right?”
//
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I expect them to require all athletes and spectators to show proof of vaccination. Combined with generally good public health measures, that should let them carry it out with minimal COVID risk.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: More mob tactics ala PPE, eh?
jonas
Yeah, but remember when Obama said you can keep your doctor? So both sides…
gwangung
@Shakti: I don’t particularly believe their spokemen, either…
SiubhanDuinne
@sab:
Also, Balmoral is privately owned, not Crown property.
Roger Moore
@Leto:
The availability of existing venues was the main reason the 1984 Olympics in LA were the first ones that were actually profitable for the host city, and they were a big selling point for bringing the games back in 2028. I think we need to build a new natatorium, but we have all the other venues ready to go.
Kent
But it also means that every individual country is going to have to ramp up its athletic training programs in early 2021 to have all of its teams ready and qualified. The bigger problem isn’t the 2-week Olympics. It’s all the moths of prep and training and selection process and Olympic trials across the world that lead up to the Olympics.
mrmoshpotato
Time for dancing!
Kent
That will work well since the Pfizer EU vaccine supply is being made in Belgium and Germany with supplies provided from China.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Catherine D.:
That can be remedied by the lads….
NotMax
@Kent
Details, details. Take it up with Jared the sooper jeenyus.
//
debbie
Doesn’t matter what year they do this, it will still be too damn hot.
Dan B
@sab: That’s Wadsworth! Birchers, quiet Klan, Chamber of Commerce GOP, etc. There was one Jewish family who told my parents and no one else that they were Jewish. The town was at least half German American. The Jewish family visited ‘relatives in Akron’ every Saturday (synagogue). There are other buts of dirty laundry like the suspicious men lurking in the city park who were supposedly molesting young boys but were probably after each other for release from the prison of heteronormative jail they’d chosen.
My brother – straight – has been back to show his girlfriend his childhood home. I have zero interest but even less interest in visiting Batesville or Clarksville, Arkansas. They made Wadsworth seem like an enlightened paradise.
BTW The fire department used to burn down houses for “practice”. I thought they were inspired by the match factory.
Martin
@catclub: I thought this captured it quite well.
Leto
@sab: that pretty much describes our former home in Sumter, SC. We also tried to get people to torch it, but we eventually sold it. Albatross, be gone!
Leto
@Roger Moore: I was thinking about LA as I wrote that. I don’t know how many other cities have as many facilities as LA, but I’m glad it’s a positive selling point for us.
raven
@Roger Moore: I had a great time! When the Russians pulled out we got great tickets at the ticket fair at the Forum!
Kent
OMG that is a funny thread.
raven
@Leto: This was Joan Benoit getting the Gold Medal for the Women’s Marathon!
Martin
I wouldn’t jump on the Pfizer news too quickly. If I were in charge of procurement, the Pfizer vaccine is the last one I’d want to buy more of. It’s going to be a fucking nightmare to distribute across much of the country. I’d be trying to buy more of the Moderna one. Equally effective, much easier to administer.
NotMax
@Dan B
“Um, chief? You’ll get a kick out of this. Turns out the practice site address was on East Elm Street.”
:)
Glidwrith
@NotMax:
And promptly spoil the entire shipment since it requires extremely low temperatures to remain potent.
Roger Moore
@Leto:
I wouldn’t be surprised if NYC, Chicago, or the Bay Area could pull off a Summer Olympics without having to build much in the way of new facilities. Honestly, I think the main reason so many cities spend so much is because the Olympics provide an excuse, not because it’s strictly necessary. For example, LA is using the Olympics as an excuse to speed up construction of public transit, which is something we wanted to do anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some federal loans to help out.
Dan B
@Leto: Strangely Seattle has enough Olympic venues. Some would need some updating, probably the stadium at UW. I believe Weyerhaeuser paid for a Natatorium in the 90’s in an Olympic bid. And there are a few dozen billionaires who’d be glad for an ego boost. With three large stadiums, a couple mid sized (7,000), and an Olympic sized natatorium it wouldn’t take much. Plus there are venues in nearby Tacoma.
I’m not in favor in case you wondered.
Leto
@raven: I was 8 but I remember those games. I’m 99% certain my parents still have the McDonalds ‘84 Olympic glass mugs.
Kent
@Roger Moore: Lots of big American cities could pull it off.
Dallas/Fort Worth could do it too. They have: Cowboy Stadium, The Cotton Bowl, TCU Stadium, SMU Stadium, North Texas Stadium in Denton, the FC Dallas stadium in Frisco, and the old and New Texas Ranger’s baseball stadiums in Arlington. Plus at least 2-dozen posh high school stadiums over 10,000 for preliminary matches and such.
Houston has a lot of big venues plus nearby Texas A&M
Martin
@Roger Moore: UC Irvine would probably be happy to upgrade their aquatic center to host. Irvine is already home to a lot of the US team, and the center was, IIRC, designed to grow to such a scale. There’s a number of comparable facilities nearby that can be used for staging – warm up, etc. (a LOT of prospective swimmers/divers/water polo move here for the facilities/teams.) Basically just need to add seating and security. I mean, sailing was run out of San Diego in 84, so it’s not like stretching things across socal is really a problem. I think cycling went through OC as well (I wasn’t living here yet in 84).
I don’t think UCLA or USC has the space to upgrade theirs, but they’d probably be happy to if they were able. There’s so many facilities close to the capability needed that building a whole new center seems kind of silly.
Dan B
@NotMax: I saw them burning down at least three houses, one near the “slightly flammable” world’s largest match factory. And we lived three miles outside town. Small town nuttery?
trollhattan
@Shakti:
I saw video–guess from their security system–and the cops come in with guns drawn. FFS is that their only mode of operation now?
raven
@Leto: The Russian’s bailing was a double edge sword, all of the sudden there were great tickets available but it did diminish the competition not having the female commie shot putters from Minsk!
Leto
@Roger Moore: it’s not just the sporting facilities, but the whole host of other logistics that also go into hosting the games. Do they have enough hotel/lodging facilities for all of the visitors/tourism that’s about to happen? Public transport? Dining? How’s their communications infrastructure? All of that. It’s why they give them 8- 10 years lead time. Some cities can get other budget initiatives/projects completed, but for a lot of these cities/nations it’s massive outlays for a two-three week event, and it takes them years and years to recover from it. Same for the World Cup. In some regards the Winter Olympics are a bit easier to host because there are only so many sites with Olympic/world class caliber winter facilities, but that summer time madness is a bit different.
Roger Moore
@Dan B:
The hard part of hosting the Olympics isn’t having enough venues for the big events like track and field. Most big American cities have a couple of major stadiums that could be used for those things. But you also need a host of smaller venues for gymnastics, weightlifting, fencing, archery, equestrian events, martial arts, open water swimming, canoeing, sailing, etc. Not only will essentially every big sports venue in LA be occupied by the Olympics, we’ll also be using other places like the convention center and the Microsoft Theater to have enough space.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
The last SF Olympics bid was regionwide and to your point, the venues all exist in some form, upgrades would be expected but it would not be a financial boat anchor.
They held the US Olympics T&F trials in Sac in 2000 and 2004, then some folks in Oregon decided it was THEIRS.
raven
@Martin: When the Olympics were here we had soccer in the UGA Stadium. yachting in Savannah and white water rafting on the Ocoee. It was pretty funny in Athens. People speculated like mad and landlords threw their tenants out and we had ZERO renters. People came for soccer games and drove home. On the plus side I went to every game except the women’s final and usually paid under $10!
trollhattan
@Leto:
Yeah, the NBA wants an allstar game in Sacramento but we don’t have the needed number of hotel rooms. They even considered bringing in a couple cruise liners to hit the target, but that was before 2020 if you get my drift.
Kent
And the East German female swimmers who could bench press 300 lbs.
raven
@Roger Moore: We went to boxing in the LA Sports Arena, hoops at the Forum, soccer at the Rose Bowl, Track and Field at the Coliseum and swimming at the USC Aquatic Center. We also watched Rodney Dangerfield and Robert Morse to lines off the bar somewhere in LA!
raven
@Kent: Ja!
Kent
No, please no. I was living in Seattle when they did the Goodwill Games. That was enough of a fiasco and hassle. Let some other city like Dallas bite that one off.
Martin
@Kent: Yeah, but sailing would suck in the Gulf, and you have legit hurricane threats that time of year there. Plus, I don’t think they have the diversity of facilities there, not to mention we have legit mountains for sports that need vertical drops, we have quite good velodromes already built and nearby. SoCal just has a stupid number of stadiums, arenas, sports parks, and so on. And large ones. And nicer weather.
Leto
@Kent: they didn’t so much swim as aggressively moved the water out of the way…
raven
@Kent: Ever read this
Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle
trollhattan
@Kent:
Fun fact: they would do that benching bundles of four gymnasts.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: Last I saw of the proposal, they’re planning on building a temporary aquatics venue on U$C’s baseball field.
sab
@Dan B: Don’t all fire departments burn down houses? Ohio they do. Rescue practice or something.
Martin
@Roger Moore: You have arenas all over now. There are 3 UC campuses (Irvine, Santa Barbara, Riverside) much more built out than in 84 (they were 20ish years old at the time, and will be 60 in 2028). You have the whole Anaheim sports complex now. You have the StubHub (or whatever it’s now called) setup at Dominguez Hills. Staples center, two new NFL stadiums, etc.
There are tons and tons of places that can host 5000 spectators for smaller events now that didn’t exist in ’84, plus there’s a lot better spread of accommodations for guests. Anaheim was there but shitty, and is less shitty now.
If I were the organizing committee, I’d distribute the events with minimal new construction – just renovations here and there and dump all of the money into transit. It’s what socal needs more than anything, and everything you build, assuming they’re going to an already proven destination like an existing stadium or arena is going to have utility after the games.
Kent
I’m not advocating for Texas. Just saying that LA is far from the only city in the US with adequate venues for Olympic sports. What summer sports require vertical drop? Mountain biking?
But yeah, you’d probably want to hold a Texas Olympics in early October.
Amir Khalid
The IOC should abandon moving the Olympic Games from city to city around the world. The selection process has become hopelessly corrupt. And wasteful: all too often, the “winning” city gets stuck afterwards with bazillions in infrastructure it can’t afford and can’t find a use for. (And not just the city; national governments typically support these bids financially as a matter of national prestige.)
I favour a variation on an idea that’s been around for a long time: The IOC builds a permanent site for the Summer Olympics. But let it build a few such sites around the world: one in Asia, one in Europe, one in Africa, one each in North and South America. (Sorry, Australia.) The Summer Games are rotated from one site to the next: Asia; then North America, then Africa, then Europe, then South America; then back to Asia again. No bidding to host the Games means no corruption in the selection process. Permanent sites means no waste of public funds on soon-to-be-underused infrastructure.
I'll be Frank
Qatar? The scene of the very first international What the Trump? Qatar, as in where we have our regional air force base? The same Qatar that was declared an international terrorist state, and least until they invested $500 million into Cadre fund which then promptly invested $400 million in Jared’s 666 flophouse? That Qatar? Never heard of it.
catclub
@raven: Thanks! Late back to this thread, I have some life outside BJ, and had not read the morning post at all.
catclub
Kayaking!