The Olympic village has taken a lot of heat lately. Not the good kind of Heat with peak Al Pacino and DeNiro. More the bad kind of heat with exposed wiring and leaking sewerage. The living conditions inside the village are so bad that some athletes are labeling it 'uninhabitable'.
Well, you can breath easy because there will be no such problems for the United States basketball teams. When they fly into Rio for next week's Olympics they will be checking into a luxury cruise ship called the Silver Cloud liner. The ship charges $10,000 a week for a suite and has a library, a salon, and four fine-dining restaurants.
Spokesman for USA Basketball Craig Miller said: "We don’t stay in the village — we don’t feel it’s the best way to prepare. The players have a long season and they want to spend time with family."
Where's their sense of fun and gamesmanship. Sure, they might be sleeping with the smell of sewerage wafting into their face holes, and sure, they may even be fatally electrocuted from exposed wires, but where is their sporting spirit?
This isn't going to do much to get rid of the perception that the American team are a bunch of pampered millionaires. Yes, they may be pampered millionaires but they're also killing the game. Since 1984, America has taken gold in basketball in all but 2 Olympics. Essentially, every four years the nations of the world line up to be mollywhopped by the United States, this year they look set to do it without the big names of Steph Curry and LeBron James.
Now they can take gold with perfect pedicures and stomachs full of caviar and shrimp.
