Buying the Games

The hundreds of street merchants licensed by the city of Atlanta to operate throughout the city, especially inside the Olympic Ring, are an eyesore to the International Olympic Committee.

“There is a certain amount of clutter as you step outside,” Richard Pound of Canada, chairman of the IOC Oversight Commission, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “In my view, that’s unfortunate. If you have hundreds of street vendors, you destroy the look of the Games.”

Pound said that the IOC will move to restore order in the future.

“The cities who want to host the Games, we will tell them, ‘Don’t even think about doing something like this.’ For those who already have been named host cities, we will be putting it in their contracts and underlining it.”