Getting a city ready to host the Winter Olympics is not an easy task. Stadiums have to be built, snow has to be hoarded, scores of innocent animals have to be mercilessly slaughtered. It's all just such an ordeal.

Excerpted from Kings of the Road: How Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar Made Running Go Boom, which is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

With the Olympics serving, in a larger geopolitical sense, as a jingoistic opportunity to laugh at everything that goes wrong, host cities sure spend a lot of time and money on the one thing they can't actually control: the weather. China reportedly seeded clouds before the 2008 games, so they'd expend their rain…

Reality TV is inherently shitty, so it's hard to judge Olympic gold medalist and über-bro Ryan Lochte too harshly for laying What Would Ryan Lochte Do? at our feet. A guy's gotta do what he can to stay relevant these days.

One fish, two fish, SO MANY THOUSANDS OF DEAD FISH.

Stan Lee, film's Willie Lumpkin, has a suggestion for the tight asses in charge of the Olympics. Wanna get rid of wrestling? Good! Makes room for pole dancing. It's "like the sexiest gymnastics of all...look how everybody loves pole dancers!" Just when you think he's just a creepy old guy talking about pole dancing,…

WORCESTER, Mass.—None of the stars from the "Fierce Five," the highly meme-able gold medal team from the London Games, competed in Worcester for the American Cup last weekend. The American Cup is the only international gymnastics competition held in the U.S., but these girls are still on the final leg of London promo:…

Last Friday was the anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, the U.S.'s semifinal win over a terrifying Russian side at the 1980 Olympics. It was noted, as it is every year, since it's the greatest moment in American hockey history, and marketable too—Mike Eruzione took the auspicious day to auction off all his Olympic…

Swimming-mad Australia needed someone to blame after their disappointing showing at the London games, and it looks like they've found it. A report commissioned to investigate why the Aussies didn't bring home a single individual gold for the first time since 1976 laid it on a "toxic" team culture that involved bullying,…

Originally published in Bloomberg View