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Beijing Olympics: sigh of relief; next up: South Africa's 2010 World Cup. What could South Africans get for its five sports stadiums, costing over a billion dollars?

There's little evidence, though, to suggest that investing in a major sporting event does much to help transform a country's economy. Commentators now even commonly refer to an «Olympic hangover» when overheated economies decline after hosting the games. In fact, since 1956, Olympic hosts have seen their GDP growth fall by an average of nearly 7 percent in the two years following the big event.

The money that South Africa is spending on the five stadiums alone could have increased its 2008 healthcare funding by 3 percent, expanded education funding by 8 percent, or paid the salaries of 80,000 Johannesburg police officers - investments that would undoubtedly have paid dividends long after the stadiums have fallen into disuse.

After that, it's Poland's and Ukraine's 2012 Euro Cup. Oh, and there's another Russian Olympics in 2014 nations can fight over boycotting in 2014.

Joshua Keating also offers a succinct post-mortem on Beijing's Olympics:

China's debut as an Olympic host was hardly the unqualified public relations nightmare that many people expected, especially after the Tibet riots and the subsequent torch-tour fiasco. If China's goal was simply to host a fantastic Olympics, its $40 billion was well spent. In terms of sheer spectacle, impressive facilities, and the host country's athletic performance, the games were without peer in Olympic history. But if the goal was to change international minds about China, its success was mixed at best.

With the deceptions during the opening ceremonies, the arrest of eight American demonstrators, and China's failure to keep its promises about political openness, the Olympics have only reinforced the conventional view of the Chinese state as capable of outstanding feats of organization and social engineering, but also secretive, repressive, and hostile to basic human rights.

Finally, good advice for confident leaders in developing countries.

In truth, events like the Olympics and the World Cup are the farthest thing from appropriate showcases for economic progress—they're more likely to highlight a developing country's faults. Yanking a country like South Africa out of any historical context invariably emphasizes the areas where it falls short, rather than the progress it has made. Once the dazzle of a spectacular opening ceremony or high-tech stadium fades, the world will remember a developing country struggling with less glamorous challenges such as pollution, crime, and crumbling infrastructure. In the long run, emerging countries that bet their reputations on a sporting event may wish they had spent a little more time boosting their number of exports or college graduates rather than playing games.

Not only will the economic benefits fall off, but the respectability boosts will also dwindle, if the G& ever acknowledges any regard for the shrimp among whales.

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Apartheid did something uniquely weird to South African culture.

Ultimately, xenophobia goes beyond the hatred of foreigners, beyond the scarcity of resources, and beyond the identity of the current or future president. But nothing about xenophobia in South Africa is, as a Time headline claimed, «beyond racism.» Rather, xenophobia is racism, wrought from the messy apartheid past and post-colonial present.

Focusing as it does on foreigners, the poor, and the president, the U.S. coverage rarely mentions the old colonial state apparatus that the ANC inhabits. This apparatus includes the police and bureaucrats, some of whom occupy the very same positions they held under apartheid.

The recent legal classification of South Africans of Chinese descent as «Blacks» (while those of Japanese descent are considered «Whites») bears this out.

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