The curious new twist that Boston Olympics boosters – now including Mayor Marty Walsh – have added to their pitch is that an Olympics bid would be a terrific way to plan for Boston’s future. From the story linked above:
preparing for an Olympic bid could be a powerful motivator to “push us to really do a comprehensive plan on what the future of Boston will look like,” Walsh said.
Well, a comprehensive plan for Boston’s future is a good idea. And an Olympics bid would certainly be a motivator to do a particular kind of plan, namely, the plan that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) demands. The big problem here is that the IOC’s priorities are not likely to line up with those of the city of Boston most of the time. For a demonstration of why this is so, check out jconway’s excellent post detailing his experience working on Chicago’s unsuccessful bid.
For another explanation of why a “Boston’s future” plan probably doesn’t line up with a “Boston 2024” plan, check out today’s Globe’s op-ed page. Economist Andrew Zimbalist has done some actual research into how cities fare when they bid for the Olympics. And, to the above point, he sensibly points out:
If Boston wants to plan properly for its future, it must have a lengthy discussion about the city’s developmental, architectural, environmental, and financial possibilities. Beginning that conversation with the need to create more than 30 competition venues — plus an Olympic village, a media center, and special traveling lanes for IOC officials — is not the way to do this planning.
One venue that will have to be built is the Olympic Stadium, with an 80,000-person capacity. There are no venues in greater Boston that will meet IOC standards. The stadium needs a track and a field, plus all the luxury accoutrements of a modern sports facility. It will also need some 20 acres of land, complete with special access roads and parking. Such a stadium is likely to cost upwards of $1 billion.
Where would it go? Is it wise to sacrifice these 20 acres for the next several decades? What would be its use when the 17-day event is over? Perhaps the New England Revolution could play there, but the capacity would have to be reduced to 25,000 and the track removed. London is spending more than $320 million to “remodel” its Olympic Stadium for the West Ham soccer club.
Pretty good questions. But wait, you say – didn’t LA and Barcelona do pretty well? Yes. Zimbalist explains why.
Los Angeles 1984 is one exception. Back then, Los Angeles was the only bidder. City officials told the IOC that it would only host if the IOC guaranteed the organizing committee against any losses. The Los Angeles plan was to use the existing sports infrastructure (plus a few smaller, privately-funded venues), and Peter Ueberroth, the head of the organizing committee, introduced a new corporate sponsorship model to help cover operating expenses.
Barcelona 1992 is another exception. The city began to develop a plan for its renovation after the death of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The plan had several components, including the opening of the city to the sea. Crucially, the plan preexisted the bid to host the Olympics, and the Olympics were fit into the plan, reversing the typical sequence.
I love LA’s idea of getting the IOC to guarantee losses. Let’s start by seeing if we can get them to sign onto that. I also love what Barcelona did, namely, create a plan regardless of the Olympics, and then, if an Olympics bid can be worked into it, great. But that’s not at all what’s on the table in Boston right now.
So, let me be clear. My position isn’t “no Olympics, no way, no how.” My position is that the future of Boston should not be planned around a 17-day party for the 1%, to be held ten years from now, whose requirements are dictated by a shadowy cabal of mysterious international jet-setters (a/k/a the IOC). That strikes me as an absolutely terrible way to plan for the future of actual Bostonians who live here year round.
Sorry I can’t remember who brought that up, but it was a permanent location in Switzerland and Greece, I believe. That makes sense to me. Like the countries all pitch in, maybe waive it for GDP below a certain amount (I don’t think Jamaica, for example, should pay a full share of the Winter Games).
Re: Boston, I agree with everything David said.
Grenada and Kwajalein Island, but you might have been thinking of someone else.
A truly international event should move around, but Greece would certainly make sense for obvious historical reasons.
But then, we have this asinine bidding war to lose money. If it were permanent, it could be a tourist attraction when it’s not in use, and boost the economy of wherever it is.
Its stewards would eventually become the governments of the host countries, and the IOC would wither. Probably.
some have made is that several locations be chosen for both the summer and winter Olympics in major cities around the world, with the IOC rotating between them.
Personally, I don’t think it matters to the average person watching from home on tv. Beach volleyball and figure skating looks the same regardless of whether it’s in LA, Sydney, London, Barcelona, Salt Lake, Vancouver or Lake Placid.
To the .1% who can afford to go to these games (including the members of the IOC) it may matter, but for everyone else it’s basically all the same. The added “fun” is abstract; the damage the Olympics do to cities hosting and bidding on the games isn’t.
…it’s nice to know that just once it’s relatively speaking “in the neighborhood”.
nt
I don’t have some great rational reason for this one. I’m not part of the bidding team with charts and figures. I’m content with simply being the cheering section on this one. I also think we should try before we shoot something down.
I am not by any stretch a sports fan. I generally only watch the opening and closing nights. With so much conflict in the world I swell with emotion at the idea of people coming together for something like this. When the Games were in Atlanta I was filled with awe by the opportunity to see the torch pass through nearby Nashua in which a HS classmate of mine who was a track star was among those who got to carry it for a few yards. To think that the majesty that is the Games themselves could be in my state is just simply an emotional thrill for me.
I know we’re generally all for rationalism and realism in our commentary here, but some of us have a soul that makes us more than rational robots at times.
I guess I’m in the upper upper class, since I went to the Olympics once. Maybe it wasn’t really the Olympics, since I didn’t see sheikhs kicking homeless people, or whatever some BMGers think happens there — often the same posters who denigrate how bad July 4th is now.
As far as I’m concerned, the Olympics are just one more crass and badly-synthesized way of selling tiresome advertising for useless products.
I think the entire spectacle can be operated out of a large studio on a Los Angeles lot of 21st Century Fox or Warner Brothers.
A completely-CGI Olympics! Records can be broken in every event! No danger from terrorist threats, so no need for expensive security measures or restrictions on civil liberties! Hell, animates the members of the USOC and IOC, too!
I think you make two interesting points here. The first is that Barcelona already had made significant strides with modernizing and opening up its city which made it an attractive host city since the legwork had already been completed and the infrastructure was in place for public use. Similarly, LA has a significant entertainment district already in place per IOC specifications. It will also use it’s competing bid for 2024 as an integration with its NFL stadium proposal-like West Side Stadium in NYC was linked to its 2012 bid.
I don’t see Boston putting either of those things in the table. I think if we aim for the bid as a goal in of itself-we limit the improvements and changes we make around what the IOC requires. Were we to lose the bid, as Chicago did, we may end up paying the price both in white elephants like the Reese site and Northerly Island-and failures to make the needed investments at the time. Boston should make a plethora of infrastructure, transit, and regulatory improvements for the good of its citizens and find that out now. This way-we can be competitive for a bid and if we lose we end up with a public benefit anyway.
The LA financing was a one time proposition though , if we take the radical approach in demanding it we lose any realistic shot at the bid. I would agree to it though as a principles stance in favor of a transparent and egalitarian games as well as a way to avoid making funding commitments for narrow potential bid site that jump the gun.
… but to mostly agree is to slightly disagree.
On the “party for the 1%’: this may be true from the point of view of some, possibly many, spectators, but it is not at all true for the vast majority of athletes. They will not come because they are representing the 1%. They are coming to represent their country and to do their best. On the field of endeavor bank accounts count for little. Usain Bolt is the Jamaican son of grocery store manager. Michael Phelps mother is a middle school principal and his father is a retired Maryland State Trooper. Nancy Kerrigans’ father was a welder. Those are just the first three Olympic athletes who come to mind.
On the shadowy cabal of “IOC”: it seems to me that the IOC has played out its hand, with respect to its overreaching, indeed arrogant, behavior. As you so ably note, the character of the negotiations fluctuates over the years: from LA’s apparently hard-nosed stance to Barcelonas pragmatic long-game to the very poor job they did in Sochi to the recent, very bad, snub of the IOC by Oslo, they are revealed not as sinister manipulators but as just another committee. They are neither as evil nor as effective as they are made out to be. To ascribe to them powers they do not posses gives them license to act like they do possess such power… Of the most recent Olympics Sochi is perhaps the most illustrative of the limits to their power: if all the IOC”s sinister demanding and 50 billion dollars of Putins money couldn’t build a perfect Olympics then it can’t be done under that model. Nobody, I suspect understands this more than the IOC themselves.
I’m not talking about the athletes – I’d have thought that went without saying. I’m talking about all the stuff that surrounds the games.