There’s an enormous amount of commentary regarding the decision to withdraw Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. I’ll leave it to you, diligent reader, to dig out your favorite bits and post them here as the day wears on.
I’m going to focus on the column by the Globe’s Shirley Leung, perhaps the media’s most stalwart advocate of bringing the Olympics here. She gets a couple of things exactly right, but then draws the wrong conclusion.
In a long-ago era, a cabal of businessmen worked with mayors behind the scenes to impose their vision on the city. It was known as the Vault, and it seemed that former Boston 2024 chairman John Fish and the United States Olympic Committee unwittingly followed their playbook.
This is correct, except that I’d question the use of the word “unwittingly.” Rather, I think that this is precisely how Boston 2024 was planning to operate. It apparently never occurred to the Pooh-Bahs who appointed themselves the masters of Boston’s future that things don’t work that way anymore, and that the people of Boston might actually have something to say about it. It also never occurred to them that the drastically changed media landscape since the era of the Vault would make it much more difficult to “impose their vision.” Back in the day, if you could get the Globe and maybe Chet Curtis and Natalie Jacobson on your side, you were in pretty good shape. Things don’t work that way nowadays. As Leung disparagingly puts it, “thanks to Twitter and Facebook, everyone has a platform to blast their opinion to the world.” Leung seems to think that only she and others employed by the (no longer so) mighty Globe should have such a platform; fortunately, technology has rendered that view obsolete.
I’m with the legendary Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan on this one. He’s been to 11 Olympics. He loves them, and thinks Boston could have pulled one off — but needed stronger leadership from the start.
This, too, is correct. Boston 2024’s leadership, in part for the reasons outlined above, was a disaster. They had no idea how to sell their idea to the public; they thought they could get away with obfuscation and half-truths (at best) in an era of public records laws and social media; it never occurred to them that people wouldn’t wholeheartedly buy into every idea they proposed, so when people didn’t (case in point: beach volleyball on the Boston Common), they kept getting caught flat-footed and scrambling for an alternative. In short, they didn’t know what they were doing. Not the people you want shepherding an effort that would have consumed much of the city’s energies for the next 10 years.
I regret that Mayor Walsh didn’t get a few more weeks to get comfortable with the insurance. I regret that Governor Charlie Baker didn’t get those weeks to digest his independent report. I regret that the USOC didn’t level with us about its desire to look elsewhere the entire time.
Right again, especially the last point. The USOC repeatedly proclaimed that Boston was their city, and they weren’t looking anywhere else. But, of course, we now know that that was false. And how ridiculous of the USOC to insist that Governor Baker countermand his own decision to commission a feasibility study on the financials of hosting the games, and instead go all-in before he had the facts. It’s so typical of the Olympics establishment to expect elected officials to kowtow to their demands. Kudos to Governor Baker for not doing so. And kudos too to Mayor Walsh, who, despite his enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics, was reluctant to commit to the onerous host city agreement (placing the city on the hook for cost overruns) until the insurance question was resolved satisfactorily.
Indeed, one of the major lessons seems to me that the USOC (and probably the IOC as well, though we never got to that point) really are just as awful as everyone has always assumed. I said months ago that we ought to be thinking really, really hard about whether we want to be in bed with these people for the next 10 years. I’d say the events of the last several days have shown that those who were skeptical about whether dealing with the IOC/USOC crowd was a good idea were right.
We still put up a fierce fight when someone tries something novel. Given the chance to think big about our future, we tied ourselves up in the minutiae of tax breaks and traffic studies. Accusations quickly replaced ambitions.
And this is where Leung is wrong. Boston 2024 wasn’t a “chance to think big about our future.” It was a chance to think about hosting a very big three-week sporting event. Thinking big about our future goes far beyond the Olympics. It is the job of the Mayor, the Governor, other elected officials, and the people of the city, and it of course will continue. And to disparage the “minutiae of tax breaks and traffic studies” is exactly backward, and quite unfair. Boston 2024 of course should have been on top of those kinds of details from the get-go – that they weren’t was one of their major failures. The devil is always in the details in large projects like this one, and Boston 2024’s inexplicable decision to leave those details to others predictably led to the details not playing out very well for them. But Boston 2024 has nobody to blame for that but themselves.
More broadly, of course, Boston has always been a glorious mix of tradition and innovation. Nobody in Boston ever gets to try anything new? Tell that to the doctors and scientists working in the gleaming new buildings in Boston’s medical areas, or to the tech entrepreneurs who have transformed Kendall Square (in Cambridge, but close enough).
A much more persuasive overall take is over at Boston Magazine from Kyle Clauss, who first hilariously lampoons Leung and other disappointed pro-Olympics folk:
In the coming days, attempts will be made—likely out of Morrissey Boulevard—to further shame Bostonians for their intransigence. While world-class cities like Paris and Rome continue their courtship with the International Olympic Committee, we obstinate bumpkins in Boston will be on the sidelines because we couldn’t pry open our small, blizzard-wracked minds to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
And who then offers some much-needed perspective:
The USOC pulling Boston 2024 isn’t an “L” on our foreheads; it’s a badge of honor. The people of Boston, armed only with shoestring budgets and broken public records laws, stood up to the IOC, an organization as contemptible and endlessly wealthy as FIFA, and said: “Slow your roll. We’re doing things our way.” This David-and-Goliath dynamic lends well to an already trite Revolutionary War narrative, but better to one evoking any failed invasion of Russia. But in addition to the crippling cold, Boston’s best defense was its native skepticism….
The question now is this: will all the titans of industry who banded together, rallied behind the knockoff Chase Bank logo, and promised transformative change in our region stay true to their commitment to the public good without the prospect of beach volleyball on a marsh in Quincy? With the bid dead, how many will care about your morning commute a year from now?
Now that is a great question. How committed are you, John Fish, Steve Pagliuca, et al., to Boston’s future?
In the end, maybe the biggest failing of Fish and Pages is that they never sold the two most important politicians on the necessity of providing stop-gap financing guarantees. As it turns out, you are never really in the running to host the games, unless you provide those guarantees to the USOC/IOC, and Boston could not/would not do it. Without those guarantees, no Olympics.
Pags, not Pages (darned auto-correct)…
David wrote And kudos too to Mayor Walsh, who, despite his enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics, was reluctant to commit to the onerous host city agreement (placing the city on the hook for cost overruns) until the insurance question was resolved satisfactorily.
Agreed. Walsh would have been hard pressed to sign the guarantee to cover cost overruns when B2024 was in the process of scattering events across the Commonwealth. Did they expect Boston taxpayers to cover the cost of overruns in other cities? Did they expect Baker to sign before his own study was completed? I think not.
I suspect that the USOC was demanding that Walsh and Baker sign the agreement knowing that they could not, as a way of terminating the bid now and moving on to LA rather than having the decision drag out any longer. It is speculation on my part, but the fact that the USOC withdrew and is not demanding payment of the $25 million penalty for a Boston decision to cancel is revealing.
The international sports/business media predicted this well before the public announcement. A case in point is the article quoted from below, which was posted on July 25 from Kuala Lampur:
…which is why they were sold in part as a means to that end. I also sympathize with Leung “everyone blasting their opinion to the world”. I participate in BMG because I like the give and take among people who generally know what they are talking about, but now every news site follows its stories with a comment section as if everyone has to express their sometimes-not-very-informed opinion on everything. We’ve idolized a bit too much I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that all opinions are created equal.
From the email they sent out yesterday to friends and supporters, you might say — pretty committed. Sleeves are already rolled up:
But the press release on 2024Boston dot org, while very similar to the email in many respects, conveys the impression that their work here is done.
To the extent that their vision for the city is premised on gentrification and displacement, I regard a commitment from them with unease.
I don’t think anyone needs to be wearing a tin foil hat to think that the Olympics, for some number of folks on that B2024 board, was a means to that exactly that end.
Insofar as the Olympics is off, though, I think it’s good for the businesses and organizations already in those areas, even if redevelopment there is still persued: if the powers that be want to redevelop them, they’re not going to have the Olympics to hang over anyone’s heads.
That means we’ll see a much fairer redevelopment now, without the threat of eminent domain, in which the businesses and organizations are fairly compensated for their property and the inconvenience they’ve gone/will go through, and given alternatives that meet or exceed what they have now.
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What’s more important than all of that, to me, is that the No Boston Olympics folks are committed to staying active, and to the reinvestment in Greater Boston, as well. It’s going to take a massive, people-powered army to force Beacon Hill to properly invest in our region, especially giving the MBTA the resources to a) modernize and b) expand, but that’s exactly what this region needs if it’s going to truly advance up the list of world cities.
If people keep wanting to be up there with Paris, Rome or Tokyo…. then guess what, folks…. we need a rail system (light and otherwise) that is far more reliable than what we have today, and services a far wider region. We need one that links North and South Station, bridging that divides the entire East Coast’s rail system. We need a subway that completes the urban ring (and maybe even plans for another urban ring further out!), one that extends the blue line out through Lynn and even Salem (or Beverly!) and gets numerous other core cities in the Metro Boston region on board with light rail.
We need to invest in roads, bridges and schools like we haven’t in decades. We need to make college for our students debt-free. We need to rapidly build homes that people can afford. We need to continue to invest in our culture, community spaces, open spaces and having fun and unique events and things to do — just not events and things to do that cost hundreds of millions or billions.
We have a great city, but there is room for improvement, and a lot of it. But that improvement was never going to come from investing in the Olympics, a very expensive party for the world’s elite. It’s going to come from investing in our people — investing in ways for them live here affordably, get to work in a reasonable amount of time, enjoy themselves and provide for their families.
The Olympics was never going to do any of that, but we can do it all, at any time… simply by organizing and crashing those gates at Beacon Hill.
Amen
Baker knew the same details as Walsh and Baker should have expressed his reser ations on the guarantee. He didn’t and Walsh did. Huge omission here. Baker was a paper pusher and not a leader. It’s vevy evidet here.
a green shades boss, but he may come out winner in this because no matter which side he came out on he was going to antagonize about half the electorate. For someone who won a close election, keeping most of the big favorability numbers for initiatives he really wants, may be the biggest prize. He let Walsh do the dirty work. Now the question is, what does he want to use those support numbers for?
I’m with you on Leung’s skewed and ignorant groundwork. I can’t play that game of she’s-not-from-here, but she cites the Vault, and then draws crazy conclusions anyway.
Truth be told, in the past 40 and over 100 years, Boston has suffered from deferential culture. Small groups of business overlords and before that Brahmins and more met in private and emerged to issue fiats on the path for both Boston and MA. This 2024 thingummy was just another go at the same throwback, undemocratic routine.
You can see and hear Leung with unctuous host Joe Heisler make kissy face to anti-Olympics Matt O’Malley and then to pro-2024 booster Shirley Leung in two half-hour segments.
Of course, I had my own rant at Left Ahead — just me, no guests. I fall into the huge gang shouting that it’s done, now let’s do the necessary things, without the fake deadlines of the Olympics. Now where’s the city, state and federal efforts to a yet-to-be-defined vision of housing, infrastructure and jobs upgrades?
that the subservience and deference was just for the Massachusetts Supermajority Party.
I thought they just screwed up by hiring Deval instead of asking DeLeo who HE would like. That’s how the fame is played here.