I didn’t have time to say much the other day about my hometown’s narrow escape from Olympian Hell, and a few days’ wait has allowed me to spot some reasonable analysis by other people, especially Andrew Zimbalist, who I’m sure is often called a Sports Benefits Denier. I was a little surprised that our president would fly over there to lobby for his hometown–it seems a bad use of his time when health insurance reform is sinking out of sight–but that’s the sort of thing that presidents do, and I for one won’t hold it against him.
The nature of the ongoing spend-tax-money-on-sports argument is very nicely summarized over on Slate, in this piece by Brad Flora. It’s the same thing we hear again and again when billionaire sports team owners extort publicly financed stadiums from cities by threatening to move the team to a more gullible venue. The strategy virtually always works, though one wonders how or why.
Such deals never make financial sense for the cities and their taxpayers. It’s a strange ballet of spreadsheets vs. hypnotism: The policy wonks (I’m not sure they’re nerds as I define the term) come up with studies and hard numbers to debunk the Civic Pride and Benefits myths, while the jocks simply repeat statements of tribal emotion over and over until the electorate’s eyes glaze over and caves. It’s the same deal with the Olympics, and perhaps worse. Cities are expected to cough up billions of dollars to host an event lasting a few scant weeks, including the construction of substantial stadiums and athlete housing and lord knows what else, and then figure out how to make the facilities useful after the Games are over and everybody disperses to the four winds.
How can this ever make sense? It took Montreal thirty years to pay off the billions it cost to have the Games there in 1976. Few Olympic facilities get much use after the Games. Past Olympic facilities in some cities are crumbling wrecks behind barbed wire fences or already torn down in whole or in part and dumped in landfills. (That was actually Chicago’s plan from the outset.) The vast sums of money required are virtually always steered into politically friendly hands, and sheesh, guys, this is Chicago we’re talking about! (The sport they play best over there is racketball.) The crush of outsiders makes residents flee to the countryside, and in places where an ongoing tourist economy already exists, tourism falls to nothing before the Games and often remains depressed for years afterwards.
All for a mutated megatourney that has gone 180 from its original purpose: to transcend nationalism and glorify the efforts of individual athletes. Instead, we now have a global festival of flag-flavored tribalistic poo-flinging that takes huge advantage of the dazzling young athletes, who work basically for free while insiders and organizers pocket whatever money comes in.
I know, I know, I always come out against sports, heh. Guilty, and unrepentant. Still, not a single person I know in Chicago (and I know lots) came out for the Games, and if anybody was defending them before, I suspect they’re being very quiet now.
My view is pretty simple: The Olympics have long been too big an event to bounce around the world as though they were a spelling bee. They need to go back to Greece and stay there forever. What we used to spend on building whole cities every four years to host the Games, we should now parcel out as prize money to the athletes, so that they can at least get a college education against the (strong) possibility that there isn’t much money in professional biathalon once the last echoes of Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream” fade to silence.
What’s scary is that Governor Ritter seems to have drunk the same Kool-Aid, and is actively encouraging a Winter Olympics bid for Denver for 2018 or 2022. I don’t think it’ll pan out–the IOC has long memories of Colorado voters’ snub of the 1976 Games–but how much money is he planning on throwing down the rathole just to make the bid?
(Incidentally, where would a good “permanent” home be for the Winter Olympics? Dunno if you could hold those in Greece…maybe Switzerland?)
Jeff,
Thanks for the link to the analysis. As a survivor of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta I think the best I can say is that it was not as good as the hype or as bad as some other cities experienced.
I was in it at work every day right in the middle of the center ring. To help reduce traffic our work hours were shifted to O’dark thirty in the morning until early afternoon before the real GAMES began! I rode our MARTA mass transit every day, as I always did, and it made me think of the images of the Tokyo train system where they have the white gloved pushers to pack a few more on each car!
It is true, however, that the Olympics was perhaps the biggest urban renewal project Atlanta had seen since the Northern General that liked to play with matches paid us a visit over a hundred years ago! It was almost as disruptive too!
I sometimes think about it the same way I do my military service during that unpleasantness in Southeast Asia in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It is an experience I value having had tremendously, but it is also an experience I never would want to repeat.
I don’t understand the fascination with the Olympics. (I like sports, by the way–except all the ones that aren’t sports, like gymnastics, ice skating, and high-diving. Those are just showing off.) Who the heck are these people, and why do people want that circus in their hometowns?
This is a bunch of guys who already live high on the hog, are prone to scandals, and whose only product is a traveling road show with a trademarked name. The customers pay not only for the privilege of watching the spectacle, they pay to host it!
Good work if you can get it, I suppose. I, for one, wouldn’t lose a second of sleep if the Olympics never came to the United States again. Ever.
What’s funny is that while liberals are all getting their knickers twisted because conservatives had some schadenfreude over Obama’s failure, the main NoGamesChicago protests were organized by a gaggle of far-leftists: International ANSWER, International Socialist Organization, Green Party Chicago, etc.
Oh, and the cops were completely down on the Games. They created an unofficial anti-mascot for the Chicago bid: “Chalkie”, as in “chalk outline”, in honor of Chicago’s soaring homicide rate.