Why should Denver, or any other city, host the Olympics?»
Among the many distinctions us adorable Coloradans hold is that we are the only people in the world with the audacity to flip off the Olympics.
In 1970, the International Olympic Committee selected Denver to host the 1976 Winter Games. But two years later, after then-state Rep. Dick Lamm and others raised questions about the costs and environmental impacts, voters passed a referendum to forbid public spending for hosting the Games.
It was a loud and proud voter-generated raspberry.
So here we are in
2018 contemplating another bid to host the Winter Games in 2026 or 2030. The Sharing the Gold exploratory committee began a series of online community meetings on Thursday. A decision on whether to proceed with a bid is expected in March.
Everything and nothing has changed.
Our environment is at least as vulnerable, since the population has exploded from 2.4 million in 1972 to 5.63 million in 2017.
Our fiscal climate is much more precarious, since voters passed the most restrictive tax limitation measure in the country in 1992. One data point says it all: per-pupil spending in Colorado schools was at the national average in 1972, but by 2015 it had plummeted to $2,163 below the national average.
Suffice it to say, money is tight.
And our transportation infrastructure — particularly the part serving mountain towns — is grossly inadequate. Just for grins, imagine a 17-day period in which thousands of additional visitors hit Interstate 70 in rental cars.
Pppffffttt!
Still, advocates envision a glowing alternate universe.
The ski areas already have a lot of the needed venues in place, they say, and those that would have to be added — a ski jumping course, a facility for bobsledding and luge, and a Nordic skiing center at an elevation below 5,800 feet (with actual snow?) — could be temporary structures.
Other new construction, such as housing for athletes, could be repurposed after the Games to help address the affordable housing shortage.
Easy peasy. Rake in billions from unnamed private investors, build a couple of cheap venues, and then wait for the economic benefits to start gushing into the state.
Or not.
An analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations offers a reality check.
For starters, the cost of making a bid to the IOC is $50 million to $100 million. Toronto dropped out of the bidding for the 2024 Games because it didn’t want to spend $60 million just to go through the process.
Required infrastructure costs between $5 billion and $50 billion, security runs $1 billion to $2 billion, and servicing the inevitable debt is far from insignificant.
It took Montreal taxpayers 30 years to retire the debt from the 1976 Summer Games, and the debts resulting from Greece hosting the 2004 Olympics helped bankrupt the country in 2010. Russian taxpayers are spending $1 billion a year for the debts from Sochi, which cost the city more than $50 billion.
As for revenue, that, too, is debatable.
For Beijing, total revenues from the 2008 Summer Olympics were $3.6 billion. For the 2012 Summer Games in London, the gross was $5.2 billion. But the IOC takes more than half of the TV revenue, which is the biggest piece of the pie, leaving little to offset the tens of billions in costs.
There’s also no evidence that hosting the Games creates lasting benefits.
Construction creates some short-term jobs, according to economists, but most of those go to workers who are already employed — they’re just diverted temporarily from one job site to another. And while tourists flocked to Barcelona, London, Beijing and Salt Lake City, all reported decreases in tourism after the Games.
So the big question is not whether Denver should bid to host the Olympics but why any city should.
Plenty of rich cities, including Oslo and Stockholm, have declined to bid on the Games because of the exorbitant costs and ephemeral benefits.
Until the IOC figures out a way to produce the Olympic Games without leaving communities buried in debt after the brief glittering spectacle of international competition, Coloradans should resist the seduction.
All these years later, I’m confident that when we really need to, we can still deliver a magnificent raspberry, loud and proud.