Olympic bids can’t be rushed
The Toronto Star, among others, is in an Olympic swoon. “This is an opportunity that mustn’t be missed,” the editorial board insists. “We can do this. We can seize the moment,” said one columnist. Another suggested we now face a “dilemma”: Do we bid for the 2024 Olympics, or Expo 2025, or both? “On Monday morning (after the Pan Am closing ceremonies), people will wake up in a euphoric state … and be willing to cast a thought for, ‘What would it be like for us to put on the Olympic Games?’ ” Vancouver Olympic head honcho John Furlong effused to the National Post’s Sean Fitz-Gerald.
Deep breaths, everyone. Please. There’s nothing wrong with some misty-eyed boosterism. The problem is that it’s fertile soil for nonsense.
As ever, the boosters tell tales of a turbocharged economy, of a soaring international reputation, of fending off future tourists and conventioneers with pointy sticks. But those Olympic outcomes certainly aren’t the rule, nor are they predictable in advance or easy to measure dispassionately after the fact — and as we all know (bonjour, Montreal; kalimera, Athens), the risks are enormous. The boosters often mention Vancouver’s Games as a model, but the city has enjoyed no measurable increase in tourism or reputation. It did get $7 billion in “free” new infrastructure, including the Canada Line — but there is no good reason it couldn’t have been built regardless, and the Olympics certainly offered no discount.
The Pan Am Games, meanwhile, have transported us into a new land of make-believe. CBC reports “several new (Pan Am) facilities … could house future Olympic competitions, such as a velodrome and multiple swimming pools.” The IOC is far more amenable to using existing venues and to less grandiose visions, we are told. An unnamed source told The Globe and Mail we might satisfy delegates with a temporary 100,000-seat Olympic Stadium “that would not cost millions of dollars.”
Needless to say, there is no stadium, temporary or permanent, that doesn’t cost millions of dollars. The IOC will always prefer permanent. And Toronto has no earthly need of such a facility. The Pan Am organizers have always been frank: Their facilities are not designed for the Olympics. The 2,500-seat velodrome in Milton is half the capacity of the one planned for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The aquatics centre in Scarborough seats 6,000; those in Rio, London and Beijing seat more than 17,000. It’s not even close.
And then there is the timeline to consider. Publicly, Mayor John Tory has been making the right noises: Let’s not go food shopping while we’re starving, as he aptly put it. But the dinner bell is ringing. When city staff reported on Toronto 2024 to the economic development committee, they stressed how “constrained” the timeline was. That was 19 months ago. “There is not enough time to wait until after the (2014 municipal) elections and the holding of the (Pan Am) Games in 2015 to decide whether to bid,” they warned. And here we are.
If the committee wanted to proceed, staff suggested spending the spring and summer of 2014 preparing a “detailed business plan,” consulting with the public and seeking corporate sponsorships, concurrently undertaking months of negotiations with the provincial and federal governments and then slapping it down in front of city council for approval — all to meet a Sept. 15, 2015, deadline to declare our interest. As the committee voted not to pursue the bid, none of that has happened. Boston’s bid, abandoned this week over fiscal concerns, had been a going concern for almost two years. City council doesn’t even meet again before the deadline.
Perhaps it’s possible for Toronto to secure Olympic-size commitments from Ottawa and Queen’s Park in a matter of six weeks, and then cobble together a reasonably coherent basic bid in time for the next deadline, which is in January. But it wouldn’t be a bid in which Torontonians could feel managerially and fiscally confident. The risks of a last-minute bid are huge; panic is not cheap. Many of the infrastructure commitments likely to ride on that bid — notably a Downtown Relief Line and Port Lands development — are not costed. There’s no doubt mega-events can provoke action on long-neglected priorities. But look at Toronto’s waterfront: For ages it was hitched to Olympic bids and then we lost and redeveloped it anyway. This is definitely an opportunity we can afford to miss.
I’ll admit it. For all the IOC’s bombast and corruption and hypocrisy, I enjoy the Olympics immensely. And I would be happy for Toronto to host them some day — not as a sound economic investment, however, but as a big, bold statement that we think this place is pretty great and we want to show off for a few weeks. That’s what even the most economically successful Olympics are really about. The jobs and tourism and international goodwill arguments are just talking points, and should be treated as such during the frantic discussion we’re suddenly having. Beware boosters bearing gifts.