OLYMPIC BIDS HIT THE SKIDS
2022 Games choices dwindle
So the list of bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics has dwindled to Almaty, Kazakhstan, or Beijing, China. Oslo, Norway, has bailed. Oh, joy. It makes you wonder, as the cloistered crowd in the International Olympic Committee considers this sobering development, whether it occurs to the blue bloods that the world outside their gilded walls must be starting to wise up.
As the cost of staging and securing the Games soars out of sight? as the decaying, graffiti-covered ghosts of Olympics past dot the global landscape? as politicians and ordinary citizens begin to do the cost/ benefit analysis of the host’s role and ponder swallowing the tax bill? surely, someone at the IOC must have seen this day coming.
Kazakhstan or China, those world-famous winter wonderlands? What, didn’t Putin make Crimea available, after he annexed it?
Why not Minsk, Pinsk, Omsk or Murmansk?
“Well, the price tag keeps going up and up and up and, despite the willpower of the IOC to keep moving the Games around from place to place, I think people are just not willing to stand for the cost for 16 days. That’s the easy answer,” says Olympic historian Kevin Wamsley, the former director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
“That kind of reflection is decades overdue. And the IOC wasn’t listening. Their heads are in the sand.
“I think the evidence is in the bidding, because that’s all we see. And if they don’t have four or five nations at once, then that tells us something.”
Having just two bidders for an Olympics is not unprecedented. Los Angeles got the 1984 Games by acclamation when Tehran, Iran, pulled out, and L.A. provid- ed a model for staging a financially successful Games that, alas, pretty much everyone who followed completely ignored.
Instead, starting with the Seoul Olympics in 1988, each Summer Games has tried to outdo the last and has certainly exceeded its predecessor’s spending.
Only gradually, it appears, have nations begun to figure out the scale of the undertaking, once the thrill of the winning bid has dissipated.
“The whole hosting package is not as enticing as it once was,” Wamsley said. “Cities are smartening up because they’ve seen that, yes, they can turn a zero deficit on the athletics component, because of the sponsorship packages offered by the IOC — and they are lucrative. But it’s
There’s so much money to be made on land speculation and short-term gains on construction and hospitality.
the infrastructure that is killing everybody.”
The IOC seems to have stripmined its way through the roster of reasonable sites and has gone in search of a whole other level of bidders.
In doing so, it has bestowed legitimacy on deplorable authoritarian regimes (China, Russia), not to mention borderline bankrupt nations so financially strapped (Italy, Greece) they should never have had billions diverted from their struggling economies to fund the magnificent playpens the IOC requires for its athletic contests.
The promises it makes of lasting legacies are hollow, too, with few exceptions (Calgary and Barcelona, notably). Currently, its “Green Games” pledge is a travesty in Rio de Janeiro, where the 2016 Olympic golf course is being constructed in defiance of litigation alleging violations of environmental laws.
The pictures are grim of the abandoned facilities left over from Athens in 2004 and the ghost towns that now stand where the Russians spent megabillions for Sochi.
Similar stories haunt many a former host city — Sarajevo’s war-ravaged facilities mostly lie in ruins, Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium is headed for the wrecker’s ball barely 20 years after it was built, venues around Beijing are overgrown or disused. And then there’s our own Big Owe in Montreal, the debt for which took 32 years to retire.
What part did the 2004 Olympics play in the collapse of the Greek economy? What price, the glossed-over crimes of the Chinese and Russian regimes so that the world could be wowed by the magnificence of their Olympic parks and think happy thoughts about them?
The IOC’s day of reckoning may not be long in coming, just as it is coming for FIFA, soccer’s scandal-wracked international governing body.
The old corrupt institutions aren’t even coming close to passing the sniff test any more.
As the IOC has gone deeper and deeper down the depth chart of countries in search of new mines to plunder, it has become more and more apparent that it badly needs to go back to cities that already have the facilities to play host to Games without investing billions in infrastructure costs.
Why not Calgary? Lillehammer? Salt Lake City?
Why not return to Sydney? To Barcelona? Helsinki? Why not Athens, now that it’s been bludgeoned into modernity, or even make the Games’ birthplace their permanent home?
You know why? Because those cities aren’t bidding.
“I’m sure the real estate folks in many locations are interested in hosting,” said Wamsley.
“There’s so much money to be made on land speculation and short-term gains on construction and hospitality. But after that, holy smokes. I think, I hope, people are coming to their senses.”
He didn’t mention Toronto, but the Little Apple no doubt has another Olympic push percolating in the backrooms. Good luck with that, Hogtown.
Meanwhile, Almaty or Beijing? followed by a World Cup in Qatar.
If Armageddon is coming, hope it arrives before 2022.