Mayor wanted New York to run before it could even walk
Sandy aftermath is something sports simply can’t heal
A different kind of marathon will take place on hard-hit Staten Island on Sunday, with runners carrying backpacks filled with things like baby wipes and energy bars to those in need.
They’ll be wearing orange, just like they would have if the New York City Marathon was held as scheduled. But there will be no bands playing on the corner as they go by, no one handing them cups of water as they make their way.
And no one will be setting a personal best. Just a bunch of runners trying to do some good and beat a bad rap pinned on them by greedy race organizers and a mayor who seemed oblivious to the end.
“We initially were bummed, but also saddened by the perception that runners were indifferent to the needs of other people,” said Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine doctor in New York. “We wanted to turn a negative to a positive.”
If only Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been nearly as enlightened. Might have saved himself some political capital, and thousands of would-be runners the expense of coming to New York for a marathon he kept insisting would go forward.
The idea that a marathon could somehow lift the spirits of a city following Superstorm Sandy was a stretch to begin with. There are things that sports simply can’t heal.
The mayor stubbornly spun it like this was two months after 9-11, when the marathon went ahead in tribute to the victims. Rudy Giuliani was in charge then, and won widespread praise for his efforts to get the city back to normal as soon as possible.
But this was only a few days after Staten Island and other parts of the New York area were hit with a furious storm that caused widespread devastation. It wasn’t until Friday that the first real aid arrived on Staten Island.
The mayor wanted to run when the city was still struggling to walk.
Nowhere was that more evident than at the marathon starting point in Staten Island, where 19 people are dead because of Sandy, including two young boys who were swept from the arms of their mother by the waters. To host the citywide party that is the marathon there just days after the storm devastated the island was simply unthinkable.
Tough enough to justify hosting an NFL game at the Meadowlands when gas is in short supply, public transportation is still spotty and more than one million people in New Jersey are still without power. Impossible to justify using scarce city resources to help more than 40,000 runners make their way 26.2 miles through the city’s five boroughs as residents struggle to with the most basic services.
Up through the end of the business day Friday, though, Bloomberg was trying to do just that. The marathon would be good for business and good for morale, the mayor insisted, a sign to the nation that nothing can keep New York down.
It wasn’t until outrage over his decision to forge ahead spread via social media and the city’s employee unions started to rebel that Bloomberg abruptly reversed course and called it off.