2024 Olympics? I say bring ’em on
Hosting mankind’s riskiest event a chance for city to shed shackles of false modesty and really shine
Big risk. Great opportunity. Go for it.
That’s been my view on any Toronto bid to host the Summer Olympics, mankind’s biggest, most complex and risky extravaganza.
The near-three weeks spent walking around Sydney, Australia, during the 2000 Olympics convinced me of that. There is no greater test of a city’s mettle; no more pressing and irrepressible mandate for success on a stage where the alternative is universal embarrassment; no more exhilarating gathering of the world’s peoples.
I can understand why timid souls would shrink from such an enterprise. I bristle at those who won’t even consider it.
One of the more frustrating things about living among the nearly 6 million people in the GTA is our unfathomable deference to the rest of the world. As in, “Leave it to the world-class cities like Paris, London and New York.”
The more highbrow holders of such sentiments maintain that Toronto is about neighbourhoods and diversity and walkability and being a livable city and retrained urbanity, not garish commercialism and boosterism.
Just leave us alone to bask in our understated brilliance. If the world discovers how good we are, more of them will want to come here. And imagine what that would do to house prices and traffic and . . .
For too many others, they simply lack faith in the city even as the rest of the world is discovering our charms and robust, sustainable, livable characteristics.
It’s not cute, this servile shrinking. It’s not commendable, this false modesty. It’s born out of laziness and complacency and satisfaction with “good enough” and even mediocrity. It feeds into the “polite Canadian” narrative. And it’s time we blow it up. Look what happens when we open our doors a bit as we did to the Americas with the Pan Am Games. Strangers get exposed to our organizational excellence. And we surprise ourselves with how much fun we can have from hosting our guests. We put up our name — TORONTO — in big block letters and are taken aback at the compulsion to frame ourselves in its image and share it with friends.
More importantly, such events give us a kick in the butt, an inducement to spruce up, fix up, rebuild, redesign the messes we’ve dreamed about fixing for decades.
Stretch your mind a bit and imag- ine the biggest welcome mat of them all: for an Olympic Games.
Recent public opinion polls reveal that a new ethos is emerging: one stoked by Torontonians who know and feel that we are as good as, and can compete with, any city in the world. If only we will.
More than most cities, Toronto has the ability and people and sensibility and sophistication to host just about any gathering of the world’s people. More than most cities in Canada, we need such events to provide the excuse or reason or catalyst for governments to invest in our infrastructure without inviting crippling envy across the country.
To those fretting about the federal government being pushed to spend billions on Toronto, just ask: Who helped pay for Montreal’s 1976 Olympics or the Calgary and Vancouver Olympics? We all did, from coast to coast. When the world comes calling, the nation forgets about east and west, French and English, and comes together.
Toronto could always do with some national love.
We’re Canada’s calling-card city. We can compete with anyone in the world.
We have the best of the world here. We put on our boxers and our panties the same way the rest of the world does. We graduate from the same schools. We eat the same food, breathe the same air — only safer and cleaner than most.
If we were to ever host the Olympics, it would be spectacularly delivered. To think otherwise is to be stricken with delusional self-loathing.
There is no perfect time to pursue such a prize; the bid is a crapshoot, infused with politics, luck, bribery, greed and unfathomable intrigue.
The cost to host the Games is prohibitive. But it’s only money. And we are Canada’s richest city.
The gargantuan grandiosity of the event can overwhelm a city. So? We can deal with it.
More than anything, my city, your city, needs to figure out what we can get from the Olympics even as we give the athletes and visitors a good time.
What’s our big ask? What generational change is needed in our social housing stock, our transit network, our roads system, our technology?
Answer that and pursue it with the determination of an Olympic athlete.
Long ago, I stopped dreaming about burying the Gardiner Expressway, despite the magnificent improvements seen when cities around the world have done similar.
Too often I despair that our politicians, planners and civic leaders are not committed and resolute enough as a team to deliver the region’s most pressing transit need: the downtown relief line, a fix of the poorly conceived Yonge-Bloor subway interchange and capacity restraints at Union Station.
What if that was our big ask, our non-negotiable demand or deliverable?
A Toronto Olympics would probably cost $20 billion in 2024. That’s the kind of money we need to spend on the DRL and Union Station capacity improvements.
It’s been shown elsewhere that one massive expenditure leads to another. Does Toronto have the nerve to embark on this adventure? Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca