Stay out, Olympics
A citywide struggle against a bid has emerged, from the highest ivory towers to the humblest bungalows
Mayor John Tory claims to be busy behind the scenes gathering support for an Olympic bid, but his opponents are far more transparent. Right before our eyes — and his, if he had the wit to use them — entire armies of well-armed and professionally led naysayers have sprung up from the civic mulch and are girding for battle with blood in their eyes and victory at hand.
This is the real news of the day: How the entire city is swinging strongly against any potential bid even before the alleged goodies are unveiled.
Forget Bread Not Circuses, the left-wing activist group credited (and blamed) for ruining Toronto’s chances to host the 1996 Games, which went to quiescent Atlanta instead. That group fought with pitchforks and fax machines against a comparatively modest and wellplanned bid.
This latest round is shaping up as a citywide struggle against a glowering behemoth, joined by all varieties of civic leader and follower from the highest ivory towers to the humblest bungalows of Ford Nation.
Every pundit and populist in town is united in this new cause, and the ammunition they now have at their disposal — coming straight from the world’s best-informed experts — is devastating. The 1996 bid team, with considerable popular support, lost a close fight. What looms in the face of today’s shadowy elite is a truly world-class shellacking.
That prospect alone — never mind the cause — would be enough to activate the usual suspects. Angry at the new mayor’s increasingly retrograde performance, especially the Gardiner fiasco, downtown militants are lusting for revenge. There’s nothing new in that, one might suppose. But what’s different today — apart from social media, which is already seething with anti-Olympic fervour — is the quality of leadership the antis now enjoy.
Boston fought off the International Olympic Committee with the aid of experts such as economist Andrew Zimbalist, who recently exposed the financially disastrous consequences of hosting the Games in his book Circus Maximus, along with University of Michigan Olympics scholar Stefan Szymanski. In Toronto, North America’s leading name-brand urban guru, Richard Florida, has already stepped up to denounce the folly of a bid.
Even more impressive is the sudden emergence from out of nowhere (London, Ont.) of the miraculous @janiceatwestern, the Twitter handle of Western University professor Janice Forsyth, past director of that institution’s International Centre for Olympic Studies — and pretty much the most vehement critic any corrupt institution has spawned since Luther. Sniping in the dark at a still-veiled target, Forsyth has almost single-handedly destroyed the credibility of Toronto’s peekaboo bid team. No mere journalist was ever so well informed about the Olympics, nor so implacably opposed.
Add Rob Ford to this mix — as he has done, declaring the Olympics “a bottomless black hole” — and the picture couldn’t be clearer. You’d need the arrogance of a Custer to think this hasty, ill-advised, ultra-risky gambit will succeed.
Enter John Tory, whose ineptitude in handling this issue so far strongly suggests that he will once again do the wrong thing on Tuesday, the deadline for announcing a bid. It will be fun for awhile to watch the entire city punish him, but the punishment is bound to last longer than awhile and it will travel both ways.
Nothing else will happen in Toronto as long as the Olympic battle is raging. Together the Olympic nabobs and their fiercely resistant enemies will push every other priority aside and spill gobs of blood until one side or the other — the bid, almost certainly — is dead. It could be years before the last wounds heal.
Leaving aside the $20 billion in hard cash it will probably cost, that degree of civic damage alone is far too high a price to pay for a threeweek party.