We are all Bostonians
People with bad intentions know no borders, yet we must carry on
What happened to the Boston Marathon is not about sports, or, at least, not only about sports. It could have happened anywhere — a St. Patrick’s Day parade, a pride parade, a championship parade. They have had a lot of those in Boston in the last 12 years. They were soft targets, too.
The problem with the Boston Marathon was that it was not the Super Bowl, or the Olympics, or even a Bruins game. It cannot be sealed away from the community, because a marathon cannot be contained.
At the 2012 London Olympics, only part of the route required tickets — it went to Westminster Bridge, past the Queen Victoria Memorial, toward the Tower of London, and was part of the city. The Olympics took place in a vast, armoured bubble, but part of the marathon roamed free.
It was the same in Boston until the bombs went off, full of nails and shrapnel, designed to maim as many people as possible.
The pipe bombs that went off at a public gathering place in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Games were also packed with nails. They killed one woman, gave a Turkish cameraman running to the scene a fatal heart attack and injured another 111 people.
It turned out to be an antiabortion attack, in a convoluted way, and largely took place at the Olympics because the world was watching. In his statement, the bomber, who was not caught until 2003, said he wanted to create a state of insecurity.
That’s what Boston felt on Monday. That’s what a lot of people felt Monday. The numbers kept climbing, inevitably — three dead, 183 injured, some critically. When things like this happen, nothing feels safe.
And that’s probably because nothing truly is. As sports have become global properties, television citadels, money- making jewels, the security surrounding them has grown.
In 1972, the members of Black September had to scale a threemetre chain link fence to gain access to the Olympic Village in Munich to kill Israeli athletes. Afterward, athletes’ villages became armed camps.
After 9/ 11, the Salt Lake City Olympics bolstered security to the point that athletes’ bags were searched and men with guns swarmed the city. The security budget was $ 441 million, three times what was spent in Atlanta.
In Athens in 2004, the security budget ballooned to $ 1.2 billion. Vancouver’s security eventually cost about $ 900 million and still, this could have happened there. There were people flooding the downtown core for 16 days.
And Boston was a soft target because in marathons people come to cheer perfect strangers as they push themselves to the limit. It was vulnerable because it was a free event.
And that divide is where sports is going. The NBA now requires fans to submit to a scan by a hand- held metal detector before entering an arena; the Super Bowl is a fortress, with bomb- sniffing dogs checking every journalist’s backpack and satchel, with metal detectors and pat- downs; there are snipers in the building. The Olympics are fortified; London’s security budget was $ 1.6 billion and featured the military, warships, surveillance aircraft, missile batteries on rooftops and — like the Super Bowl — no- fly zones. And when you are inside, you feel safe.
There is danger outside the gates. That’s part of the price of non- admission. That won’t change until everybody stays home. That’s not sports so much as society, though. One person can hurt or kill a lot of people, with the right amount of determination and the wrong intent.
And it can happen anywhere people gather together in a communal setting. The power is in preserving that community and carrying on.
There are not vastly different realities in different parts of the world, not really. There is just good luck and bad luck, inside the bubble and outside the bubble, the joys of community and the dangers of free societies. So, we all carry on. On Monday, Vancouver’s 10- kilometre Sun Run was up 348 entries from the same day last year, or more than 50 per cent. On Tuesday, there was another surge.
The London Marathon will take place on Sunday. People will run, together.
The stories of kindness from Boston were beautiful; locals taking in runners whose hotels were outside Boston’s expensive downtown, first responders running toward the blast, people helping.
As Mister Rogers once put it, speaking of terrible events, look for the helpers. There are always people helping.
That’s what the Boston Marathon was, in every way. It showed what people are capable of.