Here’s how to fix a broken, bloated Olympics model
It is time to reimagine the Olympics.
The current model — the behemoth of an event that descends on a particular town, sucks up billions in resources and leaves behind busted budgets and white elephant edifices
— is broken. It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to figure that out, but the dysfunction is currently on full display in Japan, a little less than two months before the opening ceremonies are to take place in Tokyo.
A significant majority of Japanese who have been polled, by some reports more than 80%, want the games canceled — now. The COVID-19 infection
rate has been low in Japan but has risen in the past two months, and the vaccination rate is estimated at between 2% and 4% of the population. Only now is Japan opening mass vaccination centers, enlisting military doctors and nurses to begin giving shots to the elderly. Meanwhile, the State Department issued an advisory Monday cautioning U.S. citizens against traveling to Japan.
The fear is of 11,000 or so athletes, plus another 12,000 or so officials and dignitaries, descending on Tokyo and creating a superspreader event that would overwhelm that country. A public health emergency is in effect in Tokyo, Osaka and eight other areas that comprise 40% of the country’s population, and that area may expand. Yet, International Olympic Committee vice president John Coates said last weekend that “absolutely, yes,” the Olympics would go on even in a state of emergency in Japan. And IOC president Thomas Bach keeps talking about how everyone must “sacrifice” to make these Summer Olympics successful.
As long as the sacrifice doesn’t involve those TV rights fees, it’s all good, right?
The problem there, and in any city that signs a contract with the IOC? You take the risks. You clean up after the circus. And if there are cost overruns or a terrorist incident, or a pandemic, you’ll be left holding the bag.
Meanwhile, the 2022 Beijing Winter Games are a little more than eight months away. Nobody in China is protesting — are you kidding? — and there’s reason to hope the pandemic will have mostly abated by next February. But the Chinese government’s crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong and its roundup of
ethnic Uighurs and Tibetans have led many to call for a boycott of those Winter Olympics, either a full-scale athletes’ boycott or at least a diplomatic snub.
As is often the case, the IOC washes its hands of any control over the host city it picked (beyond, of course, financial commitments). “We are not a super-world government,” Bach was quoted.
Just think: Paris gets to clean up after the circus in 2024, and then it’s our turn in 2028. L.A. saved the Olympic movement in 1984 when it outbid Tehran (before Iran’s Islamic revolution), put the Summer Games in Peter Ueberroth’s hands and turned a profit from which the LA84 organization is still supporting youth sports organizations throughout Southern California.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was a great two weeks. But hindsight suggests an alternate view as the movement has reverted to its bloated self. The IOC and the events it stages resemble that container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal a couple of months ago and blocked shipping traffic for a week: ponderous and incapable of self-correction.
The Games themselves are tremendous competition. The athletes are sublime. The stuff behind the curtain is a mess.
So here is our suggested remedy: Break up the Olympics. Seriously.
There are 33 sports scheduled to be contested in Tokyo. Why do all have to be held in the same city, or even the same country? At its heart, the Olympics are the world’s grandest TV show, especially since broadcast fees are where the bulk of the money comes from (and probably all of it this year should spectators be prohibited from attending events.)
Here’s the plan: Assign the Games to a region of the world and put each sport in a different city. Instead of separate world championships in various
sports in an Olympic year, each of those competitions will now be Olympic events in the same twoweek window as now, but in different locations.
Sure, there will be disadvantages for the athletes, who won’t have an Olympic VIllage to mingle with athletes from other sports or a closing ceremony to celebrate the experience. (The closing ceremony is for the competitors. The opening ceremony is for the politicians and the dignitaries and the puffery of the host city and country, and that will be missed far less.)
But consider, for the sake of argument, a 2028 Summer Olympics spread throughout North America in much the same way Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will split the 2026 World Cup. Hold track and field in the Coliseum, where it belongs. Put the basketball competitions in New York, the gymnastics in Montréal (in honor of Nadia Comaneci, who recorded the first Olympic 10.0 score at the 1976 Olympics), the aquatic sports in Vancouver, soccer in Mexico City, maybe baseball and softball in Monterrey, and so on.
Spread the Games throughout a continent, in existing facilities, with the idea that to the viewer at home it’s all one giant sports festival anyway. Cities won’t have to mortgage their futures to host Olympic competitions. Security will be less onerous, during the Games and after. It will be a party everyone can truly enjoy, and there won’t be that “what have we done” hangover after it ends.
Los Angeles and Southern California positively transformed the Olympic movement once before. We could do so again by taking one for the world and offering to share — if the Olympic movement can stumble its way to 2028 without imploding first.