'This will unite right and left': the Bostonians who want to bring down the Olympics
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Version 0 of 1. On 8 January, the US Olympic Committee announced that Boston had won the opportunity to bid on the 2024 Summer Olympics. The backlash didn’t take long: a week later, the group No Boston Olympics held their first meeting since the news was confirmed. Braving the bitterly cold weather, more than 100 individuals from Boston and surrounding cities congregated at a church in the heart of historic Back Bay. Some were there to talk. After all, there were no public debates that led up to Boston being awarded the bid. The first official meeting on the matter will be held on 21 January. This would be the first chances nearly anybody would have to make their voice heard. Others were there to listen. Despite the bluntness of the group’s name, not everyone in attendance was against the idea of hosting the Olympics. The NBO meeting was a chance to hear a side that wasn’t purely pro-Olympics. And some were there to see if there was anything that could be done. The night would be a chance for NBO to make a sales pitch of sorts, to gather volunteers and spread a shared belief that hosting an Olympics would do to the city, and the entire state, more harm than good. Nearly everyone in attendance, despite their reasons for coming, was concerned about the process that led to the city being chosen to represent the US. The most frequently used word of the evening was “transparency,” or more specifically, what those in attendance felt was the lack of it throughout this process. A frequently repeated sticking point was that the private Boston 2024 organization hasn’t even released details about the bid (afterwards, Boston 2024 said that it would, in fact, release the related documents earlier than it had planned.) At one point before the proceedings began, a loud voice broke through the murmuring declaring: “the more secretive an idea, the worse it is.” That probably summed up the feelings of many: if the 2024 Olympics would be as beneficial to the city as its proponents claim, why the secrecy? Why had there been no attempts to get the public involved? Why has Mayor Marty Walsh been adamant that there will be no citywide referendum if he feels the majority will be pro-Olympics? The speakers spent much of the evening listing, in occasionally soul-numbing detail, reasons why Boston 2024 may have believed open discussion would have hurt their cause. The most informative was Professor Andrew Zimbalist, author of Circus Maximus, a study on the economic drain the Games historically have put on their host cities. Zimbalist challenged many of Boston 2024’s arguments. He estimated that the proposed $4.5bn budget would end up in the $15-20bn range. He questioned the idea that the funding would come from private sources (“the public bodies … are required by the IOC to back up [funds] in case the private money doesn’t come through”). Zimbalist said Games do not turn a profit, or even bring in tourists, noting that during the 2012 Olympics “tourism actually fell in the city of London by 5%”. Beyond all the numbers, the biggest impact Zimbalist made on the crowd was in belittling the biggest yet most intangible selling point of the Boston Olympics: that hosting such a historic event would make Boston a “world class city”. To much applause, Zimbalist said “we believe Boston already is a world class city”. In some ways he was pandering to the crowd, but the line served an additional purpose by challenging the notion that civic pride and supporting the Olympics are opposing concepts. As NBO co-chair Chris Dempsey noted, “We are not anti-Boston ... We are not curmudgeons, naysayers, Nimbys, or trolls.” Responding to criticism painting opponents as pessimists, Dempsey added that he had no doubt that the city was up to the task. That, he believed, was besides the point: “The question is should Boston host the Olympics?” If the 2024 Boston Olympics were a bad idea, NBO’s main challenge going forward would be: what was to be done, especially if the Olympic bid itself was not up for vote? Dempsey was open to ideas, but he had one major suggestion of his own. “Demand that taxpayer support for the Games be put to a public referendum,” he concluded, adding that it could be “potentially the only way for you and your neighbors to have a public say”. Underneath the founders’ mostly realistic suggestions, though, might have been a more radical purpose. An underlying idea at work was that the best way to stop the Olympics would be to make the atmosphere in Boston so inhospitable to the concept that the IOC would choose a different host. As Ian Crouch wrote in the New Yorker: “A feasibility study of a potential Boston Olympics commissioned by the Massachusetts state legislature and published earlier this year noted specifically, ‘The Usoc requires a high level of public support for a bid city to be considered’ … A well-organized grass-roots campaign against the Games could send the IOC looking elsewhere, for a city where the public sentiment is in line behind hosting, or else where that sentiment is otherwise muffled by the government.” To that end, maybe the most telling moment happened in the Q&A section of the evening, when over a dozen audience members made their way to the front of the church to ask questions or give mini-sermons of their own. Among them was Dr Edmund Schluessel, proudly wearing a blindingly red shirt bearing the world “Socialist”. Schluessel discussed making No Olympics part of a #BlackLivesMatter rally, mentioned the potential of the Olympics turning the area into a “security state that you wouldn’t believe” and then emphasized that “this needs to be a movement for the whole city”. Immediately following Schluessel, amusingly, was one-time Tea Party Republican political candidate George Boag. Noting the incongruity, Boag used the situation to make his main point, “this is an issue that will unite the left and the right”. The result was another round of applause, second only to that of Zimbalist’s “world-class city” line. If No Boston Olympics, and other like-minded organizations, can build on this sort of bipartisan unity, there could be a very good chance that the Olympics will be held elsewhere come 2024. |