Bidding Goodbye

Tomorrow, Toronto is making a big announcement about bidding for the 2024 Olympics.  There are conflicting reports of whether they will or won't be bidding.  By the time you read this, you'll probably already know.

Toronto tried but failed when bidding for the games in 1996 and 2008.  In more recent years, city politics took a turn for the conservative, and the Olympic dream went to the back-burner.  But the success of the Pan-Am games has people talking about an Olympic bid again.

Personally, I don't think they should go for it.  The fact people seem to be ignoring is that the Pan-Am games don't really change any circumstances.  Since it used facilities that were either small or far-flung. (For instance, there's no way the Olympic Committee will accept a velodrome in Milton.)  Toronto would still be looking at a tens-of-billions bill for the games.

The fact is, Toronto isn't really in the mood for this.  Even if we assume that the Rob Ford episode was a temporary act of rebellion, the fact is that a big chunk of the city wants lower taxes more than they want grand gestures that will look World Class.  That's kind of disappointing that the city went from being reserved to minimalist in about thirty years, with only a generation of outgoing assertiveness in between.  We in the rest of Canada liked to make fun of Toronto and its quest to be World Class - I'm no exception - but it was always entertaining.

As for the Olympics, you have to wonder how long they are going to be able to keep conning cities into staging the games.  I've always thought that they could make the games far more palatable to cities if we could get past the we-have-to-build-all-new-everything mentality.  Lots of big cities around the world could stage the Olympics without building anything other than specialized venues like velodromes.  They did that in Los Angeles in 1984, and it turned out fine.  Well, I discovered that the only reason they did use pre-existing sites then was that they got special permission from the International Olympic Committee.  They got that permission because they were the only city bidding.  They were the only city bidding because the 1976 summer games in Montreal were such a financial disaster.  But there are still cities willing to stage the games under the current circumstances, so they won't have trouble finding a host, even if it's too rich for Toronto's blood.  And oh look, Los Angeles is bidding for 2024.

So it looks like the Olympics will continue to be a no-win situation for hosts, in which they build a bunch of facilities that are used for the games then sit unused forever.  Although there are horror stories about such things (mostly from Athens in 2004) you can also point to Calgary, where the venues built have been used for years.  Of course, that's because many of those facilities didn't exist in Canada prior to the games, so it was a case of nice timing.  So if the Olympics is going to insist on building all new stuff for each games, they might get away with that if it keeps going to cities that need new facilities (say, Toronto 1984) or emergent economies (China is likely building lots of new stadiums, we may have to keep holding the Olympics there in one growing megalopolis after another.)