Is It That Time Again?
Posted by: Not The Only One in New Yawk, Media, Government Incompetence, History, Asia, Economics, Civil Rights, PersonalYes, it’s time again for the Olympics, the greatest sports event, next to the World Cup, that most Americans never bother to watch.
I’ll admit my bias here; I am not that into sports. I rarely watch sports on television and when I do, my attention span barely allows me to tolerate it for more than 15 minutes. Ironically, my first paying job in journalism was as a newspaper’s sports editor. I understand the basic rules for football, soccer, baseball, boxing and other less complicated team sports. I’m just not interested. As you can guess, I’m even less interested in the Olympics.
Here in New York City, Mayor Mike Bloomberg submitted a bid in 2001 to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. The idea came from some nut job named Dan Doctoroff who founded NYC2012, a nonprofit dedicated to drafting a 2012 Olympic bid for New York City. For some reason Mayor Bloomberg made him Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, the campaign to convince the International Olympic Committee -as well as eight million unwilling New Yorkers-that New York City would be the ideal host city for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Millions of dollars was wasted promoting the 2012 bid on display ads, on local television and hiring people to come up with realistic accommodations not only for various sporting events but also for housing for athletes and Olympic staff and realistic transportation solutions for an estimated 2 million extra visitors that wouldn’t interrupt workers’ commutes. With so little space in the five boroughs, some events were planned to take place at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.
The Mayor had previously wanted New York City and new York State to each pay $300 million towards the construction of a football stadium for the New York Jets on the west side of tiny, overcrowded Manhattan. The Jets have been homeless since their creation and played their home games at the New York Mets’ baseball stadium until 1983, when the Jets began playing home games at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.
NYC2012 proposed that the Jets’ future stadium in Manhattan could also serve as an Olympic Stadium. Thankfully, New Yorkers fought the West Side Stadium projected and the Olympic bid all the way. I worked as a reporter in Queens when all this madness was going on. The bid was ridiculous, relying on transportation routes that hadn’t yet been created and non-existent technology (such as a fleet of high-speed commuter ferries that according to NYC2012 “should exist by 2010″
A lot of New Yorkers including myself saw the Olympic bid as a bad thing for a city that had recently become the site of a terrorist attack and that the city was using the bid as a way to shove the proposed Jets stadium down taxpayers’ throats. A lot of people also felt New York City barely has the infrastructure to accommodate the people who currently live in, work in, or visit here. Besides the outlandish proposal, most New Yorkers were insulted that not once did the Mayor ever ask the taxpayers if they wanted New York City to host the Olympics or to finance a home for a football team that hadn’t won a Superbowl since 1969.
I wrote many news stories regarding the 2012 Olympic bid for New York City, add such facts as most Olympic host cities find that hosting the Olympics costs much more money than it brings in. I offered the example of Montreal who hosted the 1976 Summer Games-who had yet to pay off their Olympics-related debt (they finally paid it all off in 2006) and the 2004 Summer Olympics in Sydney which will cost Australian taxpayers $320 million to pay off. Barcelona which hosted the Olympics in 1992 is still paying off about $1.2 billion in Olympic debt, Athens which hosted the Games in 2004 faced about $9 to $12 billion in Olympic debt.
Given the fact that almost no host city has ever made a profit from hosting the Olympics, it makes me wonder why so many cities fiercely compete to host future Olympics games, especially cities in developing countries already overwhelmed by non-Olympic debt. The story I was happiest to write was in 2005, when the International Olympic Committee, who had learned of the strong opposition from New York taxpayers) finally shot down the New York City bid and chose London instead.
Another interesting aspect of the Olympics is the low, low television ratings it receives in the United States. Even when the U.S. is hosting the Olympics, ratings are not that high for Olympic coverage. I can’t help but wonder if the International Olympic Committee accepted Beijing as the host city to stir up some controversy as well as ratings. All of the flaws of the Chinese government have been exposed as a result of the 2008 Olympics, including their rap sheet of human rights violations. Here in New York we have Falun Gong, a religious group started in China in 1992, but they claim to have been brutally persecuted by the Chinese government, who claims that Falun Gong is a terrorist group.
I live in a neighborhood with a fairly large Asian community, so you can imagine all the Falun Gong protesters who assemble on a regular basis to protest the PRC, who stand on the street urging Chinese nationals to quit the Chinese Communist Party and now, protesting the 2008 Olympics. Falun Gong even has its own daily newspaper, the Daily Epoch, which although offers more substantial news reporting than most other newspaper in New York, never misses a chance to talk smack about the PRC.
This post about the Olympics has grown far longer than I meant it to, so I’ll end on this note:
Why the hell does Puerto Rico have its own Olympic team?
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