Tanner’s Take: Los Angeles must exercise caution as 2024 bid appears inevitable
(Kimberly Ann Striegel / Daily Bruin)
By Tanner Walters
Aug. 3, 2015 9:23 a.m.
Boston made the right decision.
On July 27, Mayor Marty Walsh called a press conference to say that he would not be pressured into signing a contract that would require Boston to cover any Olympic cost overruns. That afternoon, the bidding group and the U.S. Olympic Committee announced that the city’s 2024 bid was over.
It was a swift death for an agonizingly long process that had seen more than its fair share of political maneuvering and public outcry.
These days, Olympic bidding wars are purely political. Take, for example, the 2022 Winter Games, which the International Olympic Committee awarded to Beijing this past Friday over Almaty, Kazakhstan. The original list of bidding cities was much longer – including Oslo, Norway and Stockholm – and each city’s reasoning for withdrawing its bid is telling.
“Norway is a rich country, but we don’t want to spend money on wrong things, like satisfying the crazy demands from IOC apparatchiks,” wrote a Norwegian political commentator in VG, a national newspaper. “These insane demands that they should be treated like the king of Saudi Arabia just won’t fly with the Norwegian public.”
Yikes. Well, maybe things weren’t so bad for the Swedes.
“Although the calculations are thorough, we estimate that revenues will likely be lower and costs higher than the investigation indicates,” said Stockholm’s top financial mayor in a statement.
That’s not exactly a vote of confidence for the IOC, yet those fears are justified when you look at the price tag of recent Games. Vancouver, Canada 2010: $6.4 billion. London 2012: $14 billion. Sochi, Russia 2014: $51 billion. Clearly, the extravagance of new infrastructure, facilities and good ol’ Olympic pomp and circumstance has skyrocketed out of control.
Bostonians weren’t supportive of the ordeal and Walsh wasn’t willing to commit to handing the IOC a blank check, so everybody is rightfully moving on. With the United States’ sudden vacancy in the 2024 process, the IOC has already announced their desire to find an alternative city.
Enter Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was one of three cities that lost out to Boston – San Francisco and Washington D.C., being the other two – but, in reality, Los Angeles continued to be an active lurker throughout the entire process. As public support for Boston’s bid hovered near 40 percent, rumors swirled that the USOC was considering backup plans in Los Angeles.
Now that the path to a bid is clear, the rumblings have exploded into a clamorous frenzy.
The prevailing belief is that the USOC will choose Los Angeles as its candidate city selection by the Sept. 15 deadline. I wholeheartedly agree that the city is the United States’ strongest Olympic candidate, but that does not leave me without concerns.
Los Angeles has facilities that, while not pristine and new, are easily viable locations for the Olympics. The only problem is that the IOC has an obsession with shiny things. If the city goes all-in for the 2024 bid, there will certainly be external pressure to build excessively. Los Angeles must restrain itself and commit to restoration projects for these athletic facilities that fit into long-term plans.
Another concern – one that was prevalent in Boston – is the Games’ cost to taxpayers. Financially, Los Angeles only needs to look back at its own Olympic history to find prime examples of moderation.
The 1984 Olympics, Los Angeles’ second hosting gig, were the first Summer Games to make a profit since 1932 when the Olympics were in sunny Southern California.
While the total costs in 1984 reached nearly half a billion dollars, private funding from corporate sponsors, media rights and ticket sales covered the bill.
“Anyone who was here (in 1984) will remember the Games were privately funded and took in more money than they cost,” said David Simon, the President of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, in a 2013 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We would hope to do the same thing again (in 2024).”
If the city protects the taxpayers from having to pay for unnecessary extravagance and proceeds with cautious optimism into the next stages of the process, its bid should be met with continued positive public opinion. The 2024 Games offer a chance for Los Angeles to bring the Olympics back to what it’s truly about – celebrating athletes who span the globe – while shedding unnecessary frills.
With all of this said, if the USOC does choose Los Angeles for the country’s bid, nobody knows whether the IOC will be all too thrilled to give the city its third Games when the vote is counted in September 2017. Paris, Toronto and Rome currently stand as the toughest competition for the undecided U.S. city, and the IOC may find one of them to be a better fit over the next two years.
No matter how long the process continues, however, Los Angeles owes it to its residents to act responsibly in the face of the Olympic money spending vortex.
In nine years, as the Olympic flame ignites over the Coliseum … or, a renovated Rose Bowl … or, a new NFL stadium … okay, let’s just say somewhere in Southern California, the country might take a moment to thank Boston once again for making the right decision.
