Drugs scandals and Rio’s haphazard preparations have dominated the
headlines but the most worrying sign for Thomas Bach and co has barely
been reported – does anyone really want to host the Games any more?
The opening ceremony of the Montreal Games in 1976 was a colourful
affair but the city took 30 years to pay off its Olympic debt.
Photograph: Tony Duffy/Getty Images You do not need to be an academic to spot the pattern. But
Christopher Gaffney is – a senior research fellow at the University of
Zurich, he is a prominent voice in the anti-Olympic movement
– and he describes it this way: “Wherever we see an educated population
that has a relatively free press, relatively high levels of
governmental transparency, and that has put it up for a referendum, in
every one of those cases we have seen the Olympics be rejected. Without
exception.” In the west, at least, it seems no one wants to play host
anymore.
The
IOC has been in a similar position before, after the disastrous
Montreal Games in 1976. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off its Olympic
debt. The upshot was that Los Angeles was the only city in for 1984.
Because it was the only bidder, it was able to dictate terms. So the IOC
was cut out of all the TV and sponsorship deals but it was able to turn
to the sizeable profits LA made to its own advantage in other ways. It
used it to incentivise other cities to bid. Five applied to host in
1992. Eight in 2000. Eleven in 2004. The IOC became “a monopoly rights
holder of a business that seeks to extract rent from cities”, as Gaffney
puts it. “They depend on having a group of cities competing against
each other, raising the stakes.”
Where there was resistance, it came from the fringes. In Amsterdam
protesters posted bags of marijuana to the IOC’s officials, then pelted
them with eggs and tomatoes when they appeared in public. In Berlin a
coalition of “anarchists, dropouts, punks, gays and lesbians, the
alternatives, the stone-throwers, the fire-eaters, the grafters, the
poor, the drunkards and the madmen” marched in the streets when the IOC
made its final inspection of the city. The difference now is Olympic
resistance has become mainstream. “What we’re seeing,” Gaffney says, is
that “the more information citizens have about how the IOC works, the
less likely they are to want to engage in that kind of business
contract”.
Chris Dempsey was one of the leaders of the No Boston Olympics
campaign. He once worked at the management consultancy Bain, and had
been an assistant secretary of transportation for Massachusetts. “We
were the people that showed up to meetings with suits on and power point
presentations,” Dempsey says. “We were comfortable working on the
inside, so to speak.” Dempsey and his group simply saw it is a question
of civic priorities. “The Olympics
would be a huge net cost on our city and our state, in that if our
governor and mayor were focused on building a stadium and building a
velodrome, they were going to be less focused on improving education and
fixing roads.” It was, Gaffney adds, “a clear-eyed, pragmatic, American
way of looking at this, to say: ‘We’re not going to spend tax money on
hosting a three-week party.’”
Over
the course of two months early in 2015, public opinion in Boston
completely flipped. In January it had been polling 54% in favour of the
bid. By March, the figure fell to 38%. In between, No Boston Olympics
picked apart the details of the bid, cut through the “glossy brochures
showing how the venues would look” and made it clear “the taxpayers were
on the hook”. The Boston bid became untenable. Dempsey says it was “a
reaction to the excesses of recent years. Especially Beijing but also
London, because when you look at what was actually spent on those
Olympics it is something like four times the original budget.”
In Hamburg, on the other hand, the anti-Olympic movement was rooted
in the left. Florian Kasiske ran the PR for the NOlympia campaign.
“There was a spectrum,” he says. It combined students, young members of
the left-wing parties and a lot of harbour workers who were against the
Olympics too, because their jobs were being threatened.”
Kasiske says one of the big issues was the gentrification of the
city, especially around the harbour. “The Games are a big motor for
displacement of poor people from inner city areas.” The other was the
immigration crisis. “The people kept asking: ‘How can we organise the
Olympics when we have to find housing for so many of the people who have
come to the city? These people are sleeping in tents, and the
politicians want to make a new velodrome?”
In Boston and Hamburg, small, well-organised protest movements faced
down powerful political and corporate coalitions. “The people that were
pushing the bid were people that stood to benefit,” Dempsey says. In
Hamburg, NOlympia overcame a bid backed by the mayor and the chamber of
commerce. Both cases reflected Gaffney’s view the Olympics have become
about “the selling of the city by the city’s own elites”. The more
information the public have about all this, he says, “the less likely
they are to want to engage in it”. Dempsey agrees: “Cities are starting
to understand the IOC’s demands are unreasonable.”
“The IOC only have power if cities show up to bid. Eventually it may
come to a breaking point where the IOC has to make real reforms.”
In Monaco Bach introduced Agenda 2020, a plan to reduce the barriers
to bidding. Dempsey suggests it is not enough. “I would question whether
moving to a different city every four years is really a model that
makes sense in today’s world. Maybe in the 1890s it made sense but you
are now in a world where 99.9% of people that engage with the Olympics
do it on a screen.” He believes the Games should have a single permanent host venue .
Gaffney is more radical. “The same mistakes are made over and over
again. So it can’t be an accident and if it’s not an accident, then we
have to realise that the IOC’s business model is noxious,” he says. “We
need to have a serious rethink about the way these events drive
inequality on a global scale. And the best way to do that is to stop
them. Full stop.”
Source: theguardian
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please, leave your comments here: