Chicago Olympics bid: Smoke, mirrors and synchronized swimming

Imagine it’s the summer of 2016.  You arrive early to Lake Shore Drive to stake out a spot on the front row, wait two and a half hours and then try not to blink as cyclists whir by like a swarm of bees.  Then you take a sip from your $8 lemonade and begin the four-hour trek home.

Oh, I can’t wait until the Olympics come to Chicago.

Maybe cycling isn’t your thing and you instead decide to watch some track and field events in was used to be Washington Park, and what is now Olympic Stadium.  Midway through the 800-meter relay, you realize that you don’t know who any of these athletes are, you probably have a parking ticket and that there isn’t enough beer in the world to make you care who wins.  As you leave the stadium, you wonder what the city will do with Olympic Stadium after the events—and who will pay for it.

I pose this question to all the fans of the Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox who live in Chicago: How much enjoyment will you really get from the Olympics being in your city? (Keep in mind we’re talking about a collection of sports—including badminton and synchronized swimming—that are relevant once every four years for a reason.)  And will that enjoyment outweigh the potential costs and inconveniences?

You can call me an American elitist sports snob, and you know what? You’d be right…and I’m not alone.   And while my reasons for not wanting the Olympics to come to Chicago may center around how terribly unexciting I consider its events to be, there’s more to this story than that. 

Take the Chicagoans for Rio, a group that is reportedly driving the organizers of the Chicago 2016 bid a little crazy. The Chicagoans for Rio website presents figures on the massive debt accumulated by host cities (Montreal took 30 years to pay off their debt from the ’76 Games) and useless construction (21 of the 22 structures from the recent Athens Olympics are presently going unused).

These are very real risks for Chicago, and Mayor Daley has yet to provide concrete answers on how the city will pay for the Olympics, at times saying taxpayers will not foot a dime of the bill, and other times being considerably less adamant in his assurances.  Recently, he lauded a plan for buying $1.2 billion worth of insurance as a good thing for taxpayers. 

That’s swell of you, Mr. Mayor, but I fail to understand how government spending $1.2 billion is ever a good thing for taxpayers.   Maybe the astronomical cost is the insurance company trying to tell us a little secret: Do not host the Olympics.

“Oh, but all that is irrelevant,” say the proponents of bringing the Olympics to Chicago.  Whatever the cost, the city will reap endless economic benefits from the global prestige and tourism associated with hosting the Olympics.

As someone who doesn’t own a restaurant or hotel in Chicago and doesn’t own a well-connected construction company, I have a hard time identifying any meaningful and tangible way in which these benefits will “trickle down” to me.  As for the world prestige argument, I tend to doubt that many meaningful and tangible benefits would stem from that—and I suspect the citizens of Salt Lake City would agree with me.  I’m sure, though, that Mayor Daley looks forward to getting his face on global newscasts for a couple weeks.

But I can’t blame Daley for his lack of specifics.  He just needs smoke-and-mirrors to make it to the Olympic announcement on October 2nd.  If he has any bad news to give to taxpayers, it makes no sense for him to give it before then.

Regardless of what Daley has previously said, if the Olympics do end up coming here, common sense says, in the long run, it will much more likely be bad news for taxpayers than it will be good.

And—as fun as watching live cycling could be—that’s a risk I have no interest in taking, both as a sports snob….and as a taxpayer.

Michael Demkovich is a Marketing and Communications Associate with the Illinois Policy Institute.