As Daniel Burnham Spins In His Grave

While relatively quiet about it, I was a proponent of Chicago’s Olympic bid. My friends and acquaintances seemed to be about evenly divided on the matter, reflecting the populace at large, at least if the polls that the local media conducted on the issue are to be trusted.

I found the fairly widespread and often passionate opposition within Chicago to hosting the Olympics a bit perplexing. Leaving out the usual knee-jerk opposition by the confused fringe who oppose any kind of civic improvement as a matter of course, what remained were two legitimate gripes: first, that the Olympics might not make money like it’s organizers imagined, eventually sticking the Chicago taxpayer with the bill; and second, that many of the contracts generated by the games would wind up in the pockets of the well-connected.

But these opponents were all playing small-ball. The reality is that the Summer Olympics have been a consistent game changer for at least half a century, vaulting the host city into the rarified air of places that matter.

Before hosting the Olympics, Atlanta, Munich and Barcelona were each a center of their respective regional economies but lacked a significant global footprint. For each, the Olympics were a coming-out party of sorts, helping to catapult them to the forefront of the global imagination, at least for a couple of weeks, and, coincidently or not, the fortunes of all three have been much brighter since hosting the games. Atlanta vaulted into a clear frontrunner as the first city of the New South; Munich has become a more prominent economic and political force within Germany; and Barcelona has become a preeminent tourist destination while Catalonian culture in general has gotten a boost.

This civic boost is even true for some of the more powerful and influential cities to host an Olympic games. Take Beijing. I was there to speak at an agricultural conference in 2005, three years before the 2008 games. Never mind that the city itself was an irredeemable shithole, with 17 million people plopped into a barbaric outpost on a dry, dusty plain without a source of decent drinking water, subject to lung-wrenching smog and periodic dust storms that could literally blot out the sun on a cloudless day. The city was out to transform itself into a worthy capital of what will soon likely become the most powerful country on the planet, and that optimism was expressed in every crane that dotted the city skyline. There wouldn’t be just one crane working on a building, there would be seven, and the hotel or the aquatic center would span two city blocks. Beijing may have been an unlikely spot to build a capital, but the collective will of that town was out to prove that the city could be a worthy host to the rest of the world.

The actual profit or loss that a metropolis makes hosting the Olympic Games is essentially irrelevant. So are whatever jobs that come with hosting the games. What counts is the prestige that goes with hosting the Olympics, particularly if you run the games well.

I lived in L.A. in 1984, and I can tell you first-hand that it was a lot of fun to be in the city when the Olympics were there. The Los Angeles Olympics were not just well-run but profitable. To be blunt, it was a two-week demonstration of the pleasures of fascism. Peter Ueberroth, the organizer of the games, worked out an arrangement with the business leaders of the city, and for two weeks, the oil refineries in San Pedro didn’t run during the day, and most of the major corporations staggered their work schedules. The result was that, over virtually the entire Olympic fortnight, there was an almost total absence of traffic jams and smog. The L.A. Basin reverted to its natural state, the kind of sunny utopia it must have been when my grandparents first pulled up stakes from central Illinois and southeast Kansas, respectively, and made California home.

I pictured Rahm Emanuel leaving his role as White House Chief of Staff in 2014, knocking heads and taking names, making the trains run on time, providing Chicago with two weeks of its own taste of beneficent fascism. There aren’t many opportunities in our tawdry democracy where one can enjoy the benefits of that kind of corporate-state coordination, and I was really looking forward to it.

But alas, Chicago was not chosen by the International Olympic Committee. In fact, it was the first city eliminated in the final round of voting, leading to a lot of soul searching in this town as to why, a question being asked by both proponents and opponents of the bid. I think the answer is three-fold but fairly straightforward, and that it is important to correctly ascertain these reasons because they imply a call-to-action and because the truth serves as a necessary corrective to some of the wishful thinking and misinformation being sold as insight in this town, including ridiculous ideas like that Chicago lost the bid because of the corruption of its government leaders (The International Olympic Committee has to be one of the most corrupt and bribe-able institutions on the planet, and the inside deals made in the corridors of power of Brasilia or Beijing make what goes on inside the Daley Center seem like child’s play. And does anyone remember the personal favors that Mayor Andrew Young, former ambassador to the U.N., called in to have Atlanta chosen over Athens on the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics? If anything, the Chicagoans who came to Copenhagen last week needed to be more corrupt, or at least not so wide-eyed and innocent at their prospect of winning a fair vote).

First and foremost, Chicago didn’t get the Games because the bid leaders put all their chips on an out-and-out gamble of being everyone’s second choice, a calculated risk taken by necessity, because even these Chicagoans believed that Rio de Janeiro had the strongest emotional appeal. Meanwhile, Madrid and Tokyo focused their energies on an entirely different strategy, namely not being the first one out. Both were long shots, and thus tried to solidify a base of support in that first round, to the point where Juan Antonio Samaranch, the leader of the Madrid bid and former head of the IOC, gave a teary-eyed speech asking the committee to give him this last vote before he died (conveniently ignoring the fact that Barcelona hosted the Summer games in 1992). The result was that Madrid, which was never going to get the games, ended up with the most votes in the first round, while Chicago was knocked out of the competition. For all we know, Chicago may have won a one-on-one matchup with Rio de Janeiro, but it got outplayed early and would never get the chance to attempt it’s gambit of being everybody else’s second choice.

The second reason Chicago lost goes to the point of why the bid leaders felt the need to play the role of pragmatists: Chicago really didn’t really believe in itself. If everyone agrees that Rio de Janeiro is the most exciting option, then you have to find another angle. But we did, and still do, have a competing story to tell the world, that Chicago is the great American city, capital of the Midwest, heart of the nation’s breadbasket and an elemental part of the American character. Chicago in the summer is a stunning place, from our beautiful lakefront to our skyline and architecture, a metropolis freed from the grip of winter whose pent-up energy is then released in a thousand ethnic and neighborhood festivals. But we never really attempted to tell this story, never tried to make the rest of the planet truly excited to come here.

Lastly, the Chicago bid did not have the whole-hearted support of the city, and this has its roots in the Daley Administration’s top-down distrust of the people. Actually, I don’t entirely blame them for this. The reality is that there is a big chunk of our populace who shouldn’t be trusted. As a community, most of us collectively realize this, and that’s why we keep voting to reelect the Mayor, because we intuitively understand the man’s arrogance is a necessary bulwark against most of the blow-hards and ignoramuses who skulk around City Hall or have the phrase “activist” attached to their shingle.

The problem is that the Mayor’s arrogance, which one brimmed with enthusiasm to remake the city, is now a tired arrogance, a paint-by-numbers authoritarianism. Once he signed on to the Chicago Olympic bid, he got together the requisite civic and business leaders and then assumed he could set up a Potemkin Village of public support. Hey, it’s not like Brazilian President Lula da Silva doesn’t have his own underclass that he needs to sweep under the rug, it’s just that he was able to generate enough civic pride and enthusiasm that the activists decided to come on board.

In terms of corruption, I viewed the Olympics a lot like I view Millennium Park. For years, all we heard about about Millennium Park were the politically-connected dealings, the construction snafus, and the cost overruns. But now that it is finished and part of our urban landscape, who isn’t glad that it’s there? Millennium Park is our generation’s gift to our posterity. I understand that the city is going to take a lot of my money, and a lot of that money will probably either be wasted or end up in the hands of shady characters. All I ask it that I get something real in return. Give the people a Millennium Park, modernize the CTA, make a real attempt at a Midwestern high speed rail network, and I’ll gladly give you my taxes and barely squawk when you skim off the cream. But don’t raise my taxes just to keep your patronage army in place.

The Chicago Olympic bid never should have been about money, or jobs, or even neighborhood redevelopment. It never should have been about getting “what’s mine”. Rather, it should have been a call to civic pride, of being part of something greater than yourself.

The Olympics should have been our coming-out party, probably the first time since the Columbian Exposition when Chicago was the center of the world. And we all blew it, from the mayor on down, because of a begrudging pettiness.