It is when you’re paying the suckee for the right to do it. With other people’s money. In public.
Didn’t you also get a baseball team? Not that I expect you to remember or care; in fact, I fervently hope and pray that you give as little a shit for the Montreal Expos as you possibly can, and encourage all of your friends to do the same.
[sup](And I’ll be just a little bit closer to seeing them move down here and become the Washington Senators! Woo hoo!0[/sup]
/hijack/
Dude, how many times do the Sen… oops, the Twins and the other Sen… oops, the Rangers, have to move out of Washington before you realize that DC cannot and will not support a cheezy, low rent baseball team?
Remembar… First in war, First in peace, and Last in the American League 
.
/end hijack/
Mmmm… no, still not seeing it.
Esprix
So NYC 2012 is up and running, too, with all three newspapers on board. Now, New York is one of the few cities in the world that could host the Olympics without really noticing it, but still it’s a joke.
The Olympics work best for those cities that have something to prove: I’m rebuilt from the ashes! (Tokyo, Rome); I’m first-world now! (Tokyo again, Seoul, Mexico, Atlanta, Athens); [Jesse Jackson] I am somebody! [/Jesse Jackson] (Atlanta, Barcelona, Montreal, Melbourne, Munich, Tokyo, Seoul, Helsinki, Sydney). Moscow and LA are special cases.
So what’s Toronto’s problem?
There’s a reason no True World Capital* has held the Olympics since 1948. There’s all the downside (huge expense, inconvenience, etc.) and not enough upside. I mean, people know that Paris is fabulous. New York already has more tourists than it can handle.
The argument they’re using here is that it provides a great impetus to build some desperately-needed infrastructure. Well, I don’t really buy that. Yes, the athletic housing might become middle-class apartments. Yes, it might give a key push to a couple of needed transit links. But no, we don’t need (a) a new Olympics/Football stadium, (b) a replacement for Madison Square Toilet, © a wildly expensive transit link that would take people to A, B and the convention center (itself a white elephant - how many conventions want to deal with NYC hotel prices?), or (d)(e)(f)(g) multifarious other athletic facilities to be used once and then never again (ask Sydney about this one).
I mean, I love the whole symbolism of international competition, etc., and I think that once you get away from the top events that impulse is still there. But spend billions on it?
*True World Capital: A genuine crossroads for much of the planet, not just in politics but in finance and culture. By my calculations, at this time only the following qualify at the most stringent level: New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong (and maybe Berlin). Toronto’s really in a second tier, with Seoul, Beijing, LA, SF, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Sao Paolo, Cairo, etc. - regionally important and very well known, but not quite diversified enough to make the top cut.
adam yax:
The Calgary games blew $417 million in 1988 dollars. See Dr. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj’s Inside the Olympic Industry for the ugly figures.
What you might have heard is that “the Olympics didn’t lose any money,” which is true if you mean “The IOC didn’t lose any money.” That’s literally true because the governments of Alberta and Canada lost all the money. The Olympic people didn’t lose a dime of THEIR money. WE lost it.
Esprix:
Whatever.
No need to worry. I’m sure the local politicos will screw the whole thing up before the IOC even gets here. (For non-BADS: the Bay Area is made up of 9 separate counties with 9 separate governments, none of which ever ever ever ever ever agree with each other, meaning that Stuff Is Fucked Up.)
I’m just afraid that the minute we count on infighting and inefficiency to save us from the Olympics, some charismatic yahoo will wave an American flag one too many times and get everyone on the same page to jump on the bandwagon.
We must be ever vigilant.
Sorry - was just joshin’ ya.
(Although I do see a new thread here… Hmmm…)
Esprix
But would it be Great Debates, or IMHO? Weigh in on my Archie thread.
Snoooopy:
This is what allegedly saved Toronto from billions in debt in 1996; a lot of people locally campaigned against it under the banner of “Bread not Circuses.” Unfortunately, I don’t want to throw my hat into the ring with BnC because they just want to steal the taxpayer’s money for different types of boondoggles; they bury a lot of their good points under the standard Chairman Mao litany of complaints against Western society. IMO, a focused campaign would be much better, based on a three-part platform:
- This is gonna cost us a zillion dollars and we’re not going to see a return on it.
- This is gonna cost us a zillion dollars and we’re not going to see a return on it.
- This is gonna cost us a zillion dollars and we’re not gonna see a return on it.
You could get into deeper issues such as Toronto’s deep-seated insecurity and longing for international recognition. I don’t know why people think anyone would give a crap about Toronto after the Olympics; the notion of the Olympics going to great cities was pretty much torpedoed by giving it to Atlanta. If the Olympics lasts another hundred years, people will be looking at a list of all the Olympic cities and saying “Why the hell did they hold it in Atlanta?”
.
I’ve got the solution for the IOG mess-hold these fucking roman circuses where the people actually VOTE to pay for them! I have ABSOLUTELY ZERO interest in 90% of these events-like “ribbon dancing” and trampolene for example! I also don’t care about synchronized swimming, or biathlon, or graeco-roman wrestling!
It is absolutely scandalous, how much money is wasted on these retarded spectacles-that almopst nobody watches-or break the evnts up, so that they can be held in locations where the necessary infrastructure already exists. We could have the skiing events in Switzerland, and let the ribbon dancing event be held in some inner-city gymnasium!
quote:
Originally posted by matt_mcl
and ... uh, the
Decarie Expressway.
Uh, isn’t that an oxymoron ?
I don’t believe that me, a Montrealer all my life, will say something good for Toronto.
DON’T GET THE OLYMPICS !!! FIGHT THEM WITH ALL YOUR HEART AND SOUL
25 years after the fact we’re still paying for them. The Olympic Stadium is a danger to anybody who attends event there, it falls apart if you look at it crosswise.
Let me tell you a little story. When the Olympic installations were being built, in the early 70s, I was living nearby the construction site (on Pie IX boulevard, south of the worksite, for those who know the city). Every single day, for the whole duration of the construction (3 long years), spring, summer, fall and winter, we had to sweep ounces of dust caused by the excavations (grams was more the norm before).
NOt only that, we lost 9 holes of the Municipal golf course (the only course where you didn’t need membership to play at the time) to the infamous Taillibert pyramids AKA the Olympic Village. Sure, we got a metro extension, but we would have gotten it anyway. Sure, we got tourists up the kazoo, but they were a flash in the pan. We also destroyed several neighborhoods just to accommodate the transportation infrastructure (which wasn’t build until AFTER the events). We also had a governmental inquiry about the mismanagement of this disaster (by the way, we are still waiting for the book promised at this inquiry by then mayor Jean Drapeau, now dead. If it is published (AH !), if written, we would know that God is dead and Jean “Egghead” Drapeau is still in charge from beyond the grave :eek:).
As for John Corrado, we got the baseball team in 69 (that’s why they are called the Expos, because Expo 67 was still a fresh memory). BTW, Jarry Park, the original home of the Expos, was a much better baseball stadium than the Big O has ever been.
i do not want the olympics in toronto, for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread, but…
you seem to be forgetting that advertising dollars are just slightly more powerful than the bribes you mention. networks do not want another sydney situation to deal with. beijing is 12 hours different from toronto, which of course decreases the american viewing audience by a great deal.
now, if everyone had voted for tooker gomberg like they were supposed to, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
And they’re renaming Île-Sainte-Hélène metro after him.
Well, he did bring in the metro and Expo, which of course are Good Things. But he also kicked the Gay Village out of downtown* and, of course, built the Olympic Stadium.
So now we’ve got at least two anti-Semites and a homophobe in our metro system… sigh
*We got our revenge though… now, the station in his metro system that serves the modern Village has a great big rainbow flag on it. Yay. 
You think that Toronto bidding on the Olympics is bad? Pheh. Pittsburgh is supposed to be bidding, as well. It seems my home town has let its two new stadiums (and the monstrous debts that go with them) go to their heads. All water events will be held in the Allegheny River, barring toxic poisoning and mutant fish attacks.
I’m a Seattleite, and I remember how we used to go through this debate every year. Boosters say they want to put Seattle on the world stage (aren’t we there already, at least in a AAA-baseball sort of way?). Naysayers wonder why we have all this money to build football and baseball stadia and give tax breaks to downtown corporations, but we still have thousands of homeless people and badly rutted roads and no solution in sight to our shitty traffic situation. The boosters claim revenue opportunities. Naysayers provide stats about how much money these things actually cost. It went back and forth, back and forth, seemingly without resolution.
And then we hosted WTO.
Y’all know how successful that little shindig turned out to be. But on the plus side, the Olympics proposals vanished like fog in the afternoon…