URL=“http://www.aldaver.com/votes.html”]Detroit, Michigan made several attempts to land the Summer Olympic Games. It was a candidate city for the never-played 1944 games, as well as for 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972. The Motor City came closest to landing the Olympics in 1963, when the International Olympic Committee scored it just behind Mexico City for the then-future 1968 games.
This thread presents a “what if” scenaro: what if the IOC considered that with Mexico City’s pollution, poverty, and high altitude, it really wasn’t the best place for the Games. Detroit had a mild summer climate, a good economy, plenty of hotel rooms, and the money to build the facilities that were needed. Remember, Detroit was a much different city in the early 1960s than today; there were still problems with race relations, but downtown was vibrant, the US auto industry was prospering, and there was a very large middle class that lived in the city limits. Up until the 1950s, the region was growing as fast as the Los Angeles area. The city didn’t have the stigma it did now.
So, let’s envision what a 1968 Detroit Summer Olympic Games would be like. What would be the state of the city afterwards? Would the Games have slowed the future decline of the city, or would there have been no difference whatsoever?
Detroit politics was still as corrupt, however. My guess is that you would have had the same type of 1976 Montreal debacle. Cost overruns and still paying it off today.
Well, those political events weren’t exactly planned. The riots were in 1967, though, which probably would have hurt attendance. The anticipation of the Olympics probably wouldn’t have done anything to avoid the confrontation; in fact, widescale urban renewal to build Olympic-related facilities and venues would have made it worse.
On top of that, let’s say there’s extra security in the region, in part to “keep the blacks in their place, and not scare the tourists”, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos still took medal positions and raised their fists. That could have been the seeds which would have grown into another riot, only during the Games. The result: a fiasco of epic proportions that the city would never live down, and which would keep the US from hosting both the winter and summer Olympic games for decades.
200-300 students were killed in riots with the military in Mexico city just days before the Olympics. The scenario you describe seems pretty mild in comparison to the Tlatelolco massacre .
I agree that the cost of the games would have plunged the city in debt and depression even faster.