To date, the United States Olympic Committee
has received letters of intent from 10 American cities interested in earning
the U.S. bid to host the Summer Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012. Tampa
is among them. Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic
Committee, calls the Olympics “the most important event in our society.”
This is debatable. What's sure is that the modern Olympics are a
highly sophisticated
political/business enterprise that has numerous U.S. cities in
a frenzy to beckon billions.
Other than Tampa, bidding cities for 2012
are Baltimore, Cincinnati, Houston, Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles,
San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Arlington, Texas (a suburb of Dallas/Ft.
Worth.), all with anticipated budgets of more than $10 million on just
the initial phase of the bidding process.
Olympic advocates say the Games are a financial
windfall for host cities and the states that surround them, with local
Olympic Organizing Committees sucking in hordes of money related to sporting
and cultural events, the media, pre Olympic training, marketing activities,
athletes, officials, spectators and other visitors.
“Baltimore wants the Olympics because
it will create 60,000-70,000 jobs and bring $5 billion to the economy,”
says John Moag, president of Baltimore and Beyond, Baltimore's Olympic
organizing committee.
But there's much debate surrounding the
use of economic multipliers to gauge the value of sports events. The Discovery
Institute, a Seattle conservative think tank, conducted a feasibility study
on that city's competing campaign for 2012. The report concluded that –
at a cost of $1.7 billion and an anticipated net of a skim $60 million
-- a Seattle Olympics would not result in an economic bonanza.
And there's no shortage of economists to
blow holes in Olympic economic impact estimates. (See related story.)
A major issue in Tampa is the "opportunity
cost" of an Olympic bid. The growth of the Olympic Games in recent years
has made the bidding process extremely complicated and competitive -- local
organizing committees must put tremendous effort into bidding.
In addition to the dollars funnelled into Tampa's Olympic effort, most
of the regions top business and governmental leaders will need to devote
large slices of time to the project, sucking resources from other issues
with a more direct impact on the area.
For example, how can Hillsborough County
justify pursuing the Olympics when the county schools are so overcrowded?
“We do more than one thing as a state,”
says Commissioner Ed Turanchik.
Advocates also say that the Olympics leave
a long term “legacy” with host cities -- national and international recognition
for through extensive media exposure.
But is the Bay area really
ready?
“Tampa's a great city and I take Tampa seriously,”
says Moag. “But – and no offence – as compared to Baltimore, for example,
an old, sophisticated, urban East Coast city, Tampa … well … Tampa
is what it is.”
Tampa has yet to form an official organizing
committee to lead the local effort, but Turanchik
says a provisional group will announce a formal assembly as well as
Tampa's plan of attack sometime before Christmas.
“Each city has to consider if and why they
really want to do this,” says Nick Vehr, president of the Greater Cincinnati
Amateur Sports Association – created July 1996 to co-ordinate greater Cincinnati's
bid for XXX Olympiad. “Bidding for the Olympics is an unbelievably massive
exercise.”
Getting in the Games
Everything related to the Olympics is orchestrated
and leveraged by the 104 member, International Olympic Committee (IOC),
based in Lausanne, Switzerland. About eight years before a given
Olympics, the IOC sets a deadline for bid proposals for that Games. (The
deadline for the 2012 Games, for example, is 2004.) Any city or region
is allowed to bid, but each country is limited to one candidate, selected
by a National Olympic Committee (NOC). The United States Olympic
Committee (USOC) selects which U.S. city will present the International
Committee with a bid.
A year after all countries have submitted
their bid cities, the IOC selects a host. For the 2012 summer games, The
U.S. representative is scheduled to be selected in late 2002. The International
Olympic Committee will pick overall winner in 2005, seven years before
the event.
The United States is no Olympic ingenue.
St. Louis, Missouri was the first American city to hold the Games, in 1904.
Los Angeles and Lake Placid, New York each have held the Games on 2 occasions.
Salt Lake City, Utah was awarded the right to host the Olympic Winter Games
in the year 2002. And, of course, there was Atlanta 1996.
But Tampa beating out the other American
cities for 2012 U.S. bid doesn't mean we’ll get the Olympics – the viability
of future U.S. bids is uncertain.
While they were the biggest, most expensive
Olympics ever, featuring top level competition and record crowds, the Atlanta
Games left a bitter taste.
A fatal pipe bombing in Centennial Olympic
Park, the main public gathering spot for the Games, was the first terrorist
attack at the Olympics since the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian
factions in Munich 1972.
Additionally, technology and transportation,
two areas promoted as strong points of America's infrastructure, broke
down in Atlanta, embarrassing organizers and the IOC.
“Some (IOC members) feel they were
tricked by Atlanta,'' one USOC official says. “Los Angeles went so well,
and they expected Atlanta to be the same.”
The official, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, says the USOC should concentrate on making sure the 1998
Salt Lake City Winter Games are as trouble free as possible.
Taking heed, the U.S. Olympic Committee
recently delayed selection of a U.S. finalist by 2 years (the selection
was originally slated for the year 2000), to focus more attention on Salt
Lake City. USOC executive director, told Around the Rings, an Olympic related
publication (IS THAT WHAT THIS IS?), that the U.S. can “forget about a
2012 bid if Salt Lake City is less than successful.”
America's Next Great City
The 1996 version of the Olympics in Atlanta
marked the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympic Games. The Games opened
in Atlanta on the evening July 19,1996 and concluded 16 days later on August
4, 1996 – drawing more than 2 million visitors. The heart of the
Atlanta Games was a bustling Olympic village in the heart of downtown,
and the spectacle spanned the entire region, with a number of competitions
held in surrounding Georgia cities and preliminary rounds held in Birmingham,
Alabama, Orlando, and Washington, D.C.
Atlanta snagged the Olympics, essentially,
by playing the race card in reverse. The white mayor, Andy Young, teamed
up with one of his fishing buddies, Billy Payne, an African American former
college football player who had a Dream. They canvassed the world, humming
“Ebony and Ivory,” marketing Atlanta to the IOC as a human rights capital.
But it isn't as though Atlanta is some
backwater that popped out of nowhere to snag the Olympiad. The Atlanta
metropolitan area has a population over 3 million people and ranks only
behind Chicago, New York and Houston as the city with the most fortune
500 headquarters. It’s a blue chip convention city that in recent years
has hosted a Democratic National Convention, a Superbowl and 3 World Series.
Tampa, on the other hand, has little prior
recognition. In their November 14 issue, Around the Rings reported that
the buzz around the first symposium attended by representatives of the
10 U.S. cities bidding and the USOC (held in Orlando November 5 and 6)
is that Tampa – a last minute entry – “is considered a novice in the world
of international sports” (international anything?) and is expected to drop
out of the race way before the finish line.
Turanchik gives us better chances. “You
have to say they're 1 out of 8,” the commissioner says optimistically.
(It's anticipated that Washington D.C. and Maryland will merge their bids,
and Arlington is soon expected drop out of the contest, -- narrowing the
field from 10 to 8.) “It's far to early to determine how competitive any
one city is, but one the face of it we have a lot of the necessary ingredients
– 2 airports, 140,000 hotel rooms, attractive tourist venues, attractive
climate and sports amenities.”
There are 28 sports venues, 4 convention
centers and several colleges and universities between St. Petersburg and
Orlando, but the distance spans nearly 100 miles and, if they're workable
at all, many of those facilities will require significant improvements
to suit the Olympics.
Tampa also has no mass transit and frightful
infrastructure (Say the Olympic Village was somewhere around Ybor – just
imagine 2 million tourists coming in via I-4.)
Even Seattle, a city that recently passed
an initiative and bond measure to build a 40 mile, 22 station monorail
and has new stadiums from both the Mariners and the Seahawks, cited problems
with infrastructure and facilities in the Discovery Institute Study that
examined the city's Olympic chances.
The $425 million, Seahawk/soccer stadium,
scheduled to open in 2002, “can't be used for track and field or opening/closing
ceremonies, because of its design,” says Bob Walsh, a Seattle sports marketer
helping spearhead that city's campaign. And Husky Stadium at the University
of Washington (the only other option for hosting those two main events)
“would require upgrades so massive that building a new venue seems the
only option that's viable,” he says.
Atlanta, too, had existing facilities,
but still ended up spending $600 million on Olympic venues – among them
a $189 million Olympic Stadium, the 1,400-acre Georgia International Horse
Park, the $17 million Wolf Creek Shooting Range Complex, a tennis facility
at Stone Mountain, and the $10 million Lake Lanier Rowing Center.
Tampa, at the very least, would have to
build an Olympic Stadium, an Olympic Village to accommodate 15,000 people
and a natatorium (Atlanta's cost $24 million) for aquatic events, and numerous
practice facilities.
But being fit for the Olympics is more
than just venues. “Along with the physical structures, certain social,
political and economic structures must pre-exist within a city for it to
be awarded the Olympic Games,” says Douglas Ingram, USOC Director of Games
Operations.
To win a bid, Tampa must measure up to demanding
international standards – something it hasn't done before.
Major
Taxpayer Risk for Questionable Returns
Essentially the task in hosting a summer
Olympics is this: The host city must entertain 2,600 VIP guests, provide
facilities for approximately 270 events in 37 disciplines, events, and
provide transportation and housing for 10,000 athletes, 3 million visitors
and 1,400 support personnel. (All of which seems unlikely when our city
requires a small, downtown army of cops to usher spectators safely in and
out of a Lightening game.)
Here's just a few of the areas where Tampa's
going to have to get
it together:
Housing: Athletes and officials from 197
nations, numbering over 15,000, participated in the Atlanta Games. Most
of them were housed in the main Olympic Village located on the campus of
Georgia Tech University and a secondary village at Georgia State. Before
the games, Georgia State was strictly a commuter school, but added enough
4 and 5 bedroom dorm rooms to house 4,000 athletes. Georgia Tech upped
its dorm capacity from 4404 to 6251 for the Games, for a total Atlanta
capacity of 10,251. The dorms at the University of South Florida's have
a capacity of 2,600. According to USF spokesperson Todd Simmons, the number
will up to 3000 next year, when renovations on USF's Alpha Hall are complete.
Simmons says long range plans only include the addition of another 2000
rooms.
As far as quartering even 2 million visitors
– the number that attended the Atlanta Games – at best estimate Hillsborough
and Pinellas counties, between them, have around 140,000 hotel rooms. That's
14 people per room.
Accommodations: This includes food service,
rest rooms, and parking to accommodate a few million bodies. There's enough
rapacious developers in town to build a lot of restaurants, and renting
Port-o-John’s shouldn't be a problem, but – let's face it – on any Friday
and Saturday nights, the city can hardly park people in Ybor.
Transportation: Bay area highway systems
are a joke, and only a handful of people are pushing for a light
rail system.
Commissioner Turanchik has a solution for
no mass transit. “I don't think (the Olympics) are impossible without mass
transportation. I think it depends on how you stage the games.
“And,” he says, “We have a huge private
transportation fleet.”
In other words, everyone can take cabs.
Job Creation: Among the demographics evaluated
in an Olympic bid are:
“Considering the Tampa area's – from what
I understand -- total lack of experience in co-ordinating immense, international
events, it might be difficult for Tampa's municipal leaders to deal will
all the issues of the Olympics,” says Dan Doctoroff, a New York investment
banker and member of the Big Apple's 2012 bid Committee. “Issues
that, above and beyond the logistics of facilities and accommodations,
include fund raising, volunteer co-ordination, environmental concerns,
morale, public relations issues and problems.”
A lot of problems.
Waiting for Godot
No one knows the date of the first Olympiad,
but historians agree that by 776 BC the Games were being held every 4 years.
In this era - when the Olympics consisted of just one race – Tampa winning
an Olympic bid might have seemed more likely. But stranger things have
happened, so let's say we pull it off and the world's largest travelling
carnival rolls into town.
Should we be excited or horrified?
Media exposure is touted as one of the
big benefits of being an Olympic host city – the national and international
publicity are supposed to be reputation enhancers, positively affecting
tourism, conventions, businesses location and expansion decisions, and
foreign direct investment.
Since winning the bid to host the 1996
Olympic Games, Atlanta, for example, has ranked highly on many published
surveys of top cities. Fortune ranked Atlanta first in its list of the
Best Environment for Competing in the Global Economy, as did World Trade
Magazine in its poll of the Top Ten Cities for International Companies.
Ernst and Young also named Atlanta on its list of Top Ten Leading Real
Estate Markets.
But what about Tampa? If the Bay area were
to get the Olympics, our quasi southern, bumpkin burgh would be set forth
on the world stage before 3.5 billion people poised and ready to throw
tomatoes.
Despite how many billions we spend, would
Tampa really measure up? If the Olympics did happen here, how would Tampans
meet the event? Would TV cameras fixed for 16 days on Tampa's impotent
skyline make us the subject of accolade or ridicule? It's important the
city ask itself now.
Kynes, in the mayor's office of intergovernmental
relations, says the city's perspective is that Tampa will do fine. “The
mayor has said time and again that the closer he looks at the issue and
what's involved, the more encouraged he gets about Tampa successfully hosting
an Olympics.”
Which reminds us … just think how
the citizenry would be shafted.
In the last days before the 1996 Games
were to begin, Atlanta realized it was short on crappers. To side-step
global embarrassment, a rich Atlanta businessman named J.B. Fuqua came
forth and donated $1.5 million to purchase portable toilets – thus saving
the day. Atlantans love to tell this story because it furthers the myth
that, in their town, the selflessness of the city's visionary leaders makes
all things possible.
Sound familiar?
With an Olympic award, Tampa could be in
store for the same excrement. Akin to Atlanta's Great Toilet Escape,
George Steinbrenner,
for example, could reaffirm his position as Most High with an eleventh
hour Great Hot Dog Bun Bailout of 2012.
As they say, sport develops not character,
but characters.
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