Congratulations, Mayor Marty Walsh. Congratulations, city of Boston.
You made the right call.
On Monday, Mayor Walsh made the announcement that he would not guarantee that Massachusetts taxpayers would pick up additional costs that come from hosting the 2024 Olympics, thus effectively ending the USOC’s bid for Beantown to host the games there in eight years. The USOC made it official shortly thereafter, announcing that it would no longer submit a bid for Boston.
And thus, a six-month-long, totally insane dream ended.
(AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Boston was never right to host an Olympics. It’s hard to argue that any cities are, really. Study after study has shown that Olympic Games are expensive, they’re logistical nightmares, and they cause cities to invest tons on infrastructure projects that will quickly be outdated and useless.
I’ve written before on this site how Boston was uniquely poorly positioned to host an Olympics as well. The city’s rapid growth in a small geographic area means that its transportation infrastructure is being pushed beyond its limits already. Some heavy snowfall this winter effectively shut down the commuter rail. When the city welcomed the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the T was so overrun with riders that many locals found it easier to just walk to where they needed to go.
And for those tech-loving hopefuls who said that Uber drivers could pick up the slack when the T inevitably failed during a massive Olympics — You think adding a ton more drivers to the already packed Boston roadways is going to help things?
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
Boston doesn’t have enough land to build a massive Olympic stadium. The land that is available? There are a lot better uses for it than a massive stadium that — under the Boston bid committee’s plan — would then be shrunken down to be the city’s MLS stadium. (Only the Kraft family, who own the New England Revolution, can possibly be disappointed that a plan to build a massive stadium that would then have to be dismantled and shrunken didn’t go through.)
On top of that, the idea to ask the local colleges to host events and improve their own athletic facilities is a ridiculous ask of institutions of higher learning, no matter who picks up the bill.
Bostonians realized that. They understood it. The public’s ideas about spending massive amounts of money for sporting events is changing. Heck, last month a poll of Boston.com readers showed that they would prefer to host a real-life Jurassic Park over the Olympic Games in 2024.
Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports
The good thing about this insane dream of a Boston Olympics is that it got people talking about infrastructure in a real (read: public) way. Boston residents realized that some of the ideas — for making use of land in South Boston, for improving greenways and transportation infrastructure — were smart ideas, and ideas that didn’t need a bloated Olympic games to bring about. Hopefully, Boston will be able to implement some of these infrastructure improvements on their own, without the IOC and its many demands hanging over the city.
As someone who grew up outside Boston, would it have made me proud to see the city on the world stage? Of course. But Boston never needed any additional validation. This is a city that knows its place in history and its importance to the country. And trust me, Bostonians don’t need a swim meet for them to be proud of who they are.
