OPINION
Monday, August 31, 2015 5
Not In My Back Yard
Why hosting the Olympics would be the worst thing to ever
happen to Toronto.
nadia aboufariss › opinion editor
P
ardon the hyperbole. The Great Fire of
1904 was certainly worse, and the decision
to build the Gardiner expressway would at
least be on the short list. Did you know that
not only does it completely ruin the lakeshore, but
they also tore down a popular amusement park to
build it?
If you didn’t have the pleasure of living in Toronto
this summer, let me fill you in on what you’ve
missed. After initial reports of apathy, the city got
pretty caught up in the excitement of hosting the
Pan-Am games. Panamania—combined with the fact
that the deadline for placing an Olympic bid falls in
September—made it no surprise that reports started
emerging in early August that city hall was considering a bid for the 2024 summer games.
Around the same time, the city of Boston, considered one of the top contenders, decided to pull
their bid. Why? The mayor’s official comment was
that it would place the city and its taxpayers at risk
of overspending, and it seems that public outcry and
a hashtag campaign spurred this decision. I’m not
one to easily side with the residents of Boston, as an
avid hater of all of their sports teams and a native New
Yorker, so I can’t believe I’m saying this in print, but
Boston was totally right. Hosting the Olympics is a
terrible idea. Here are a few of the many reasons why
Toronto should not bid for the Olympics.
It will cost $50-60 million dollars to bid.
That’s right, just for the bid. If Vancouver’s $34 million dollar bid is any indication, likely half of this
amount will be paid by the taxpayers of this city. And
a win is by no means guaranteed. If you were into betting on these sorts of things, it looks like Los Angeles
is the current favourite in North America, but the safe
money would be to pick one of the European contenders—Paris, Budapest, Rome, Hamburg—since it would
be very rare for the games to skip Europe three times
in a row. By the way, this amount does not include the
bribery money that seems to be necessary in order to
secure a win (see Corruption).
If we win the bid, the city is almost guaranteed to lose a lot of money.
The summer games are especially hard to earn a profit
on due to their larger price tag. An Ernst and Young
report has the cost for Toronto hosting the games at
somewhere between $9-16 billion dollars, not including the inevitable overruns. The only cities that have
profited (I’m looking at you, LA) have done so because
of austere planning committees that somehow managed to not build all that much stuff. That will not
happen here: the need for new infrastructure is one
of the main reasons people want the Olympics in
Toronto. Of course, the worst case scenario for the
games happened in Athens, where overspending to
the tune of $15 billion contributed to an entire country’s economic collapse. Although that is an extreme
result, the best comparison we have in Canada isn’t
exactly positive. The 1976 summer games in Montreal
ran 800% over budget, and it took the city exactly
ê Nicknamed the “Big Owe,” Olympic Stadium has lain dormant in Montreal since the Expos left the city in 2004.
Photo credit: archdaily.com
thirty years to pay off its $1.5 billion dollar debt. But
hey, at least they have Olympic Stadium.
Corruption is rampant.
Even the Pan-Am games were not lacking for a scandal, as leaked documents revealed officials were
using tax dollars on everything from breakfast tea at
Starbucks to pricey team meals. Behaviour like this is
the norm at the Olympics, and the list of corruption
charges against the IOC could fill a book (University
of Toronto Professor Emeritus Helen Jefferson Lenskyj
has written two). There have been a number of different bribery scandals during the Olympic events, but
the largest documented one occurred at the 2002 Salt
Lake City winter games, where the city’s organizing committee spent between $3-7 million dollars on
“perks” for the IOC members and their families, such
as plastic surgery, college tuition, and lavish vacations. Let’s see, there’s also former IOC vice-president Kim Un-Yong who was jailed for corruption, the
dubious aristocrats that make up most of the officiating members, the black market for tickets that follows the games around, the entirety of the 2014 Sochi
Olympics (which human rights groups attempted
to boycott), numerous reports of collusion between
judges…the list goes on.
A lot of the positive spin on the Olympics revolves
around the idea that it’ll help promote the host city
in a positive light, and help put the city “on the
map.” Personally, I don’t see how the largest city in
Canada needs help in map placement, and besides,
this summer has already seen Toronto in the news
on numerous occasions, with the Pan Am games, the
Toronto Blue Jays becoming one of the most exciting
teams in sports (go Jays!), Drake’s ever increasing
popularity, and at least two top spots on somewhat
questionable internet lists of “most livable cities.”
Unfortunately, the last poll I looked at had
Torontonians at 61% in favour of bidding for the
Olympics. I really think that the taxpayers of this city
should be asking for much more from city hall. For
$50 million, or $10 billion, I can think of a lot of ways
Toronto can place itself in a global spotlight, and fix
its infrastructure problems, without having to resort
to an Olympic spectacle. u
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