On July 27 — just days after the last remnants of winter had finally melted — three things happened in quick succession: Boston Mayor Marty Walsh
refused to sign the host city contract that would put taxpayers on the line for Olympic debts, and told reporters that the opposition to the Olympic bid, which got more media attention than anything else during his mayorship, was “about ten people on Twitter.” Then the US Olympic Committee (USCOC) pulled Boston from the running.
Walsh explained that the costs outweighed the perceived benefits, and that “our citizens were rightly hesitant to be supportive.” By hesitant, he must have meant months of work by groups ranging from the patrician to the fringe and large numbers of residents who protested, attended public meetings, debated, organized events, wrote letters, made phone calls, and quite literally
woke the mayor up to the dangers of the Olympics.
The day that Boston was chosen by the USOC as its bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, the fiancée of a Boston city councilor
tweeted her excitement about the announcement, and her scorn that “all you no-fun Negative Nancies will be whining louder than ever.”
Those “negative nancies” would end up as members of the groups
No Boston 2024 and
No Boston Olympics, as well as much of the local media, politicians around the state, and economists around the world who spent the months between that January announcement and its July finale relentlessly challenging the USOC’s promises, dissecting bid documents, and investigating into involvement on the part of the city’s elected officials.
As rumors of a bid became a reality last November, a group of area residents connected through Twitter and formed No Boston 2024. They began to meet, focusing their attention on the lack of transparency and disregard for public opinion throughout the bid process. By the time the January meeting at Suffolk University rolled around — a meeting held
after Walsh flew to Los Angeles to present a bid that hadn’t yet been released to his constituents — No Boston 2024 was already in the thick of it.
When the Suffolk meeting attendees walked in, they were handed signs provided by No Boston 2024. Consequently photographs from the event feature black-and-white placards asking for better transit, housing, and education instead of an Olympics that residents didn’t ask for, and, according to polls taken over the course of the winter months, increasingly didn’t want.
The bid was dreamed up by a team led by John Fish, the multi-millionaire CEO of Suffolk Construction Company, as the private entity Boston 2024. This group of executives created a bid that depicted a redeveloped city, outlining an Olympics with venues everywhere from public parks to private universities.
No public opinion was considered and the city’s residents weren’t consulted, yet Walsh lent implicit and explicit support to the bid. Only a year after Boston had elected him mayor based on his promises of a better city, he seemed to be giving the keys to the city away. Boston 2024 existed as a private entity, but the mayor’s chief of staff was engaged to its vice president of international strategy, and in February Walsh’s former chief of operations, Joseph Rull, left city government to become Boston 2024’s chief administrative officer.
In one of the documents that Fish’s staff prepared for the bid, a booklet of brightly colored stock athletic photos detailing the overall concept for the Games, the word “legacy” is used nineteen times. The Olympics were to leave, respectively, “a legacy for the athletes,” “a legacy for the Olympic movement,” and “a legacy for the community.”
A public meeting in early March provided a look at what that legacy might actually entail. Arranged by the
Franklin Park Coalition and the
Emerald Necklace Conservancy, the meeting was called to address Boston 2024’s proposed use of Franklin Park. At 527 acres, Franklin Park is the largest park in Boston, and houses a public golf course, a zoo, and a football stadium used primarily by Boston Public School students — yet no local groups were consulted before the park was proposed as a site for equestrian events and a pentathlon.
Boston 2024 executives extolled the positive legacy that Olympic construction in the park would leave, including a pool, the maintenance of which would be funded from leftover Olympic money. When reporters from the Jamaica Plain Gazette asked what would happen if there weren’t any leftover funds, an executive said he would answer the question in private after the meeting.
“The real legacy that Olympics have left behind in cities has been crippling public debt, crumbling venues that blight the landscape, displacement of low-income and marginalized communities, and more intrusive surveillance technologies,” No Boston 2024 explained in an interview. As for fears of a municipal shadow government, the group added that “the legacy of the Olympics will also be an erosion of democracy, as public decisions are being outsourced to a private entity run by corporate lobbyists and CEOs.”
That democracy-eroding influence would reach all the way to the state’s elected officials: in the
full bid book, which was only exposed to the public eye after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Boston magazine, Boston 2024 wrote that it was anticipating “proposal of Olympic legislation that would facilitate permitting and entitlement” — an assumption that the cities named in the bid would be quick to support it, despite the huge amount of money and work that the bid called for and the opacity of the committee’s plans.
The bid book also revealed that, despite months of Boston 2024 insisting that the Games would be privately financed, taxpayer money had indeed been factored into the equation in a number of ways, prompting outcry from everyone from talk radio hosts to Elizabeth Warren, and proving what anti-Olympics organizers around the work have known for decades: in the end, the financial burden falls on the host city’s residents, often people who don’t benefit or didn’t want the Olympics in the first place.
And, as Montreal, Beijing,
Rio de Janeiro, and every other host in the last half-century of Olympics
has shown, the development that comes with the Olympics lends itself to corruption, worker abuse, displacement, and diversion of public funds: in short, urban renewal on steroids
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But the neoliberal rhetoric that the USOC relies on — that our cities should develop in the name of profit instead of serving residents — will not be forgotten. To challenge that, we must continue to organize and put the people before highways, before the Olympics, and before whatever they come up with next.
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