Why hosting the Olympics would be the worst thing to ever happen to Toronto
Pardon 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 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.