In 2012, there will be no legendary athlete like Muhammad Ali to light the Olympic flame in the District. In fact, there will be no flame at all. The U.S. Olympic Committee announced Tuesday that it had selected San Francisco and New York as the nation’s finalists in an international bid for the 2012 summer games.
The District’s bid began six years ago and has cost the city an estimated $10 million. The games would have been a veritable boon for the city. The plans included renovating Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium and connecting it through parks and promenades to a redeveloped Anacostia waterfront. The recently closed D.C. General Hospital has left much of that area a magnet for drugs and crime; officials had hoped to turn much of the urban blight there around with help from the games. There would also have been infrastructure improvements between Baltimore and Washington and new dormitories and sports facilities at the University of Maryland at College Park. Many aspects of the proposal had already been pulled into the District from suburban Maryland and Virginia, in the hopes of wooing the USOC and improving D.C.’s economic opportunities even more. The expected windfall from the games totaled $5.3 billion, a figure which included both construction projects and tourist spending.
What was most surprising?and disappointing?about the committee’s decision is not simply that D.C.’s bid was rejected this early, but rather the reasoning behind that rejection. USOC Chairman Charles H. Moore admitted to the Washington Post that political concerns factored into his group’s decision. Specifically, he acknowledged concerns over foreign resentment towards the U.S. government, which is often represented by the city of Washington, D.C., as well as controversial U.S. policies towards Iraq and the U.S. attitude towards the International Olympic Committee, would cause the IOC to look elsewhere for a host city.
Such an admission says a lot about how the Olympic Games system really operates. Although it bills itself as a “non-governmental, non-profit” organization whose role is to “promote top-level sport as well as sport for all,” the IOC is clearly within the realm of politics. If cities are being judged on the basis of how other countries will react to their nation’s policy decisions rather than on the facilities and amenities the cities will offer?that’s political. And given the D.C. rejection, it’s somewhat disillusioning to realize that, even today, athletics cannot transcend politics.
Politics and the Olympics should remain independent, starting from the top down?we’ve already got enough political worries to deal with in other areas; athletics need not be one of them. Consequently, the USOC and IOC should stick to making decisions on behalf of the athletes, not the politicians and their respective countries. If a country were to boycott the D.C. games in 2012 because it disagreed with U.S. policies (reminiscent of the United States boycotting the 1980 Moscow Games), that’s one thing?and still a petty decision?but the USOC deciding preemptively against a city is completely different, not to mention wrong.
