As a proud yet removed Midwesterner, I suppose I should be feeling a bit sluggish, depressed and confused today, after the great city of Chicago was denied its bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games. Actually, the Midwesterner bit shouldn't really even play that large of a role - as a red-blooded American, this latest maneuver by foreign interlopers to dash the mighty eagle against the rocky shores of international gymnastic sets should be lighting a fire in my belly and have me reaching for a glass of the strong stuff to better steel my nerves.
Actually, I find myself teetering dangerously close to all-out traitorous behavior, because the only thing I'm feeling in the aftermath of the Chicago Smackdown is a mixture of amusement and Schadenfreude. Nothing against the good boosters of Chicago, many of whom I'm sure did truly wish for the games to be plopped down against the gently lapping shores of Lake Michigan. But the pomp, circumstance, glitz, glamor and entitlement utilized during this Olympic bid has done little to suggest that Americans have any idea of how to capture or receive something without throwing wads of cash and flashy overpaid celebrities at it.
Perhaps Oprah Winfrey is truly a city booster of the old school - an individual who loves where they live and wants everybody else to love it, too. But I suspect there was also a generous helping of the narcissism and self-absorption at play that has led Ms. Winfrey to decorate every single issue of her magazine with an image of herself. Ms. Winfrey has gone some way to suggest that she is Chicago and Chicago is she, and perhaps by forcing herself into the limelight for this bid, she suspected she might be able to control international bodies of athletics in the same manner she's controlled the American best seller lists in years past. Maybe she should have considered awarding every member of the IOC a new car?
Maybe Oprah has the free time for this sort of venture, but I'm rather certain our current president does not. I suspect that part of his disastrous decision to insert himself into the IOC vote was also tied up in complicated notions of hometown pride, or possibly even the thought that asserting American hegemony in the realm of weightlifting and high diving was about as bipartisan of a gesture as he would be capable of pulling off. I'm less concerned about the taxpayer money spent on this ill-fated mission - although I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty about that from the shrill likes of Glenn Beck and the blathering maw of Rush Limbaugh in weeks to come - then I am deeply suspicious of using presidential power and prestige to argue in favor of a location for an international sporting event. This wasn't a quick infomercial appearance, or a plug during a press conference. This was a gloves-off diplomatic endeavor, undertaken on "company time". And because it failed, it means that a tiny bit of presidential prestige disappeared.
Because I dislike Oprah and admire the president, my sense of smugness at Chicago's failure must have something to do with forces beyond mere personality. Perhaps it's tied up with my own boredom with American dominance and a sense that it truly is time to begin focusing on other things. Maybe it's just that I'll always enjoy the sight of dejected jocks. But in all honesty, my response is largely a result of a long-simmering antagonism for the games themselves.
It's no secret that hosting cities lose out badly in the long run. While the games certainly bring in massive quantities of cash, they require equally large amounts of cash to win bids, get started, conduct and dismantle. They often leave crumbling and underutilized infrastructure for decades to come (I still recall walking over to the wasteland that was the Olympic Ring in Barcelona several years after the '92 games - and Barcelona is considered one of the true success stories of hosting cities). They require enormous amounts of security and traffic control. They largely make life miserable for the city inhabitants. And much of the promised cash finds itself funnelled into politicians' pockets, mired in corruption and greed. While Mayor Daley loudly trumpeted promised sums of $22 billion in profits, others were less optimistic, to say the least - the highest reputable amount given, by an independent consulting firm, was just over $4 billion. And despite promises to Chicagoans that the city and its taxpayers would not be held responsible for any excess costs, he actually signed a contract last summer agreeing to the exact opposite.
It's no secret that hosting cities lose out badly in the long run. While the games certainly bring in massive quantities of cash, they require equally large amounts of cash to win bids, get started, conduct and dismantle. They often leave crumbling and underutilized infrastructure for decades to come (I still recall walking over to the wasteland that was the Olympic Ring in Barcelona several years after the '92 games - and Barcelona is considered one of the true success stories of hosting cities). They require enormous amounts of security and traffic control. They largely make life miserable for the city inhabitants. And much of the promised cash finds itself funnelled into politicians' pockets, mired in corruption and greed. While Mayor Daley loudly trumpeted promised sums of $22 billion in profits, others were less optimistic, to say the least - the highest reputable amount given, by an independent consulting firm, was just over $4 billion. And despite promises to Chicagoans that the city and its taxpayers would not be held responsible for any excess costs, he actually signed a contract last summer agreeing to the exact opposite.
Well, I certainly hope the rest of the country can keep themselves cheered up enough to tune in to the Rio games in seven years and manage to work up suitable enthusiasm for games and sporting activities that they don't understand or normally follow. Because that's really what my loathing of the Olympic Games and the advertising juggernaut that follows in its wake every four years is all about - a loathing of the soft nationalism that plays out in millions of homes every time the red white and blue take on a foreign group of athletes in a sport that receives little to no school district funding and that hardly anybody understands the rules of. Not owning a working television anymore, the dangers of my suddenly being overcome with shamelessly melodramatic music and grizzled voice overs detailing personal struggles and family support has been tempered. For every genuinely moving or at least interesting personal saga, the little Olympic TV vignettes offer up a solid dozen slices of pure cheesecake, and while I can't remember the exact details, the nadir in recent years must have been the earnest young athlete who spoke at length of the travails of his wife's father's brother's loss of sight in one eye. My loathing of the games reached a mature point in the heady days of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a nightmare of advertising and gaudy bad taste so over the top (with Coca-Cola taking advantage of its Atlanta-based headquarters to make Coke the exclusive drink in Olympic venues) that it makes the entire economic philosophy of capitalism look as bad as Michael Moore claims it is. The twin symbols of the Atlanta games were the disastrously-designed likes of the official mascot, "Izzy" -
- and the incident of domestic terrorism that was the Centennial Park bombing. Between Izzy and Eric Rudolph, the '96 games presented a face of America to the world that one could hardly be proud of. It was little surprise when IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch merely announced "most exceptional" at Game's end rather than the traditional "best games ever" (a practice he returned to for the 2000 Sydney Games).
But if the weepy interludes and the nonsense in Atlanta codified my feelings, it's only fair to note that my animosity towards the Olympics actually began far earlier, during a 1980s match-up between the United States hockey team and our Russian counterparts. This was not the fabled "Miracle on Ice" of the 1980 Lake Placid Games - forgive me if I'm too lazy to do any detective work and track down the exact details. What remains fresh in my memory was the sense that this game mattered. Ours was a home devoted to football, and Sundays were spent at the altar of the Green Bay Packers. In those pre-Brett Favre and Mike Holmgren days - hell, pre-Majkowski days, just to show you I'm for real - being a Packers fan meant you celebrated ties and losses that weren't complete blowouts. My parents tuned into local college basketball games form time to time, and I think my father followed Brewers scores, but football was the real deal. I don't recall ever watching a single second of an ice hockey game. Nobody could name any players, nobody really understood the rules. Hockey was a non-entity in our household.
Except for Olympic match ups between Yanks and Russkies, at which point my father would become the most enthusiastic and die-hard hockey fan between St. Louis and Winnipeg. I can vividly picture him perched - literally perched - on the edge of our couch at several points of the game. He followed the puck like a cat follows a laser point on a blank wall. After a contentious foul against the beloved Yanks, my father fumed and spouted, and at one point, following a rough collision between players, jumped to his feet and pointed a quivering finger at the screen, yelling, at the top of his lungs in a mortally wounded tone, "Tripping!!!"
This is all quite amusing now, and almost charming. But I recall at the time thinking it was a most odd display. Why would anybody care so much about something simply because one team kind of sort of came from the same general land mass area that we came from? It was one of those precocious child moments that used to pop up in those dreadful "Family Circus" cartoons, but it's a moment of precocity that I've held on to. Call me silly or call me traitorous, but I really do not understand the concept of rooting on an entire country as one's personal "team". A school team, yeah, I can get behind that - you know the quarterback, the assistant coach lives a few streets over, ok. College teams, same thing - local blood, local pride. I can even kind of understand the intense loyalties ascribed to NFL or NBA teams, although even here I think we're beginning to stretch the realms of credulity when it comes to any sort of local connection. But I'm with Chuck Klosterman (bet you thought you'd never read those words, huh?) when it comes to the Olympics - seriously? You mean I need to feign interest in shot-putting simply because the guy competing in the stadium and I both stood on American soil when we signed our passports?
So, I'm sorry, Chicago - I think you're prime time material. But I suspect you're better off without the Olympics coming to town. And as for Oprah and our president - well, one of the reasons I know I'm a good American is that I enjoy watching the little guy beat the big guy. It just so happens that this time, we weren't the little guy. And we haven't been for quite some time.
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