What if Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics had been successful — if we were the next city up? One thing is for sure: We’d look back with nostalgia at the days when all we had to fight about were vaccine mandates, masking rules, and who deserves credit for that fancy Belgian waffle Oprah likes so much.
Cast your mind back to 2015, and you may recall the day when the US Olympic Committee chose Boston as its entry to compete for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Support in the Boston area was barely in favor — 51 percent, according to a WBUR poll — so it wasn’t what you could honestly call a “heady” time.
Even so, President Obama and the first lady congratulated us. “The city has taught all of us what it means to be Boston Strong,” they said.
Mayor Marty Walsh, who has since departed these parts, also gushed. “Boston hopes to welcome the world’s greatest athletes to one of the world’s great cities,” he said.
Just a little more than half a year later — amid dropping public support, and determined not to be on the hook for cost overruns — we withdrew our bid. By joint agreement with the USOC.
You can’t fire us, we’re quitting!
But Boston being Boston, those six months were more than ample time to trigger an onslaught of on-brand controversies.
They included, but were not limited to: whether city employees would be allowed to badmouth the Games (have they @#$% met us?); whether athletes and VIP candidates would enjoy dedicated “Games lanes” on our major roadways (only if the International Olympic Committee recognized flipping the bird as an official sport); and, crucially, whether we were such suckers we’d agree to pick up the tab if there were cost overruns (oh, sorry, we forgot our wallet, catch ya next time).
But suppose it had all gone differently seven years ago, and Bostonians were briefly delusional enough to think our future selves would cheerfully welcome the entire world to the Orange Line.
As comedian Lamont Price, co-curator of comedy for Boston Calling, noted, we are not an easy-going group. “People get mad if you are not moving at a red light,” he said. “They are not going to be happy if the Swedish team pauses at a yellow.”
The team behind Boston 2024 said the Games would be paid for with private funding of $4.5 billion and publicly funded infrastructure improvements of $5 billion or so.
But an analysis by the Brattle Group, done for state leaders, “eviscerated” the bid, the Globe wrote, “suggesting planners underestimated potential expenses, skimped on contingency funds, and were too optimistic in assessing public infrastructure costs for the Games.”
In doing their work, the consultants looked at past Olympics for comparison. But Boston comedian Steve Sweeney based his analysis on a major undertaking closer to home — the ridiculously tardy and budget-busting Big Dig.
“The 2024 Olympics would be ready by 2038,” he said. “And with a cost overrun that would be equal to the entire American economy.”
The Brattle Group report was delivered after Boston’s bid was already defunct — but before we were graced by COVID, supply chain issues, and inflation.
Much of what has happened since 2015 has blindsided us — Trump, the pandemic, The New York Times’s takeover of Wordle — so it’s impossible to know how the looming Olympic bid would have shaped us over the past seven years and the next two.
But comedian Josh Gondelman, a son of Stoneham and head writer and executive producer for Showtime’s Desus & Mero, made predictions:
“In addition to the other minor headaches and legitimate injustices of being an Olympics host city, I am CERTAIN that there would be a giant controversy about new construction altering some kind of dubiously historical Bostonian monument,” he e-mailed the Globe.
“Something like: ‘You can’t renovate this food court! This is where David Ortiz ate his first meal after he signed with the Red Sox!’ Or: ‘Rerouting traffic at this intersection desecrates the legacy of the Make Way For Ducklings ducklings and their struggle to cross the street!’”
Meanwhile, if for some currently unimaginable reason Boston ever makes another bid, said Boston comedian Gary Petersen, one thing is for sure: the location of the boxing finale. It needs to be inside the Southie Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru.
Beth Teitell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @bethteitell.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/02/20/metro/were-not-hosting-olympics-2024-whos-luckier-boston-or-olympics/
