With every other word, he was flashing a chart, a map, a dreamscape, pictures of boats ferrying Olympic athletes up and down the Harlem and East rivers. It was a bravura performance and when we said our goodbyes, I was sold. It took me a full 10 minutes or so before I regained my senses. After all, I’ve lived in Manhattan, and just getting crosstown is an Olympic challenge. “A New York Olympics,” I pondered, then smiled and, finally, began laughing out loud. “In your dreams.”
Well this past weekend New York’s improbable dream became the nation’s when the U.S. Olympic Committee selected New York over San Francisco as America’s official bid city for the 2012 Summer Games. But I feel obliged to warn all my Big Apple pals to pause before they plan sabbaticals for that summer or place their apartments with an agent for usurious sublets. Because hurdling the domestic heap was the easy part. Winning the International Olympic Committee vote, which will take place in July 2005, will prove a far more daunting proposition.
Right now there appear to be nothing but obstacles–political, philosophical and practical–in New York’s path, which has mighty few arrows in its quiver. America’s No. 1 weapon in securing past Olympics, namely outright bribery, has been banned as a result of the IOC’s post-Salt Lake reforms. So there’s no chance the daughter of the Korean IOC delegate’s will land a concert gig at Carnegie Hall, which is the sort of thing that happened in Utah before it secured the 2002 Games. Indeed the IOC has become so holier-than-thou that voting delegates can’t even visit New York for a little nosh or schmooze, can’t even be lobbied by the irresistible tag team of Rudy Giuliani and Billy Crystal.
Nor can New York take advantage of the fact that, with midterm elections mercifully over, some smart political operatives are now available to lend their velvet touch to the cause. Given the dispersal of the 128 IOC voters around the globe, political advertising simply isn’t an efficacious option. Which is a shame because that has become one of the hallmarks of American enterprise and would certainly help educate voters about New York’s 2012 rivals. You can just imagine the ads: “Paris 2012: Olympic Hospitality with a Sneer”; “Rome 2012: Remember the last time the trains ran on time?”; “Moscow 2012: Ask Vladimir Putin if his streets are safe.”
Even without our worst political excesses writ large, America is not exactly the most popular country among IOC rank and file. There is a significant body of opinion among the ringed set that the United States, with four Olympics in 22 years, has already had more than its fair share of Games. While the stellar Salt Lake Games went a long way toward erasing the ugly memory of Atlanta’s ‘96 greedfest, there remain residual resentments from its bid scandal. It was not lost on the IOC that it was this country that instigated the scandal then sanctimoniously investigated it, finger-pointing all the while. And there are also likely to be strong feelings, particularly among the Third World voting bloc, relating to current U.S. foreign-policy initiatives.
All this might not have mattered back when the Olympics was an orphan child that few cities were willing to take in. It was viewed as enterprise that brought with it terrorism (Munich), financial ruin (Montreal) and sticky political boycotts (Moscow and L.A.). So for a while only second-rank cities anxious to command some attention in the international firmament–Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta–were willing to host. Among such pretenders, New York would have been a standout. But for 2012, New York could face a glittery array of world capitals–London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Toronto and Rio de Janiero–many of which can match New York’s sex appeal, but with far less political baggage.
And that’s just the half of it. Vancouver is now a prohibitive favorite to capture the 2010 Winter Games next year and the standard Olympic rotation makes it very unlikely that back-to-back Games would be awarded to North America. Moreover, IOC President Jacques Rogge hopes to make history, much as his predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch did in backing Beijing, by bringing the Games to Africa for the first time. If Cape Town can muster a credible bid for 2012, Rogge would likely lend his considerable resources to the cause. (Soccer’s leadership has already promised the 2010 World Cup to Africa and, thus, could upstage the Olympics by getting to Cape Town first.)
So what’s a city to do? Well the answer for New York is just to keep on keeping on. What attracted U.S. Olympic officials to their choice is exactly what could captivate the international set. Not a sympathy vote for tragedies past. Rather a tribute to the city’s unique and resilient spirit and its vision of the future. New York City can be everything–smug, arrogant, brusque, provincial–that much of the world hates about this country. But at the same time, it represents the very best of us–a brash, can-do faith that is what much of the world loves best about America.
