It looks like the country of Greece is going bankrupt, possibly setting off the next leg of the ongoing debt crisis. They are somehow beating New York, New Jersey and even California to it. I wonder if borrowing for the infrastructure and facilities associated with the 2004 Olympics has anything to do with it? Given that New York is already one of the most indebted states and cities, relative to our residents' (falling) income, and are virtually broke as it is, I certainly am glad we aren't building similar facilities for 2012 right now. Even Vancouver, with the Winter Olympics a week or so away, is having regrets. The expectations and demands of the IOC, it seems, have been in a bubble as well.
I like the Olympics, I like tourists, and I like living in the “World’s Second Home.” Even so, after New York and Chicago were turned down, I believe it would be wise for no U.S. city to bother applying to host the Summer Olympics for at least 30 years.
The earliest the games could come to the United States is 2028, because (though they deny this) the IOC likes to move it around the world to gain exposure to different time zones. So 2028 is the next time the Western Hemisphere would be “due.”
There is an anti-U.S. bias among many in the world right now, which likely means that some IOC members may always be expected to vote against the U.S. just to do it. And there is a pro-Europe bias in the organization, which means that if any continent is going to be able to get around the around the world rule, Europe is it.
Yet there are also reasonable reasons for the Olympics not to want to come here. First there is Al Qaeda, a concern everywhere but in particular in the United States. There is no reason for the U.S. to host an Olympics, with all the security risk that entails, in the middle of a war against it. People in Canada are relieved, I read today, that President Obama will not be going to Vancouver, so worried were they about the security implications. The rest of the world will probably be reluctant to bring the Olympics where as long as there are organizations trying to launch terror attacks here.
Second, the IOC has, by picking Brazil, indicated a preference for allowing countries that have never hosted an Olympics to get the chance. It is a persuasive argument. And those international TV contract dollars go much farther in a poor country than in a rich one.
Finally, we are broke — federal, state and local. Do we really want to take that on if some other country is willing to do it for us? Rather than the other way around, for once?
Perhaps if all our current leaders in Albany are turned out and, after a difficult decade or more, we crawl out of the hole they put us in, New York State could bid for 2032 Olympics in 2025 or so. There is less competition, as Brazil is unlikely to bid, and they are smaller and less costly. Not that much less costly, however. I hear that Russia is sweating out paying for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics as much as London is sweating out the Summer Olympics in 2012. That is with the backing of whole counties, something that would never happen in New York.