Olympics 2016: The Finger-Pointing Won’t Take Long
Is three days enough to start looking back at Chicago’s epically failed bid for the 2016 Olympics with 20/20 vision? Because if it is, I think most will agree that Chicago is going to come off mighty smug in this one.
Why, when Rio declared Friday’s bid decision a national holiday, did the U.S. believe parading the president and a lone celebrity in front of the International Olympic Committee would be all that was necessary? Was it the Vegas odds? The bookmakers in Nevada pegged Chicago as the obvious front-runner for months. Nevermind the city’s dearth of public transportation. Nevermind the numerous suspect promises made about being able to fund the games. Nevermind the shallow support from the host city itself (only 33-47 percent of Chicagoans who took into account the probability that they’d have to pay for part of the Games through taxes were in favor of the bid). And finally, nevermind the fact that few countries even like America. President Obama may be more popular abroad than our former president, but he’s no get-out-of-jail free card, either.
Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images
Nevermind all of that. Vegas says we’re the 3-5 favorites and therefore anything less than a successful bid is completely deserving of the freakout that inexplicably took place in America on Friday.
Sporting-wise, there are four things Americans simply don’t care about: rugby, cricket, soccer and the Olympics. Americans like winning. It’s like the popular kid in school that wants to steal your girlfriend just so he can tell you he did it. The problem is, no one really likes that kid. In fact, almost everybody hates him. In two weeks, no one wil be talking about Chicago’s shameful showing with the IOC, which is one of the reasons the bid wasn’t successful – the U.S. wanted the bid for all the wrong reasons. Heck, outside of Illinois, announcing that Chicago failed to capture the hearts and minds of the IOC is like announcing that The Thermals just broke up.
“Who are the Thermals and why do I care,” you ask? You don’t care. And that’s the point.
Conventional wisdom believes that baseball managers often get thrown out of games in losing efforts on purpose; not simply out of frustration, but as a last stitch effort to fuel their players, to propel them into a higher plain of competition before all is lost and the game is over. Similar conventional wisdom holds true for teammates who rumble on the sidelines or dugouts or locker rooms only to see their teams go on winning streaks immediately afterwards.
Get beat, get angry, get better.
America just sent in its biggest guns and they jammed. Call it a national humble. All weekend, reports trickled out gazing backwards hoping to explain why America doesn’t have what they felt certain was rightfully coming their way on Friday. Chicago is the third-largest city in a country that has burned many bridges and dealt with this destruction with hubris.
Look at that picture of Mayor Richard Daley, Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. There’s hubris all over that photo. The color of Obama’s dress is Copper Hubris. “Hubris” is the scent of Daley’s cologne.
Oprah Winfrey? She panders to housewives and promotes babbling authors for a living. Why’d the U.S. bring her along? America’s going to look back on decisions like that with astonished embarrassment until … well, until it stops making decisions like that.
Ms. Winfrey and the Obamas weren’t the biggest players in this boondoggle, they just came in during the ninth inning and blew the save. The second President Bush and Daley … they were the biggest players. And they brought this on themselves with the IOC, stomping hither and yon, promising whatever anyone needed to hear in order to get what they want, like junkies on a bender. The IOC spent over a year considering the best host for the games, were the U.S. Olympic committee and the city of Chicago really smug enough to think they could muscle their way into hosting the largest international event in existence?
Yes. The answer to that is yes they did.
In the end, America should be grateful this effort wasn’t enough. The U.S. doesn’t deserve to host the Olympics. The IOC sent that message loud and clear. America needed a humble like this.
Now let’s see what we do with it.
Top photos courtesy of Yahoo! via AP
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[...] already written about Winfrey’s hubris-mas involvement with the Olympics (what? Michael Jordan was too busy?), and [...]