AHC: Olympics make money post-Montreal '76?

Montreal might be an interesting turning point because the entire project had delays and massive cost overruns.

And visually, the planned tower was only partially built. "It was found that the tower could not be completed as planned in concrete without major structural work because it would be too heavy and that the tower would be overstressed by the Canadian standard. The tower was completed in steel and was damaged by a fire during construction."
http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.e...safari#search="site:.edu Olympics 1976 tower"
(see page 5)

So, what if things started changing, so that the countries which energetically bid for and won the Olympics actually made some money out of them?
 
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Hah!
Hah!
You revived fond memories of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal!

Aislin's cartoon about (pregnant) Mayor Jean Drapeau telephoning "Morgentaler?"
Hah!
Hah!
By way of explanation: before the Olympics, Mayor Drapeau had bragged that the Olympics could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby. Dr. Morgentaler was a high-profile abortionist before abortion was legal in Canada.

Returning to the OP, to make the Olympics profitable, you still need back-room, good-old-boys deals, but you also need to revive the concept of "noblesse oblige'" so that Olympic organizers will return to the original concept of encouraging athletes: both elite and amateur. Organizers need to work quietly and honestly in the background. Organizers need to be patient enough to wait for long-term profits from other civic construction contracts.
Elite athletes should be the focus of any international games and they should encouraged to "do their best" competing against other top-tier athletes.
Meanwhile, amateur athletes are encouraged by the profusion of football fields, swimming pools, tennis courts etc. remaining after the games have finished.
The media needs to continue "outing" corrupt politicians (who pocket profits) and continue banning athletes who cheat with performance-enhancing drugs.
Only then will the general public resume supporting global-level competition because amateur athletes still need to believe that they can still achieve Olympic-level performance.
 
Hah!
Hah!
You revived fond memories of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal!

Aislin's cartoon about (pregnant) Mayor Jean Drapeau telephoning "Morgentaler?"
Hah!
Hah!
By way of explanation: before the Olympics, Mayor Drapeau had bragged that the Olympics could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby. Dr. Morgentaler was a high-profile abortionist before abortion was legal in Canada.

Returning to the OP, to make the Olympics profitable, you still need back-room, good-old-boys deals, but you also need to revive the concept of "noblesse oblige'" so that Olympic organizers will return to the original concept of encouraging athletes: both elite and amateur. Organizers need to work quietly and honestly in the background. Organizers need to be patient enough to wait for long-term profits from other civic construction contracts.
Elite athletes should be the focus of any international games and they should encouraged to "do their best" competing against other top-tier athletes.
Meanwhile, amateur athletes are encouraged by the profusion of football fields, swimming pools, tennis courts etc. remaining after the games have finished.
The media needs to continue "outing" corrupt politicians (who pocket profits) and continue banning athletes who cheat with performance-enhancing drugs.
Only then will the general public resume supporting global-level competition because amateur athletes still need to believe that they can still achieve Olympic-level performance.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gCayFzinbX8/Rhbm9eYmpUI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/MIQLnpZf67o/s400/drapeau.jpg
 
mmm, how did LA and Peter Ueberrath do it?

esp. since the Olympics seem to insist on all these super expensive state-of-the-art facilities
 
I was also under the impression that after Mitt Romney took over, the 2002 Salt Lake City games did quite well.
 
Salt Lake City(2002) and Calgary(2010) were Winter Olympics.

Are the new facilities which the IOC currently require a lot cheaper for the winter games?
 
mmm, how did LA and Peter Ueberrath do it?

esp. since the Olympics seem to insist on all these super expensive state-of-the-art facilities

Part of it is that Los Angeles already had much of the infrastructure in place before the Games. Some of it, like the Coliseum, were the original venues for the 1932 Games that had been extensively overhauled.
 

CalBear

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LA needs to be the example going forward for ALL Olympic Cities. The insanity of building new facilities that become more or less useless once the Games are over (How many $150M Velodromes that seat 5,000+ does a country with no World Championship experience actually need?) has pushed the price of the Games beyond the common sense level for democracies.

LA used existing facilities for the most part, with some serious renovation to them in a few cases and spread events out to take advantage of the available locations (as an extreme example early round football (soccer) was played at the Rose Bowl in LA, Stanford Stadium in the Bay Area, Harvard Stadium near Boston, and Army-Navy Memorial in Annapolis (note the three Uni locations, the dorms were used as athlete housing rather than constructing new facilities). The main Athlete's Villages were the Dorms at UCLA and USC.

Now admittedly LA was blessed with lots of local facilities, but no more than any number of American cities (can't speak for other countries, the U.S. does have a love affair with college sports that may not translate very well) but there are undoubtedly enough venues to cover almost everything in any major city that can actually afford to put on a Games.
 
Maybe if the standards weren't so impossibly high and a 60,000 seat stadium was viewed as being well within the norm. This for smaller cities.

And for Los Angeles, in part it sounds like they got lucky in that the Coliseum had been overhauled recently enough, but what about the bike track, the super duper swimming facility, etc.?
 
It sounds like the mayor really wanted to build a Taj Mahal.

Or, I suppose we can voice the suspicion, wanted it complicated in order to have opportunities for graft?

Well based on half a decade living in Montreal for school plus studying the history of organized crime and government corruption in the city… I would 100% go with your suspicion. So that's technically fixable to some extent.
 
technically fixable by being more transparent.

And we don't need to go with the newest architecture, or a technique new to the soil type.

We can go with tried and true where the cost estimate is likely to be good.
 
Sorry I meant technically fixable as in "technically, if you could magically have non-corrupt Montreal…". You'd need a POD to clean up Montreal, no other way to get a fairly priced well designed Olympics in that city at that time.
 
The Spartanburg Herald (South Carolina), Four Construction Workers Killed At Olympic Stadium, AP, page B4, March 10, 1976.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?...AIBAJ&sjid=QM0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6708,1635834&hl=en

' . . . The four workers plunged 185 feet to their deaths when steel bars bracing two huge concrete sections were prematurely removed. Three of the men were inside the pre-cast sections and another attempted to jump to safety but was killed on impact. . . '
This accident was classified as human error. But it also has major aspects of a system accident in which you're trying to rush an unfamiliar project, and probably other specific contributing factors as well.
 
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It sounds like the mayor really wanted to build a Taj Mahal.

When his critics described most of his projects as circuses, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau replied: "What the masses want are monuments.

He may have been right as he was voted in mayor until 1986 that 10 more years after he delivered the billion dollar Olympic debt.
 
and the Mayor was successful at palming off many of the costs onto the province of Quebec and the Canadian federal government.
 
As far as the idea that media needs to continue outing corrupt politicians, or merely incompetent ones, I'm all in favor of it, but for a variety of reasons I just don't think it's going to happen.

Investigative reporting is expensive. And frankly, journalists tend to be similar to student council types who suck up to the popular kids. In spite of all their pose of cynicism and jaded world view to the contrary, they really kind of do. And they're scared to death of being accused of "editorializing." Hey, we're just reporting the facts of the situation. But no, we're so afraid of being accused, that we're going to generally take what an elected official says as mainstream. And any departure from this will be relatively brief.

What we as citizens don't often get is sustained, brave coverage where the media dives into a topic on their own. And again, it's expensive.*

=====

I think it's going to need to be a citizens group, say Citizens for Affordable Olympics (or similar name).

* a wild timeline, borderline ASB, might be if both conservatives and liberals grudgingly agree that the mainstream media does a fine job! And as an example of some of the kind of brave media we could have:

If The Wedding Industry Was Honest

OR



some of the better journalism is the comedy shows, weirdly. Or, perhaps not so weirdly.
 
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http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=encee_facpub&sei-redir=1&referer=http://www.google.com/search?q=site:.edu+Olympics+1976+tower&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#search="site:.edu Olympics 1976 tower"


see section "Systemic Problems" (second to last page)

' . . . He notes that

union labor was used, and “approximately 80 days were lost to

strikes and the equivalent of about another 20 days . . . lost through

slowdowns. . . . .

.

.

In early 1976, the Province of Quebec issued an ultimatum

that the workers had to speed up or the project would be shut down

and the Games moved to other facilities. Following the ultimatum, in

better weather, productivity increased 500%. A plumbers’ and

electricians’ slowdown delayed final turnover of the project by

a week, until June 14, just 3 weeks before the start of the Games (Neil

1979). The extensive labor problems are described by Auf der Maur

(1976). There were also 12 workers killed during construction (Auf

der Maur 1976) [Emphasis added]. . . '

-------------------------------

Auf der Maur, N. (1976). The billion-dollar game: Jean Drapeau and the

1976 Olympics
, James Lorimer, Toronto.
Not good at all.

Labor wasn't angels. Ideally, both sides step up to the plate on something as important as safety. And really, I hope unions take the lead.

And it's not about heaping more rules and doing tasks in some artificial, mechanical way, for then you lose the narrative flow of what's going on. And you also lose your own good judgment on what real safety is.

Along these lines, I still very much like the concept of system accident, with William Langewiesche and Charles Perrow being two excellent writers on this topic.
 
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