It turns out that Boston wasn’t an anomaly in rejecting the 2024 Olympics, it just didn’t wait around for a formal vote. As was proven once again in the recent Hamburg 2024 referendum, the Olympic cause is not necessarily a common one anymore. Whether or not hosting the Games has ever truly been a good idea for a city is debatable (at best), but where past bids would engender support regardless of fiscal responsibility, that doesn’t seem to be the case in modern public discourse.
Hamburg, which voted down a bid for the 2024 Summer Games (51.6 percent said “no”) isn’t even the first German city to opt out of the International Olympic Committee’s bidding process. Munich, also by way of public referendum, chose not to bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Coupled with other European rejections (including a whopping 70-percent “no” from Krakow), the IOC ended up choosing a questionable Beijing bid, where venues are in some cases 90 miles away from the host city.
In all, it represents an undeniable and worrying trend for the Olympic brand. Supposed to be seen as a unifying movement, bid proposals are often now a divisive force in cities and countries that possess democratic governments. Boston was one of the most concentrated examples, precisely because it should have been the opposite. In theory, the sports-loving city that (in certain circles) has been trying showcase its increasing modernity checked many of the necessary boxes.
Yet the reality proved far different. The majority of Boston ended up opposing a 2024 Olympic bid, hung up on the financial question marks and concerns regarding public funding. It was an alarming episode for the IOC, but it only had itself to blame.
The so-called “Olympic Agenda 2020” reforms have failed to take root (though clearly can only be judged in full after more bids try to enact them). The IOC has to continue to reform itself in the meantime. As 3 Wire Sports’ Alan Abrahamson correctly pointed out, IOC president Thomas Bach is a little too elitist for his own good.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the people of Bach’s own country rejected bidding his own organization for the Olympics. Where it used to be enough for Olympic officials to simply put the athletes out front and ride the wave of positive support, communities in 2015 clearly look beyond the shiny photo on the cover of a bid book.
Of course, the only way to actually get the masses back on board with wanting to host the Olympics is through meaningful change that goes beyond a clever public relations campaign. At the heart of such reforms would be stringent financial standards, preventing the cost overruns that have rightfully been such a forceful argument against hosting.
Because if changes aren’t made soon (and, unlike past reform efforts, actually implemented), the Olympics may one day find that no one wants to bid. It’s not as crazy a notion as some might think. After all, the 2022 vote came down to two very undesirable locations.
What’s too bad is that it doesn’t have to be this way. After all, Hamburg voters and Boston opposition didn’t say no to the IOC because they don’t like the Games themselves as a concept. No one is denying that a multi-week spectacle, assembling the best athletes in the world is a bad thing by itself. It’s an organizational and financial issue, clearly.
“Obviously the narrow (Hamburg) vote was greatly influenced by the discussion about the financing of the project presented by the candidate city,” Bach said in a statement. He knows what the problem is, following high profile budgetary explosions in Sochi as well as Beijing. But he also knows that in the public’s increasingly educated eyes, the IOC is losing ground.
