One For the Fail Files: Philly’s Star-Crossed Olympic Bid

I occasionally have cause to wonder if Mayor Nutter has been creeping up over the Canuck border and getting into Rob Ford’s bag of pixie dust. I’ll cop to being a bad blogger, because there I was last night, gleefully streaming the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race and idly browsing my Google news alerts for Center City, when all of the sudden this PhillyMag opinion piece found its way onto my screen. In the immortal words of Queen Ru – oh no she betta don’t.

Philly has its eyes stubbornly on the prize, but not all that glitters is gold (…or silver, or bronze!).

First things first. Joel Mathis already did an amazing, succinct job at explaining why the essential idea of Philadelphia hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics is destined to be DOA, so I won’t belabor it much here. The basic gist is that hosting the Olympics is nothing like a wine and cheese garden party… it apparently costs tens of billions of dollars (and, as a gig, has an unfortunate history of doing more harm than good for a city’s profile). That’s a lot of chevre and moscato, especially for a city that currently has some very key departments very keenly underfunded.

This is to say nothing of the ludicrousness of thinking that New York and Philadelphia could collaborate on anything, let alone an undertaking as monumental and needfully well-orchestrated as an Olympic Games. Can you just see some lost little Romanian gymnast trying to get back to her dorm in Philly after an afternoon shopping for Pillow Pets and toddlers’ size 5t jeans in Manhattan? They’d probably stick her on the wrong train just out of spite. And just try convincing the local Boo Birds that racewalking isn’t the right event at which to jeer and throw things at the losers!

All kidding aside, I just don’t think we’re ready for the international spotlight that comes with hosting the Olympics – let alone the extreme hatchet-burying needed to facilitate a cooperative bid with New York. Public transportation is a real problem, and there are many compelling arguments that the tremendous outlay of funds a bid requires could be put to better use elsewhere. Philly isn’t the only American city making a 2024 Olympic bid – Boston, Washington, San Diego, and San Francisco are all still in the running. There’s all this ado over an event that is, based on historical precedent, unlikely to improve the city’s profile on the national or global stages. One might say, if that’s the case, why bother?