Column:

Olympics in Chicago a lose-lose

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Oct. 2, 2009

Like so many out-of-state students at MU, I hail, very proudly, from St. Louis's superior neighbor to the north: Chicago. Despite being a suburbanite, I wear this allegiance on my sleeve. I believe Imo's "pizza" is an affront to culinary virtue, and there will never be a sports dynasty quite like the Chicago Bulls in the '90s.

Today, the International Olympic Committee will announce whether my beloved city will host the 2016 Olympics. Conventional wisdom says I should be thrilled about this. After all, President Barack Obama just put a sizable effort in traveling to Copenhagen to help make the sales pitch for the games. But I'm not thrilled. Chicago doesn't deserve the games, and any responsible citizen can see that.

Why not? We can't afford it. As of July 2009, the city was experiencing a budget deficit of nearly $520 million. And it's no mystery the Olympics are often not a profitable venture: It took Montreal nearly 30 years to pay off the debt of hosting the 1976 games. With the city already hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and faced with more pressing problems, and Mayor Richard M. Daley promising the city would foot the bill if the bid went over budget, it's an unwise financial decision.

But, per usual, the people bearing the brunt of the negative consequences of the games would be Chicago's lower-income residents living in and around the proposed Olympic Village locations on the city's South Side, who would inevitably experience displacement, a decrease or loss in their public services and eventually will experience a dramatic increase in housing costs, courtesy of developers.

Although the city has promised to turn these units into affordable or mixed-income housing, many neighborhood and housing organizations fear lower-income residents will be priced out of the neighborhood, a pattern seen with past mega-events. With building for any event like this, those with class privilege are typically all for it without considering the consequences this would have on those who have less.

Long-lasting negative implications for Chicago aside, the games should go to Rio de Janeiro. The Olympics are supposed to be about providing every country with an opportunity to show off its best attributes through the lens of athletics. But a number of factors, from population dynamics to economic stratification, have prevented not just countries, but entire regions from expressing their full potential at the games.

Consistently, regions that comprise this skewed Western notion of the "developing world" — namely, Africa, parts of Asia and South America — are marginalized and pitted against the dominant "Western world," which the IOC tends to favor, but other parts of the world get demonized and pegged as incapable of hosting an event of this magnitude. Granted, this pattern is starting to change with the choice of South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup, but the Olympics are a totally different animal. Rio would be the first South American city to host the games. It has the capacity, economic and otherwise, to do so. It's time to give them a chance.

For Chicago, it's ultimately a lose-lose situation because if the city doesn't get the Olympics, then Mayor Daley pumped millions of dollars (which could have been used for something like improving the public schools or fixing the public transportation system) into something we didn't even win.

But it's not like Chicagoans aren't used to pumping millions of dollars into a failed effort. We are, after all, home of the Cubs.