Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Media / Sports / News Bites / News How we lost those games
Posted by Michael Miner on 07.26.11 at 03:45 PM
That message doesn't sound so simple. The idea that our city didn't "deserve" the Olympics supposes that the games were a treat — like angel food cake and ice cream — the city hadn't earned because it didn't do its chores. But if the games were a treat, why wouldn't the city have wanted them? And do cities collectively want or not want anything?
But here's the message the IOC actually got from Tresser: Chicago can't handle the games because it's a mess, and a lot of Chicagoans would rather clean up the mess than put on a show. Or as Tresser said in that same blog post: "We're broke....We're corrupt....We're crumbling....We're mad as hell!"
My own recollection of 2009 is that ambivalence was the most common attitude toward the Olympics. But the ambivalent never decide anything. Tresser — the organizer of No Games Chicago (and last year's Green Party candidate for Cook County president) — is an activist, and he got the result he was after. That October in Copenhagen, the IOC eliminated Chicago in its first round of voting. Rio wound up with the games.
Tresser emailed me the other day: "I think the story of who we were and what we did and why is pretty compelling. But I'm apparently the only person who thinks so because I haven't been able to get any journalist, academic institution or policy think tank interested in looking at the story of the bid and the opposition to it."
To tell the story himself, Tresser has assembled an e-book, ""Dear Members of the International Olympic Committee - Emails From the No Games Chicago Campaign," and made it available online. It's a 285-page pdf you can "purchase" for nothing and then download by clicking here.
"I'm putting this book together because there is no record of the opposition to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics," Tresser's e-book begins. "The Chicago media supported the bid with its endorsement and its money and failed to do its due diligence before lending its collective voice and authority to the bid. A few citizen efforts to oppose the bid; No Games Chicago was the most organized, persistent and effective. Our story has not been told."
He's right. Whatever you think of the Olympic bid — but especially if you supported it — I'd expect you to agree that its failure should be understood. It's interesting to read that No Games Chicago led off its "Book of Evidence" to the IOC with a Ben Joravsky column from the Reader, "An Open Letter to the IOC — Why You Don't Want to Give Chicago the Olympics."
Comments (5)
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If any of these people actually think that had even 1% to do with Chicago not getting the games they have even more of an inflated sense of self worth than I thought.
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The games were going to Rio no matter what and if this pos and his supporters think they had something to do with the outcome then they're more delusional than I thought.
I'm sure the reason the games went to Rio had something to do with corruption, just not corruption in Chicago.
"Tresser emailed me the other day: 'I think the story of who we were and what we did and why is pretty compelling. But I'm apparently the only person who thinks so because I haven't been able to get any journalist, academic institution or policy think tank interested in looking at the story of the bid and the opposition to it.'"
And that's how it should have stayed. Needless to say, the first three commentators are right that it is unbelievably loony to think that people like Tresser affected the outcome of the awarding of the games. It isn't very productive for a normally level-headed mainstream journalist to enable the crazies by spreading the word about an e-book that apparently makes such an absurd argument and to even suggest that there is validity to it by titling the blog post "how we lost those games". It would be like promoting a book that suggests that President Obama is a Muslim.
But I guess this is what is going to happen now that e-books are available. Any loon will find it worth his while to publish any comprehensive piece of junk he wants and the word about it would be spread throughout the internet and many people will actually read and believe it. The internet in the last fifteen years has allowed people to publish crazy stuff that would not have been possible before. But this has been normally limited to short things such as blog posts since it hasn't been practical to expect people to read long book-length material on the internet. Now this is going to change and there will be people who actually pay for this type of stuff. There will be e-books published that involve such things as racist ideology or just plain absurd political or ideological arguments such as from extremists groups like the Sovereign Citizens. This is not good for society.
And I am someone, by the way, who had very mixed feelings about whether it was good for Chicago to get the games and whose reaction was relief when it was announced that we didn't. But to think the outcome was the result of people like Tresser is nuts.
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Chicago's 2016 Olympic Bid
An archive of the Reader's coverage by Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke
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