Olympics News Roundup: 9/29

President—and former Chicagoan—Barack Obama is flying to Copenhagen to meet the International Olympic Committee, in an about-face from his announcement last week that Michelle Obama will represent the White House for the Oct. 2 decision. Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to attend an Olympics conference ...


... But Chicagoans oppposed to the bid aren't alone in asking "What sacrifices must we make to host the Games?" According to USA Today, Obama's announcement that he will fly to Copenhagen to campaign for Chicago met with a flurry of criticism from some Americans, who suggested Obama's time would be better spent making policy decisions about healthcare and Afghanistan ...


... And Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich argues that Chicago's bid is really all about the city's need for love—and money.

Chicago 2016 touts green spaces, water access, as hallmarks of the bid

If Bob Accarino has his way, and Chicago wins the 2016 Olympic bid, the Olympic Stadium seats will be recycled into 80,000 wheelchairs when the games are over. Accarino is the chief environmental sustainability consultant for Chicago 2016, the city's bid organizing committee, and he has made it his job to scout out innovative programs to make Chicago's bid more eco-friendly.

As the decision nears, Chicago 2016 has been highlighting the green and blue aspects of the city’s bid—from tree-planting programs to public service programs to bring clean water to the third world.

Accarino and the Chicago 2016 committee presented these plans and fleshed out the connections between sports and the environment at the Summit on Sport and Sustainability they hosted from Sept. 10-11 at the Hilton.

The Summit brought together environmental experts, sustainable development companies and the organizers of major sporting events like the Boston Marathon and the Super Bowl to discuss ways to reduce their environmental impact.

“We live in a city that has a strong history of being sensitive to the environment,” Pat Ryan, chairman of Chicago 2016, said at the Summit’s opening ceremony, citing the city’s sprawling public parklands and LED certified buildings. “We want the Games and the seven years leading up to the Games to leave a sustainable legacy for our environment for generations to come.”

All four candidate cities are proposing environmentally-conscious initiatives. Madrid, for example, has plans to expand parklands and bike-lanes by thousands of kilometers, Tokyo will “recycle” the venues it used to host the 1964 Games.

But according to Accarino, several features of Chicago’s plan distinguish it from the “green” competition. “We built upon the foundations the city already has… and came up with independent programs that can be initiated before, during, and after the Games.”

Most apparent about the bid’s commitment to environmental sustainability is how it wants to go beyond the color “green,” in name and in practice.

The bid touts itself as the “Blue-Green Games,” Accarino said, and makes clean water access a focal point. Because “Chicago is right on Lake Michigan, we have a responsibility not to cause any harm to local drinking water resources. Even though we have a lot of water, we should be looking at water as a precious resource.”

“The Olympic Games provides one of the largest marketing platforms in the world,” he added, and this compels the city’s bid to use the events to address world poverty issues.

Still, some critics of the bid have suggested that Chicago 2016’s proposals amount to little more than “green-washing,” and that the plans are too vague to be successful. But Accarino says the ambiguity over exactly what forms of renewable energy the bid would implement is an asset.

“One of the real technology challenges we’ve had in terms of transportation is that we don’t know what’s going to be around in 2016,” he explained. “We know we want to use [fuel-efficient cars,] but if we say we’re going to have all hydrogen vehicles, and they weren’t marketable by 2016, then that would be a real problem for us. We have to be somewhat general—we’re not sure if there will be electric vehicles or carbon vehicles or hybrids.”

One project Accarino supports that is not part of the Olympic bid, though it shares part of the bid’s name, is the Urban Lab “Eco Boulevard.” Urban Lab, a local urban design firm, used the increasing scarcity of clean water as the departure point for the ambitious project, which would convert a series of city streets into small parks filled with micro-organisms that clean stormwater and run-off. Urban Land designers are discussing these plans with city government.

“We realize that the Games here in Chicago would be a great catalyst for really innovative projects like that,” Accarino said. “Think about the CTA stops many people would take to go to the stadium, [55th St. and Garfield Blvd.] That could become a Blue-Green Blvd.”

Olympics News Roundup: 9/11

First Lady Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Barack Obama and head of the White House Office for Olympic Sport, both former Chicagoans, will be traveling to Copenhagen in October to be present for the IOC's final vote. Michelle announced her decision to attend Friday morning. Chicago 2016 and city officials have speculated that Chicago will secure the bid if President Barack Obama attends the IOC's October conference ...

... While back in Chicago, the City Council's finance committee recommended Wednesday that the full council approve Mayor Daley's plans to give the Olympic bid a full financial guarantee from city government. The ordinance up for approval, which was originally presented by Ald. Manny Flores (1st ward) as a $500 million spending cap but has since been amended, would require the bid's organizing committee to provide and publicize quarterly reports on spending and cost-overruns ...

... Yesterday Chicago 2016 kicked off its Summit on Sport and Sustainability, a two-day lecture and workshop series for environmentally-conscious organizations and sports managers. Keynote speakers who are scheduled to speak today include Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tony Blair ...

... And Chicagoans respond to the new audio advertisements for the bid playing on various CTA buses.

Is Chicago still game? The final 30 days will tell, say alderman, activist

Less than a month shy of the International Olympics Committee's Oct. 2 decision on who will host the 2016 Olympics, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington sat down with fourth ward Alderman Tony Preckwinkle, and Jay Travis, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization to talk TIFs, housing, and city finances.

Both Preckwinkle and Travis had information to clarify surrounding the increasingly complex relationship between Chicago 2016, the bid committee, City Hall and South Side communities.

Preckwinkle, who's ward contains the site of the Olympic Village and neighbors the sites of the Aquatic Center and Olympic Stadium, cautioned that decision is not "set in stone." Because there has never been an Olympics in South America, she explained, Rio has a particular advantage over the other cities vying for the bid, which include Tokyo and Madrid. Nonetheless, Preckwinkle pointed to the Civic Federation report, commissioned by the city council, as evidence that Chicago's bid has a firm financial foundation.

Travis, a community organizer and one of the founding members of the Communities for an Equitable Olympics (CEO 2016), thinks the Olympic bid stands to negatively impact her community, Bronzeville, if her neighbors don't do something about it. Bronzeville lies north of Washington Park, and would be host to the Olympic Village.

The event took place at the Chicago History Museum last Tuesday evening, Sep. 1. as part of the museum's In the K/Now speaker series. Chicago 2016 declined an invitation to send a representative to speak at the event.

"Displacement often occurs within neighborhoods that are within the Olympic footprint, and that displacement doesn't always happen because of the demolition of homes around Olympic venues. that displacement is caused by housing costs due to escalating rent values," Travis said. CEO 2016 has already played an instrumental role in drafting the Memorandum of Understanding, a document that binds Chicago 2016 officials to the promise to create affordable housing and jobs via the Olympics. But Travis said CEO 2016 is now filing a Freedom of Information Act request to learn about how the city plans to use TIF dollars and other public funds in the neighborhood venue sites.

"I would like more transparency around the use of public fund and public dollars," she said. "We've heard over and over and over that there will be no public funds, except the 500 million that the city is holding, and except for the 250 million that the state is holding. No money except for the TIF funding ... Where will that money be used?"

According to Preckwinkle, there will be a tax increment financing initiative, (TIF) for the Olympic Village in her ward, and there is a proposed TIF for Washington Park in the 20th ward. The TIF for the Olympic Village, she said, will be used to finance new water-mains and streets—infrastructure investments that the city would need to make to successfully redevelop the neighborhood, with or without the Olympics.

"But I think Jay is quite right," when it comes to the need for transparency, Preckwinkle added. The city council was able to pass an ordinance in support of the Memorandum of Understanding because, "not only were we able to build a consensus in City Council, but there were local groups building around the issue."

Travis acknowledged Preckwinkle's help in passing that ordinance, but is worried that it will not legally bind Chicago's Olympic Organizing Committee, which will not be formed until after Chicago wins the bid, to any of the promises for transparent finances, affordable housing or local job creation.

"There's an opportunity for the city, if the city should win the Games, to figure out how to do development in a way that doesn't displace people," Travis said. "But if we don't have the right checks and balances, the Olympics could exacerbate a lot of the issues that are already happening in our neighborhood in terms of displacement."

Olympics News Roundup (9/3)

The city's Olympic bid is falling out of favor with many Chicagoans, according to a Tribune/WGN Radio poll. The poll shows that support for the bid among residents has fallen from 61% last Winter to 47%...

..Meanwhile, Mayor Richard Daley is touring Moscow, Russia to promote the bid. But furthering the Chicago's foothold in global business is his main priority, Daley says...

...And back at home, Aldermen, including Manny Flores and Leslie Hairston, introduce an ordinance to promote Olympics oversight. The ordinance would require better disclosure of the Olympics bid committee and, eventually, the city's organizing committee's finances.

IOC report: Chicago's bid is "ambitious"

Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics still leaves some doubts over how the Games will be managed and financed, according to a report released today.

The International Olympic Committee issued a detailed evaluation report on each of the city candidates vying for the 2016 Olympics, which are Madrid, Spain, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tokyo, Japan and Chicago.

Rio de Janeiro has been called the "emotional favorite" to win the bid, because an Olympic Games has never been held in South America, and the report emphasizes the cohesion between the city’s government, the national government, and the bid committee.

The report says that Chicago’s bid aspires to create a “spectacular experience” that would showcase the city’s acres public gardens, parks and lakeshore. However, it also cautions that the proposed relationship between City Hall and the Organizational Committee of the Olympic Games leaves “some doubt as to the ultimate responsibility for delivery of the Games.” Of particular concern to the report is how the city’s organizing committees, local government, and federal government will share responsibilities for implementing proposed environmental and mass-transit initiatives.

The report also details the projected costs for holding the games, including the budget for venue operations ($1.06 billion), Games employees ($509 million) and transportation ($226 million). The evaluation also tucks a wary prognosis on Chicago’s financing plans into its additional comments section: “the budget is ambitious but achievable.” The city-commissioned report on the Olympic bid by the Civic Federation, released last week, has deemed the Olympics budget “adequate.”

Another concern of the report is that Chicago had not agreed to fully guarantee the Olympic Games for the IOC in April when the report was commissioned. The full financial guarantee, a staple of all past host city agreements with the IOC, has been the source of much tension between City Hall and the community in recent months because of fears that such a guarantee will burden taxpayers.

On a more positive note, the evaluation offers some praise for the temporary venue construction projects, such as the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Center, which would be deconstructed after the Games into smaller, public venues to be used by the Washington Park community. This concept, according to the report, supports previous recommendations to the IOC that the Olympics host city should “build a new venue only if there is a legacy need.” In Chicago’s case, the bid committee determined that the city did not need an 80,000-seat stadium or an Aquatic Center with four Olympic-sized pools, but would benefit from the venues if the stadium could be shrunken after games, and the pools moved separately to other parts of the city.

These plans, the report concludes, would to some extent reduce the environmental impact of hosting the Games.

The report also cites the White House’s new “Olympic Office” and the “Memorandum of Understanding,” an agreement between the bid committee and community members, as positive examples of public support for the bid. However, it also said that a public opinion poll commissioned by the IOC shows Chicago has the second-lowest popular support for its bid among the four candidate cities, with local support at 67% and national support at 61%.

Click here to view the complete report.

The anthropologist in the Olympic Stadium

When John MacAloon began his research on the Olympics, past scholarship amounted to little more than a box of files in a room. Since then, he has published articles on the origins of the Olympic Movement, advised the International Olympic Committee, and sat on several bid committees and organizing committees.

He discusses the ideology behind the Olympic Movement, eminent domain, and why you won’t be renting out your South Side apartment during the Games:

Rachel Cromidas: You’re a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. How did you join Chicago 2016, the city’s bid committee?

John MacAloon: It’s more that the committee joined me. I’ve been working as an Olympics researcher, activist and consultant for about over 30 years now, and when Chicago decided to bid for the Olympics I was one of the few people in town who knew anything about the process.

RC: When you began your research on the Olympics, there was very little existing scholarship on the subject of the Olympic Movement.

JM: When I started, the Olympic Movement was not centralized. My PhD dissertation was a biography of the founder of the Olympic Games, and the story of origins of the Olympic Movement. There had been no such document until I wrote one, other than strict sports history, like who won the 200 meters in 1912, which is not what I do. Many Americans don’t know that the ritual system of the Olympics is by many measures as important as the sports system, because that’s where the ideology of the Olympic Movement comes in.

I study the Olympics as something that ought to be impossible, according to the field of anthropology. [the study of cultural difference]. If cultural differences are so important, then how is it that 205 national cultures and literally uncountable subcultures manage to come together every four years to interact and engage and cooperatively compete? That’s an astonishing achievement, and precisely what the Olympics are designed to demonstrate.

But if you think the Olympics is just sports event, then who cares, what’s the big deal? We’ve got plenty of sports events. But its not that, its absolutely not just that.

RC: What distinguishes the Olympic Movement from the Olympic Games?

JM: The difference is really important to understand if you want to understand what Chicago’s bid is about. Olympic sport is not like other sport. First of all, it’s not like professional baseball. If I ask you to tell me what’s the ideology of professional baseball, or what’s the ideology of NCAA Final Four, or what’s the ideology of the World Cup, you would struggle to answer. But you can tell me something about the opening ceremony of the Olympics. For most Olympics, the opening ceremony is far more important than an individual sports event. That’s because Olympic sport is sport in the service of international education, intercultural understanding, peace, détente, youth development, social justice. We Americans don’t really understand that.

RC: What makes the opening ceremony so important?

JM: Basically, to be considered “a nation among nations” requires marching in the opening ceremony or being a part of the United Nations. And there are more territories, countries, that march in the opening ceremonies than members of the UN—and that is for certain peoples of the world absolutely critical. For example, Puerto Rico appears as nation among nations only in Olympic sport, and its autonomy becomes dependent on Olympic sport. The Games are not everything of course, but in part, because Puerto Rico would lose its independent Olympic team, a referendum on statehood cannot win there.

RC: Do you think local opposition to the Olympic bid has been centered on the idea that we don’t need more sports games in the city?

JM: Some of it obviously has been. But if you’ve never experienced [the Olympics] directly, if you think watching NBC is the Olympics, then you are sadly benighted.

In Germany, until fairly recently, Olympism was taught in every school as the most important social movement of the 20th century after socialism and feminism. That’s a statement that makes no sense to the majority of Americans. They’ve never heard of Olympism, and there’s no tradition even in higher education of teaching this.

There’s also the Cultural Olympiad, which is another ritual of holding the Games. It is a major, four-year festival of arts and culture and education, which I will be leading for Chicago if we get the Games. You don’t hear about this on NBC.

RC: What do you think makes Chicago a more equipped city than the other candidates [Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo] to host the Olympics?

I’m not just working on this bid because this is my city and my city needed me. This is a city made for the Olympics. It’s because of those parks and because of the Burnham Plan. It’s because we are the only city in the world in which the finest real estate is owned by the people. Our ability to put the [temporary and permanent] sports facilities in the parks, by the lake, means we don’t displace a single person; we won't use eminent domain to take somebody’s business or somebody’s neighborhood. And our Olympic Village goes on an empty space, [Michael Reese Hospital]. All of that makes us profoundly different than other bids.

RC: Eminent domain aside, I have heard community members voice concerns that rising rents will displace the poorer residents of Washington Park, Grand Boulevard, and other South Side neighborhoods surrounding the proposed locations of the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Center.

JM: Research tells us that whatever is happening in terms of property values or gentrification in the venue neighborhoods will be virtually unchanged by anything having to do with the Olympics.

Those worries [about displacement] are driven by people’s fantasies, not there fears. People think, “Oh great, for 17 days there’s going to be a huge crowd on the South Side. I’ll rent my apartment!” These people don’t know anything. If anyone coming to Chicago for the Olympics is very rich and renting places, they’re not renting your Hyde Park student apartment. And the people who are coming to work here are construction workers who are not renting.

RC: Is it also a fantasy that the Olympics would revitalize these neighborhoods?

JM: Yes. If you think that other than what is already going on that there will be a ton of business development on the South Side because of the Olympics, you don’t know anything. Of course, there is a major revitalization project in the Olympic Village. There, you will have a major new neighborhood on the South Side that is committed to being 30 percent affordable housing.

RC: What about the speculation that the University of Chicago is buying property in Washington Park in hopes that property values will rise after the Olympics?

JM: The University buying property in Washington Park has been an issue for the past 30 years, and it will continue to be an issue for the next 30. There have been discussions with the University and [Chicago 2016] about repurposing some parking lots near the park, but the notion that University is now buying property because of the Olympics…? What planet are people on? The Olympics are not about economic capital.

RC: Does the University stand to benefit from the Olympics in other ways?

JM: Of course. Think about this: If Chicago gets the Olympics, how many people would ever wonder again if we were the University of Illinois at Chicago? How many North Siders and suburbanites that have never been to the south side will be looking here?


John MacAloon is an associate dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the College, and director of the Social Sciences Master of Arts Program. He sits on the Chicago 2016 Bid Committee. This interview has been edited for length.