Olympic Cities

City Agendas, Planning, and the World's Games, 1896 – 2020

John Gold, Margaret M Gold, John R. Gold, Margaret M. Gold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317565307
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

The first edition of Olympic Cities, published in 2007, provided a pioneering overview of the changing relationship between cities and the modern Olympic Games. This substantially revised and enlarged third edition builds on the success of its predecessors. The first of its three parts provides overviews of the urban legacy of the four component Olympic festivals: the Summer Games; Winter Games; Cultural Olympiads; and the Paralympics. The second part comprisessystematic surveys of seven key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: finance; place promotion; the creation of Olympic Villages; security; urban regeneration; tourism; and transport. The final part consists of nine chronologically arranged portraits of host cities, from 1936 to 2020, with particular emphasis on the six Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games of the twenty-first century.

As controversy over the growing size and expense of the Olympics, with associated issues of accountability and legacy, continues unabated, this book's incisive and timely assessment of the Games' development and the complex agendas that host cities attach to the event will be essential reading for a wide audience. This will include not just urban and sports historians, urban geographers, event managers and planners, but also anyone with an interest in the staging of mega-events and concerned with building a better understanding of the relationship between cities, sport and culture.

Chapter 1

Introduction

John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold

July 2015 was not an auspicious month for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). On the 17th, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe announced the scrapping of the chosen design for the new National Stadium, which would have been the $2 billion centrepiece for the Tokyo 2020 Games. The design in question had been selected in November 2012 from entries submitted to a competition organized by Japan’s Sport Council. The brief was for a new 80,000-seater stadium to replace the one previously constructed for the 1964 Olympics, with the proviso that it would be ready in time to host the 2019 Rugby World Cup (Fulcher, 2012). The winning submission from the eleven shortlisted entries supplied by international architectural practices was a sinuous design by the London-based Zaha Hadid Architects that resembled a giant cycling helmet.

Justifying their selection, Tadao Ando, the chairman of the adjudication panel, stated: ‘The entry’s dynamic and futuristic design embodies the messages Japan would like to convey to the rest of the world… I believe this stadium will become a shrine for world sport for the next 100 years’ (Ryall, 2013). For more local consumption, the addition of a retractable roof was hailed as supplying a flexible arena that could be easily transformed from a sport to a concert venue. In September the following year, Hadid’s striking design was undoubtedly a selling point when Tokyo won the nomination for the 2020 Games, with IOC President Jacques Rogge praising ‘the excellent quality of a very well-constructed bid’ (Gibson, 2013a).

Yet by 2015 thoughts of symbolism, spectacle, multifunctionality and long-term cultural kudos seemed secondary to considerations of price and value-for-money. Announcing cancellation of the original scheme and the decision to seek a re-design from scratch, Abe alluded to ‘criticisms from the public which made me believe that we will not be able to host a Games that everyone in this country would celebrate’ (Wingfield-Hayes, 2015). The strategy of blaming the architects for ‘greatly inflated construction costs’ was added to assuage any concerns over possible loss of face¹ amongst the international community. This populist move, however, would have its downside. Deciding to ‘start it over from zero’ meant, among other things, that the stadium would not now be ready for the Rugby World Cup (Ibid.).

Abe’s declaration and his recognition of the need to address sustained disquiet resonated with wholly separate developments in the USA that came to a head shortly afterwards. On 27 July, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) announced that Boston (Massachusetts), the city chosen to bid for the 2024 Olympics, had withdrawn its candidacy. Once again, this was the culmination of a lengthy chain of events. In February 2013, Boston had been one of the thirty-five US cities to which USOC had sent invitations to prepare a bid. After a protracted selection process and the emergence of a shortlist that pitted it against Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC, USOC gave the nod to Boston on 8 January 2015. At first, the major local stakeholders had provided strong support, with Mayor Marty Walsh issuing a statement that resounded with the rhetoric of place promotion. He duly recorded the city’s acceptance of this ‘exceptional honour’, which recognized ‘our city’s talent, diversity and global leadership’, and how ‘Boston hopes to welcome the world’s greatest athletes to one of the world’s great cities’ (Nessif, 2015). Of particular note, too, was the way that the bidders emphasized ‘marketing Boston as a site of innovation, contending that the city [was] … not only capable of hosting a Games but also well placed to develop new planning models for the Olympics in general’ (Lauermann, 2015, p. 3).

Other potential stakeholders saw things differently. There was concern about lack of public consultation and a growing sense that no proper economic case had been made. Organizations such as ‘No Boston Olympics’ and ‘No Boston 2024’ challenged the legitimacy and the rationale of the bid, using Freedom of Information provisions to document ‘municipal risk-taking and other indirect subsidies’ that had been deliberately downplayed (Ibid., p. 6). As the summer progressed, USOC pressed Boston to sign a host city contract that would leave it responsible for any cost overruns (Moore, 2015). On 27 July Mayor Walsh called a press conference at which he delivered the coup de grâce to the project that he had so recently supported. Walsh announced: ‘I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk … if committing to sign a guarantee today is what’s required to move forward, then Boston is no longer pursuing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games’ (Arsenault and Ryan, 2015). Faced with that rebuff, USOC were ignominiously forced to seek a substitute.

Finally, on 31 July came what seemed rather better news for the IOC. Amidst the conventional Oscar Awards-style razzmatazz, the 128th IOC Session in Kuala Lumpur chose Beijing over Almaty (Kazakhstan) as the host city for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The world’s television networks that chose to cover the event were treated to the usual pictures of a smiling IOC President announcing the winner followed by images of backslapping victors in the conference hall and scenes of jubilant crowds back home at the Olympic Green in Beijing. In some respects, it could be presented as a triumph. The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing had been the most lavish in Olympic history, giving rise to memorable spectacle while still supporting the IOC’s core values. There was no reason to suggest that a Winter Games there would not produce the same desirable outcome and certainly the Chinese were regarded as offering a safer pair of hands than their Kazakh rivals for staging this festival.

Nevertheless, the surprising closeness of the voting – 44 votes to 40 for Beijing over untried competitors who were bidding for the first time – reflected an underlying sense of unease. Questions were asked about the credibility of Beijing’s bid. Almaty had pointedly campaigned under the slogan ‘Keeping It Real’ and had featured many images of ice and snow in its bid videos. It also emphasized the possibility of staging a compact Games (Borden, 2015). This contrasted with Beijing, which had no history as a winter sports venue and where neither of the two distant mountain sites for the snow events – Yanqing and Zhangjiakou – could stage their events without copious quantities of artificial snow. In such circumstances, an unusually large number of IOC members seemed willing to take a chance on what normally would have been a rank outsider.

A related and perhaps more disconcerting consideration was the proven difficulty in assembling and retaining the usual roster of four to six cities to provide a convincing choice for the final vote. Back in November 2013, the IOC had announced a shortlist of six applicant cities, with Oslo (Norway), Kraków (Poland), Lviv (Ukraine) and Stockholm (Sweden) bidding in addition to Almaty and Beijing.² Informal ideas about continental equity – never an official part of IOC policy but never far from thinking about the political realities of host city selection – suggested that a Northern European bid would be favoured. After all, the three previous Games had been allotted to Vancouver (2010), Sochi (2014) and PyeongChang (2018). In quick succession, however, ‘every potential host city with a democratically elected government dropped out … mostly over economic concerns and lack of public support’ (Manfred, 2015). The bid from Stockholm was quickly withdrawn due to inability to produce effective costings around which to seek public support (Abend, 2014). The Kraków bid was terminated after it failed to win support in a local referendum. The Lviv bid also partly foundered on lack of public support as well as from the instability stemming from the political crisis caused by Ukraine’s territorial conflicts with Russian-backed separatists (AP, 2014; see also Chapter 3).

Most damagingly, though, the Oslo bid – judged as comfortably the best of the three in the preliminary bid assessment – was cancelled as late as 1 October 2014. At that point the Conservative Party, the main Norwegian political party that favoured the bid, withdrew its support meaning that it was no longer possible to achieve a necessary Parliamentary majority to provide cost guarantees. Although made primarily on economic grounds, the decision was also made more palatable to the Norwegian public by the decision to publish what were termed ‘the hopeless pampering requirements’ of the IOC (Crouch and Blitz, 2014). These included: a drinks reception with Norway’s King Harald to be paid for by the royal family or the local Organizing Committee (OCOG); instructions as to appropriate ways in which IOC members should be greeted; chauffeur-driven transport to be provided along lanes reserved for their use, with traffic lights adjusted to give them priority; supplying each delegate with a Samsung mobile phone with a paid Norwegian subscription; ensuring that all furniture should be Olympic-shaped and have Olympic appearance; demands over ambient room temperature, quality of food and late-night opening on bars; and exclusive control over all advertising space throughout Oslo during the Games, which would then be used exclusively by official Olympic sponsors (Ibid.; also Matthis-Lilley, 2014).

For their part, the IOC hierarchy was both incensed by the Norwegian withdrawal and genuinely surprised by the ferocity of response to demands that had been freely granted by predecessors (albeit sometimes modified or partly withdrawn in due course). Christophe Dubi, the IOC’s Executive Director of the Olympic Games, issued a press statement that was curtly dismissive of the arguments about the likely costs of the Games, blaming the Norwegian bid team for failing to discuss the terms properly with the IOC and allowing decision-making to be made on ‘the basis of half-truths and factual inaccuracies’. Above all, he asserted: ‘This is a missed opportunity for the City of Oslo and for all the people of Norway who are known world-wide for being huge fans of winter sports … [and] a missed opportunity for the outstanding Norwegian athletes who will not be able to reach new Olympic heights in their home country’ (Dubi, 2014). After various retaliatory salvoes from the Norwegians who, among other things, accused the IOC of behaving like capricious rock stars, the matter was laid to rest (Crouch and Blitz, 2014).

The IOC-Host City Relationship

Taken together, these separate developments represented setbacks for the IOC in various ways, but also have to be seen in their broader context. In the first place, previous experience suggests that none will prove critical to the staging of future Olympiads. Problems with main Olympic stadia have been experienced before and it is quite likely that the events of July 2015 will later seem only a blip in the development of Tokyo 2020. The withdrawal of Boston from being US Applicant City for 2024 paved the way for the selection of Los Angeles, the host on two previous occasions (1932 and 1984) and probably always a stronger candidate than Boston. Finally, for all the problems in retaining a convincing shortlist of applicants, there were few doubts about the outcome in terms of the Chinese being able to stage the Winter Games successfully. Certainly, by any comparison, whatever anxieties might currently exist over attracting candidate cities are minor compared with the situation that pertained in the mid-to-late 1970s, when the supply virtually dried up (Payne, 2006; see also Chapter 2).

That finding in itself underlines a second key point, namely, that a proper understanding of the staging of Olympic Games rests substantially on an appreciation of the relationship between the IOC and its host cities (Gold and Gold, 2012). At once complex, richly textured and continually evolving, it is a relationship that has given each Games a unique character while still being part of a recurrent series. Moreover, its flexibility has also been a vital factor in ensuring the extraordinary longevity of the Olympics despite the challenges presented by changing times.

To elaborate, the IOC’s decision in the 1890s to re-establish the modern Games as an ambulatory event that moved to a new destination every 4 years immediately placed the relationship between the IOC and its host cities at the centre of the Olympic project. Like any contract entered into by two parties with different starting positions, it was always likely to be a fluid and occasionally uneasy partnership. This was particularly so because that partnership often rested on changing and sometimes contrasting views about the ways in which the increasing size of the Games should be accommodated and about the extent to which the hosts could use the Games as vehicles for achieving positive outcomes for their cities.

In the early days, the Olympic movement sought to use the Games’ ambulatory path to encourage longer-term sporting outcomes in host nations around the globe. Members of the IOC tended to nominate cities in their own countries as potential hosts, believing that the value of the event came from the prestige that accrued to centres that held the Games. Naturally, the organizers of earlier Olympiads were aware of the economic potential that the Games might have, particularly with regard to tourism but, given the attachment to amateurism and antipathy to profit on the part of the IOC, it was considered inappropriate to glory in what the Games would do for the city rather than for sport and the pleasure of its citizens (McIntosh, 2003, pp. 450, 452).

This arrangement was feasible when the burden on the host city was small, with the local organizers staging the early Games in adapted stadia or temporary arenas, but the rapid growth in the scale and complexity of the Olympics quickly created new circumstances. Increasingly, host cities were expected to act as risk-takers. Special venues were needed, with London’s White City Stadium, purpose-built for the 1908 Olympics, setting the trend. Five years later, the Swedish organizers of the 1912 Games wistfully concluded that: ‘to carry out the Olympic Games of the present day … required not only personal effort on the part of the organizers, but also the most ample financial resources’ (SOC, 1913, p. 51).

In the fullness of time, the Games’ organizers saw that much more could be achieved as by-products of being nominated to stage the Olympics. Los Angeles’s bid for the 1932 Games, for example, was crafted by aggressive local entrepreneurs and political leaders who wished to boost the city’s credentials on the national and international stage. The organizers of Berlin 1936 saw the Summer Games used as a medium for the Third Reich’s spectacular representations of the New Germany, albeit with a surprisingly small impact upon the host city apart from the completion of an enormous sports complex on the city’s outskirts. Rome 1960, the first Games held after the end of the Austerity that followed the Second World War, saw the first thoroughgoing attempt by a host city to attach a general exercise in urban development to the festival. Over time, a tacit bargain effectively developed between the IOC and the host city, particularly as mediated by the OCOG. In broad terms, this allowed the Games to be used to address the needs of the home city in return for the extraordinary investment of time, effort and resources needed to stage the modern Games. By the time of Barcelona 1992, the balance had altered so dramatically that only 17 per cent of total expenditure actually went on the sports element of the Games compared with 83 per cent on urban improvement.

In the 1990s, the issue of sustainability entered the frame. In 1994, the IOC adopted the principle that the candidate cities for the Summer and Winter Games should also be evaluated on the environmental consequences of their plans (Gold and Gold, 2013). This was matched by the decision to construe ‘environment’ as a ‘third pillar’ of the Olympic movement’s core philosophy of Olympism, alongside ‘sport’ and ‘culture’. In 1996, the Olympic Charter was itself amended to assert that one of the IOC’s roles is ‘to encourage and support a responsible concern for environmental issues, to promote sustainable development in sport and require that the Olympic Games are held accordingly’ (quoted in Pitts and Liao, 2009, p. 67). In October 1999, the Olympic Movement published its own Agenda 21 document as a response to the recommendations of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to serve as a ‘useful reference tool for the sports community at all levels in the protection of the environment and enhancement of sustainable development’ (IOC, 2006, p. 10). To a large extent, the idealistic tenor of environmentalism conveyed by these measures struck a resonant note with the Olympic movement – itself not adverse to idealism. Yet it may also be argued that the sustainability agenda gave the IOC the chance to respond to accusations of ‘gigantism’, in which it was blamed for requiring host cities to expend vast amounts of resources in constructing and staging one-off events. Direct advocacy of environmental responsibility helped to show that the movement was addressing these issues by seeking to reduce the impact of the Games and to ensure the future generations of the city’s residents gained lasting benefits from the expenditure.

If sustainability led the way in renegotiating the core relationship between host cities and the IOC, it would quickly be joined by a new and explicit concern for ‘legacy’ – a notion that now exerts a powerful sway over the way in which the outcomes of the Games are imagined, conceptualized, negotiated and realized (Gold and Gold, 2014, 2017). The word ‘legacy’ itself had had sporadic and nonspecific usage in Olympic parlance, largely lacking the conceptual impedimenta now attached to it. The first significant mention of the word per se occurred in the city of Melbourne’s bid document for the 1956 Games (McIntosh, 2003, p. 450), but that was an isolated occurrence – particularly as there was no further use of the term in the Official Reports either prepared for the Melbourne Games or for successors for several decades thereafter. This did not mean, of course, that organizers were indifferent to achieving beneficial outcomes for their host cities. A...