LA or Chicago. Which City Do You Think Is More Deserving....

to represent the United States for the 2016 Olympic Bid?

Curious to hear from people in Salt Lake and Atlanta as to what positive or negative long term effects the Olympics had on your city.

Didn't the Olympics help finance part of the I-15 / 215 reconstruction in SLC? Or was it all in state funds? Anyway SLC got their roads and freeways upgraded big time.

The only thing I remember about Atlanta is Richard Jewell.

The SLC Olympics allowed Mitt Romney to get elected Governor of Massachusetts. That's not a positive.

Here is a PDF of an analysis of the projected cost of holding the 2010 Games in Vancouver . The estimated cost, after figuring in all the tourist dollars is over a billion CD.

Here is a hearsay quote:<blockquote>Quote
<hr>Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), citing General Accounting Office studies, noted that the 1996 Atlanta Olympics cost federal taxpayers $609 million and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics cost the federal treasury an estimated $1.3 billion.<hr></blockquote>
I think they should hold the 2016 Olympics in Baghdad.

The budget for 2012 in London is £9.3 billion.

Not sure how that translates to $US, because the billions are a bit different I think. Still a lot of money though!

i hope they don't have it in chicago ever

Sports is just Big Business, even the holy Olympics.
Spend the money on health care and start wagering on when Granny will die of cancer.

Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil) got inspired to build a big posh hotel, Grand America (nice patriotic ring dontcha think?), and upgrade his ski resorts for the SLC fanfare. Difficult to judge how that improved the quality of life for folks.

Chicago... LA's already had it.

The games are not what they used to be. They don't benefit the hosts as much as they are projected to.

If I were the Chicagoans, I'd insist on giving it to L.A. again (they had it in 1984 -- the marathon passed a half-block from my apartment). The Olympics is an excuse for every developer to loot the public treasury for meaningless white-elephant projects. Run for the hills, Chicago.

I read somewhere that both Salt Lake City and Atlanta made a TON of money on the games.

I live in Chicago and would love to have them to get some much needed public transportation expansion and better roads.

willy is probably right.

Be careful what you wish for #11, Willy is right.

I live right outside Chicago in Oak Park and I hope LA gets the nod for the US again. City taxes will go up, county taxes will go up, state taxes will go up and the taxpayers will get white elephants.

Banned, it would be cheaper just to raise the CTA tax again.

The Chicago lakefront was deeded to the city by Montgomery Ward to remain FOREVER FREE AND CLEAR. Meaning no buildings, no entry fees. No Olympics.

The olympics haven't been profitable for the host cities for years.

As much as I complain about crazy bus drivers and buses bunched up together, and the ridiculous delays from the brown line renovation, Chicago has a much better transit system than many other cities. Not much reason to think the Olympics is going to make the transit or roads improve. In fact, there hasn't been much talk of changes on this front to accommodate the olympic traffic all.

LA can have it.

Atlanta wasn't considered a particularly good Olympics. I never thought this was a fair assessment (there were several important benchmarks, including (1) the most well-attended Olympics, (2) significant improvements in civil rights and animal rights, and (3) the first Olympics in which all eligible nations participated) -- but you can't change public opinion even if it is misguided.

Also, I was disappointed that so many of our Olympic structures were either comletely dismantled or partially dismantled (e.g., the viewing stands at the Aquatics Center; half of the Olympic Stadium, leaving the baseball stadium that is now known as Turner Field).

Even so, the Olympics represented a complete change in Atlanta, almost entirely for the better. I have spent my whole life here, and specific changes I noticed included:
(1) Prior to the Olympics, Atlanta was self-conscious to the point of paranoia. Any criticism of the city in the national or international press would be met with angry rebuttals from city officials and much of the citizenry. Now, Atlanta is confident in itself and, like any mature city, recognizes that criticisms will be leveled -- sometimes accurately, and sometimes unfairly. Mostly we don't even notice national/international criticism now. If it's a really good point, sometimes a movement will develop to address the problem. This may sound trivial, but from the perspective of a native Atlantan, its a major, major shift, and that's why it's at the top of my list.
(2) The Olympics heralded the beginning of a profound population shift in Atlanta: Prior to the Games, we were a suburban city with a decaying core. Now we are (becoming) an urban city with a suburban environment that is diminishing in prestige and relative population growth.
(3) Atlanta was already a diverse city in the sense of having ethnic communities and restaurants. But the games brought our relationship with the rest of the world to a new level, opening up trade relationships, cultural exchanges, and educational cooperation in diverse arenas. These were helped by the fact that we already had the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and the Carter Center located here; but I'm convinced that a lot of the connections would not have been made if the Games had been played elsewhere.
(4) The Olympics gave Atlanta a sense of capability. You never hear politicians say, "If we hosted the Olympics, we can do anything," but that unspoken sentiment underlies just about everything that gets done here.
(5) Atlanta has always been enriched by the people who move here from other places and bring new attitudes and cultures. (I say this as a third-generation native, which is a rare status here.) After the Olympics, Atlanta had the cachet to attract a lot of new blood.

As for negative, there's not a thing. The Games themselves were anticlimactic, and we were disappointed in the international criticism of the commericalism (we had a street fair that some people called tacky; Barcelona draped entire buildings in advertisements; but we were the overcommmerialized while they were the shining example that we failed to equal) as well as the fact that we're remembered more for the bombing than for the achievements. But the improvements after the Games, which started almost immediately and hasn't stopped yet, has made it all worthwhile.

-- Joe / Atlanta

The olympics should go to either Leadville,colorado or Nome, Alaska.

it';s amZing that except for Joe, most of the posters don't have any idea of what they're talking about.

as for the free and clear thing, have you ever seen lakepoint tower? I've seen the olympic plans for Chicago, and it's very interesting.

I think Chicago should get them b/c LA has already had them twice.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>it';s amZing that except for Joe, most of the posters don't have any idea of what they're talking about.<hr></blockquote>Still true after 19 posts.

It would be a good thing for LA, because it would finally force local governments to develop some sweeping and timely programs to address the area's problems with traffic and its lack of useful mass transit.

In my opinion, LA is now incapable of supporting an Olympic-sized event, as its gridlock is now a serious issue (much more so than it was in 1980, when traffic was relatively bad compared to the rest of the country, but still fairly manageable), while population density has increased to the point that a well-designed transit might actually be successful and gain ridership. An Olympics would force the agencies to cooperate in developing a workable plan and to implement it quickly, lest the event deteriorate into an international PR disaster.

why have them at any one spot,anyway? Spead them around,sez moi.

They can't spread them around too much because a lot of people travel around the world for the environment of the Olympics, and having them in multiple cities would make this impossible.

That said, they do get spread around a lot more than people realize when they're watching on TV. The Atlanta Olympics had events as far away as Savannah (6 hours from Atlanta), and preliminaries were conducted throughout Georgia and in most surrounding states. (Along this line, we were amused when Alabama put up signs at the Georgia border reading, "Welcome to Alabama - Site of the 1996 Olympic Games." They have a new design now, but those signs were up for years after the Games.)

-- Joe / Atlanta / USA

or have them permanently in one spot,like Greece,or central Greenland.