Olympic trials | September 5, 2001

THE OLYMPICS ARE a festive two-week sporting event. That's what the organizers of the bid to bring the 2012 games to San Francisco tell us. They talk, with legitimate passion, about the international goodwill the games create. They also talk of the money the games would bring to the region and how the 2012 Olympics could demonstrate to the world that the infrastructure for a world-class event could be built using sound environmental principals.

The Olympics are also – and for those of us who live here, perhaps primarily – a giant exercise in land-use planning. Tens of thousands of people have to be housed, transported, fed, and entertained; events would be spread over at least 100 miles. Some $2 billion in public and private money would be spent to make that all possible.

But decisions that benefit the Olympics won't necessarily be good for the rest of us. And because the Olympics have become a massive big-money spectacle, run almost entirely by private interests, Bay Area residents won't get much say in how those decisions are made. There will be no local vote on how to plan, finance, or run the games. There have been no public meetings of the organizing committee.

As we report on page 17, the modern history of Olympic games hasn't been pretty. In Atlanta, for example, hundreds of low-income people were evicted to make way for Olympic venues. Thousands were arrested in sweeps of the homeless. In the end the city put up millions of dollars, and very little of the promised financial bonanza trickled down to the needy. In Sydney serious environmental problems were ignored or covered up. In Salt Lake City public money has gone to build and expand venues that will have little or no use when the games are over.

To their credit, the local organizers, the Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee, are trying to reach out to environmental groups, social-justice groups, and community leaders to get their input. The organizers insist that this Olympics will be different – that there will be no displacement, no bad environmental impacts, no costs to the taxpayers that aren't more than covered by Olympic revenues.

The problem is, organizers in Atlanta said the same thing. So did organizers in Sydney.

So far, there's been very little organized local opposition to the games. But before city officials in San Francisco get firmly behind this bid, they should hold extensive hearings and ask some tough questions. Among them: Do we really want to make $2 billion worth of changes to the Bay Area landscape to serve the needs of a two-week sporting event that primarily serves the needs of giant TV networks, corporate sponsors, and wealthy tourists?

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