Interesting politics. It would appear Obama owed some favors and appeared for this reason alone. There is no way really that his appearance at this late date could make any difference in the bids because all the bid reports were in and read and all the delegates’ “lost luggage” that needed replacing in potential host cities had already been replaced (or not, as the case may be).
It was a long odds mission for the President.
My own take on Chicago would be how could anyone get anywhere in a timely fashion?
I drove from Windsor to Chicago in 2.5hrs- and then from the one side of Chicago to the other in another 3 hrs! Good thing I arrived before rush hour!
You will have the same problem in Rio. Avenida Brasil will colapse if heavily transited. I hope they finish building their metro soon.
Anyway great to see the OGs in Brazil, it´s a marvellous country.
I am amazed they would both pick a city that is hosting the World Cup just 2 years before the Olympics AND pick by far one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It makes South Side Chicago look like a kiddie playground. And Madrid in the final 2 (after London being in 2012)?? This has to be a joke.
I wonder if the IOC is actually looking at themselves long-term as a massive portion of their revenue comes from the US market and I can hardly see how this is going to help things when the popularity of the Olympics dies a bit more every 4 years. It has already been discussed that the USATF is going to be taking a hit since they were going to receive large increases in contributions from some of their sponsors (like Nike) if Chicago was to have the Olympics.
I live in Chicago and I don’t have a clue how they could pull it off with the traffic. A single Bears game on Sunday shuts the place down.
Have you ever been to Madrid, Tokyo? I have gone from the south side of Chicago to O’Hare in well under 2hrs during rush hour on a Friday and to St. Charles as well in a similar time frame. It isn’t any worse than the other cities listed and better than some.
I don’t really like the idea of the Olympics in Chicago, but I just don’t see how it could lose out to the places in question except perhaps Tokyo who clearly had the best plan. Politics are fun though.
I’ve been to Madrid and Tokyo. I could see problems in Tokyo because of the no-right-turn rule but I’ve never experienced delays like Chicago. In any event, I’m sure traffic problems are a side issue to politics as usual.
I don’t understand why the US nominated Chicago as their Olympic bid candidate city. This is a genuine question: Why Chicago? In my own mind’s eye, I have no impression of anything appealing about Chicago. Sorry, but maybe that’s how the rest of the world saw the place too.
:o
Sometimes prejudices are hard to fail…Rio is as dangerous as could be any big american city (New orleans, for example, or washington or London, which holds the record for teen agers killing by knife fight…)…in the south and center part, there is nothing to worry.far easier to be robbed the camera or cellular in other european cities…only in certain favelas there are constant wars btw police and drug dealers…but no turist can notice this, because no one goes there…also, not all the favelas are dangerous place…95% of people living there are just poor honest guys.
In a couple of favelas, you reach an Homicide rate of 150 for 100.000, whereas in washington ( all the city) you had 78 in late 90s, new orleans 80…btw, in the center and tourist area of Rio, you have 4 (!!!) each 100.000…actually safer than most european cities…
The crome problem came with democracy in the 80s…still during 80s, homicide and crime in all brazil were similar to those in all USA…Th olypics are the best occasion to move on…
Rio has 3 metropolitan lines ( modern, on time and clean), and there IS a lot of traffic, but public transport is quite efficent…easier to reach any
point of Rio by coach or metro than doing the same in Rome, for example.
First time in that part of the world, internet, phone, sewer electricity, accomodation and transport. They have cleaned up cities before,
How many of you have actually visited Rio?maybe for a significant time and not just a swim in Ipanema?Good luck to Rio…I’ll be back there very soon.
that was the point of the bid- to show that Chicago has a great center part at least but of course from a visual aspect, how can any bid city match Rio?
By not being one of the most dangerous, crime infested places in the “Western” world. And having money, too, of course. It is also technically winter in Rio during the summer Olympics, which isn’t a huge deal, but average temps in the 60s. I’m not sure if that is considered ideal or what, but not how I exactly imagine a summer Olympics (Sydney was cold, too).
You gotta be kidding me regarding the crime. This has to be a joke. Today, not 20, 30, 40 years ago, Rio is incredibly more dangerous than virtually any city in the US or in Western Europe and clearly much more dangerous and financially distraught than any of the other cities in question. It isn’t even comparable.
The slum won it again!
It was the same with London vs Paris… London promised to regenerate the east-end… infact they’re pretty much flattening Hackney!
However, I doubt very much that any stadiums will be built in the Favelas… they’ll be left to rot… worse off than before.
Do they have a starting date for Rio?
Are you so sure fogelson?Ever been there for a significant time?There are stats from international organization, and new orleans and washington have far worse death count…then, not a paradise off course(except it should be a paradise…from eyesight it is), and still great disparity among people…but one of the very few country in which, albeit slowly, middle class is growing, slowly but growing…can we say the same here in europe or the us?It’s a city and a country of contrasts…you see favelas and city wars like african tribal wars, and then you have the most advanced anti aids prevention program, plastic surgery and dental ones.
It had been early 30, when according to Roosevelt brazil should have become n1 power in the world…didn’t happen…then during the 60s…didn’t happen…yesterday Lula’s speech is one of the best ever from a country leader, in par with some of Obama (not the ones on Iran for sure…)
Also…average low temp during night is 66 in august, average day high is 78…not so cold in the end…also is the driest month of the year regarding rain.
Look, I’m not going to turn this into a thread arguing about murder rates, but there has been more than enough published on what a joke some of the purported stats are. Many drug related murders and crimes in Rio aren’t even reported as homicides, so the stats are quite deceiving at best and still show how dangerous it s. I don’t know what years you are referring to, but Washington DC and New Orleans, at their worst, are not as bad as Rio (and I don’t recall New Orleans or DC being in the running for the 2016 Olympics, both of which I would think are absurd). If we look towards violent crime in general, it becomes even more insane.
I too wonder if the IOC is biting the hand that feeds them or at least alienating the US considering the revenues that come directly from the US versus anywhere else in the world.
Comparing homicide stats won’t get you anywhere, because other countries use murder stats. Homicide includes other things. And besides, I doubt the police are going to report and file every slum corpse or any of their many victims.
Great point, UKCheetah. Some manslaughters are even classified in the same category as murders in the US. That is sure going to change things…
How has the East End been affected over the last few years (in the lead-up to 2012), from what you have seen?
By Philip Hersh
October 3, 2009 | 9:48 a.m.
Reporting from Copenhagen - That Rio won the 2016 Summer Games is easily understandable.
The International Olympic Committee fancies itself a force in global affairs. As in the case of breaking Olympic ground by giving the 2008 Olympics to China, the world’s most populous country, Friday’s vote was a chance for the IOC to say that by giving the Olympics to South America for the first time it will have aided the development of Brazil, the most populous country on the continent.
That Chicago was eliminated in the first round, as shocking as it seemed, also was surprisingly understandable, given the IOC’s byzantine internal politics, its fractious relationship with the country whose companies have been its cash cow and the way the host-city election system is structured.
Since the IOC narrowed the 2016 field from seven to four finalists 16 months ago, it has been apparent that Chicago’s biggest challenge would be surviving the first round in what was expected to be a very close election.
Chicago was the only candidate without a significant regional constituency. And it was working to overcome years of IOC members’ ill feeling toward the U.S. Olympic Committee, which intensified in the last year.
NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, whose company paid $5.7 billion for Olympic TV rights from 2000 through 2012, placed the blame squarely on the USOC.
“This was the IOC membership saying to the USOC there will be no more domestic Olympics until you join the Olympic movement,” Ebersol told me early this morning, after he had talked with many leading members. “Chicago never had a chance, it turns out.”
Chicago failed – miserably, it would seem at a cursory glance – for some of the same reasons New York lost in the second of five rounds of voting for the 2012 Summer Games. It also failed out of a naivete that having what may have been the best bid was good enough.
“We [North Americans] kind of think if you’ve got the best bid, the world will recognize that, and these decisions are made solely on the merits of the bid. Well, not solely,” said veteran IOC member Richard Pound of Canada.
The issue isn’t that Rio earned what Ebersol called a “spectacular and deserved victory.” It was Chicago’s early departure after long having been considered the favorite.
“Good for Rio, very disappointing for Chicago,” said IOC member Kevan Gosper of Australia. “They deserved much better.”
Conversations with IOC members and other Olympic officials Friday produced a number of reasons factoring into the second straight slap in the face at a U.S. bid city.
- Even with an intense USOC international relations effort after New York’s expected defeat four years ago, the United States is not a player in international sports politics. President Obama’s impressive international relations effort as a speaker in Chicago’s final presentation could not make up for the nation’s lack of influence in the Olympic arena.
“The United States, within the Olympic movement, hasn’t engaged as well as we could have for a long time,” said Bob Ctvrtlik, who filled a newly created position, USOC vice president for international relations, a the New York defeat.
“This [defeat] isn’t just on the merits. I don’t think it’s anti-American. Maybe we still don’t have the horsepower to do some of the politicking within the movement.”
- The USOC, in its habitual revolving-door leadership mode at the start of New York’s bid, went right back into that position in March, when its board unceremoniously dumped chief executive Jim Scherr in favor of Stephanie Streeter.
IOC member Denis Oswald of Switzerland cited the USOC instability as a problem and said it was his impression “this was a defeat for the USOC, not for Chicago.”
“It was clear that between the USOC and Chicago there were differences,” Oswald said. “Although everybody tried to look united, it was clear it was not.”
- The apparent truce between the IOC and the USOC in the acrimonious negotiations over revenue-sharing didn’t hold. And the USOC’s decision to go forward with its own TV network despite IOC warnings to desist remained an irritant even when the USOC put its tail between its legs and backed off.
"The colleagues who asked me, I told, ‘I would like you to forget about this, [that] we will try to find a solution, and we should judge Chicago based on the quality of its bid,’ " Oswald said. “But everyone has a different approach, and I cannot say this has not played a role for a number of people.”
Those words may be self-serving. Oswald has been on the IOC committee trying to get the USOC to give up some of the revenue it gets from U.S. TV broadcast rights and global IOC sponsorships, and he described former USOC Chairman Peter Ueberroth as arrogant for stonewalling the negotiations.
“The truce might have held if not for the network thing,” Ebersol said. “It made IOC members suspicious the USOC was just going to keep all the sponsorship money and use it for the network.”
- Any North American city lacks a natural constituency in an IOC dominated by Europeans, especially in a race where there was a South American and European candidate.
Chicago got 18 votes in the first round, when there were only four North Americans voting – two from Canada and two from Mexico, the latter certainly more inclined to align with their Latin cousins.
Tokyo had 22 votes in the first round, Rio 26 and Madrid 28. In the next two rounds, nearly all the eliminated cities’ votes went to Rio, allowing it to rout Madrid, 66-32, in the decisive round.
Some members may have been so convinced Chicago would advance that they initially gave another city what Swiss IOC member Rene Fasel called “sympathy votes.”
Chicago “going out in first round, that was just an accident,” Fasel said. “I expected to have a different vote in the end. If Chicago is against Rio, it will be much closer.”
- Rather than an accident, it was clever electioneering by Brazil that eliminated Chicago early.
“When you look at the margin, it was clear there was an effort to make sure Rio got this, and the only meaningful threat to Rio would have been Chicago, so all the friends of Rio were urged to try and make sure Chicago didn’t get into that position,” Pound said. “I’ve got to say I was surprised nevertheless that it was a first-round loss.”
You can read all these explanations, shake your head and be forced to fall back on the reasoning of poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote that much madness makes divinest sense to a discerning eye.
Or rely on the impression of Norway’s Gerhard Heiberg, long a cool voice of reason within the IOC.
“I am very sad; I am very sorry,” Heiberg said of Chicago’s early exit. “This should not have happened. This was, I can’t say a wrong decision, but it was not a right decision.”
Yet not an unexpected one.