Introduction to No Boston Olympics
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No Boston Olympics organizer Claire Blechman gave this presentation on their campaign from 2015 at the 2024 conference of the Academy of Leisure Sciences in New Orleans, Janaury 31, 2024. https://www.2024talsconference.com/keynotes - NBO = https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069312185401 The simple URL for this presentation = https://www.tinyurl.com/TALS-NBO-Intro
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Introduction to No Boston Olympics
- 1. No Boston Olympics Claire Blechman
- 3. Marty Walsh - Mayor John Fish - Suffolk Construction Deval Patrick - Former gov Stephen Pagliuca - Celtics owner, Bain Capital Chris Dempsey Liam Kerr Kelly Gossett Andrew Zimbalist - Smith College Robin Jacks Jonathan Cohn Leftist activists from all over Boston
- 4. Timeline (2015) Jan 8 USOC announces Boston as the bid Redacted Bid 1.0 Released Jan 21 First Blizzard of 2015 Jan 27 First Boston 2024 Public Meeting Feb 5 Consultant Rates Released Mar 9 Walsh agrees to a Referendum Mar 24
- 6. Timeline (2015) Jan 8 USOC announces Boston as the bid Redacted Bid 1.0 Released Jan 21 First Blizzard of 2015 Jan 27 First Boston 2024 Public Meeting Feb 5 Consultant Rates Released Mar 9 Walsh agrees to a Referendum Mar 24
- 8. 82 inches in 20 days between January 26th and February 15th
- 9. The MBTA
- 14. Timeline (2015) Jan 8 USOC announces Boston as the bid Redacted Bid 1.0 Released Jan 21 First Blizzard of 2015 Jan 27 First Boston 2024 Public Meeting Feb 5 Boston 2024 salaries and consultant rates released Mar 9 Walsh agrees to a Referendum Mar 24
- 15. Timeline (2015) May 15 NBO Presentation to Gov. Baker Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing. Bid 2.0 Released Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing. June 29 Tito Jackson Subpoenas 1.0 Bid Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing. July 20 Bid 1.0 Released Unredacted Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing. July Walsh announces he won’t sign the cost guarantee USOC pulls the bid July 27
- 17. Who stood to gain? ● John Fish ⇨ construction ● Marty Walsh ⇨ political limelight ● Consultants ⇨ contracts ● IOC ⇨ cost guarantee, eastern time zone ● Elite donors ⇨ prestigious 3 week party
- 18. Who loses? (It’s always the people) ● Enclosure of public spaces ● Police state ● Sweeps of the unhoused ● Taxpayers foot the bill ● Municipalities pay for white elephant stadiums ● Austerity ● The Environment
- 19. Why did the Boston bid fail? ● Public perception ● Snow ● Inadequate Infrastructure ● Threat of a referendum ● “10 People on Twitter”
- 20. Why did the Boston bid fail? ● Without the cost guarantee, a Boston bid was no longer attractive to the IOC, and no longer in the USOC’s financial interests
- 21. Takeaways Mega events are put on by the capitalist class, to enrich themselves The PR bubble around those events has popped. Appeals to patriotism are ineffective. Promised infrastructure and quality of life improvements never materialize.The public is more informed than ever, and demand representation Research and press play a big part. Don’t legitimize the mega events when they come calling you for your expertise. Do give honest findings to legitimate press Admin matters: printing signs, sending emails, setting meetings Organize today and build for the next fight
- 22. Demand a better world Publicly funded recreation and leisure spaces for all
- 23. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- No boston olympics was my first foray into activism and organizing. I had watched the 2012 london olympics and all the gross state repression that came with it, everything from draconian copyright/trademark enforcement to rounding up unhoused people, to surface to air missiles on residential building roofs. I’d seen photo essays of abandoned olympics venues from the 2004 Athens games. And I knew I didn’t want any of that for Boston. So I contacted Chris Dempsey and was one of the very early volunteers to join on to No Boston Olympics in fall of 2014
- Here are the major players involved with the Boston Olympic bid and opposition to it. On the booster side there was a big coalition of business interests, politicians and sports players. The major figureheads were the new Mayor Marty Walsh, John Fish (owner of Suffolk Construction, the largest construction company in the state). John proved to be a PR liability and he was replaced a few months later with Stephen (pagliuca (PAGLee OOka), who is ceo of bain capital and owner of the Boston Celtics). I’m listing names for reference here but I want to emphasize that we don’t adhere to great man theory here. Opposition to the bid was successful because we brought on a great many people to organize against it. I was a member of no boston olympics, and NBO was the group that largely got the most press attention, but I want to be sure to acknowledge the crucial and very effective organizing work No Boston 2024 did in tandem with No Boston Olympics - in any social struggle you need a variety of tactics, and no boston 2024 was great at building the mass movement. No boston olympics was more focused on media and electoral support, and more closely aligned with academics like Andrew Zimbalist who has studied the economics of the olympics extensively.
- We’re discussing a very short time frame overall here, from the submission of the initial bid in September (12) of 2014, to the USOC announcing they were pulling the bid July 27th 2015, is a little over 10 months. On January 8th 2015, the US olympic committee picked Boston’s bid over LA, San Francisco, and DC. Boston would still have to compete with other bids from around the world at the IOC, but being a US city in the eastern time zone made it very attractive for the IOC to choose, and so we hoped to prevent the bid from even going before the IOC. Not to mention the massive amount of money we know that cities waste just going through the bidding process.
- Notably, the bid city choice was announced on Jan 8 but the contents of the bid was still sealed. No one knew what the BOston 2024 committee was proposing, what they were committing us to. There was a lot of pressure for transparency, and the booster committee eventually released a redacted version of the bid they submitted to the USOC on January 21st. This was crucial because even the redacted version had a lot of objectionable proposals in there. For example, cutting down dozens of hundred year old trees to build a beach volleyball venue on boston common, and a public guarantee that the host city would be on the hook to pay back the IOC for any cost overruns the games incurred - overruns were inevitable: the average overrun of an Olympics budget was at the time 167% (and have only increased since)
- Other cities had defeated their olympics bids with referendums, and a lot of people wanted an option to vote on it, but a whole referendum is a big and uncertain undertaking with a terrible timeline (vote would have been in the fall of the 2016 presidential election) so both sides were hesitant. Boston 2024 tried to make it seem like they were being more transparent by announcing a series of public meetings. The first one was to be held at the beginning of february, but days before this happened
- The first blizzard of the great snowpocalypse 2015
- The snow was relentless that season. We had a record breaking 110 inches of snow that year, 82” of it in the course of 20 days.
- That much snow really put a strain on our crumbling infrastructure. The MBTA is the pride of Boston, the first subway opened in the united states, but was at the time 8 billion dollars behind on the state of good repair, and had been underfunded, saddled with big dig debt, and generally getting less and less reliable for decades.
- The snow shut down large sections of the T, for days. This is a viral graphic by reporter sarah morrison shows the frustration at all the closures. Travel was impossible. No one was working from home really in 2015 so the days when the entire system was closed hundreds of thousands of people couldn’t get to wor Some branches remained shuttered for extended periods even when the underground system was back up.
- So in the middle of all this, on Feb 5, Walsh and Boston 2024 held their first public meeting at Suffolk university. NBO brought people out in force, and we handed out signs. Some of them adapted from No Games Chicago, calling for investment in better housing, better transit, better schools.
- When Marty came to the podium we all put our signs up at once and it was a great show of solidarity - it really looked like a united front against the games. But with important messaging of wanting to invest in Boston and things people care about like housing and the T, rather than a naysaying, NIMBY mindset that Boston wasn’t good enough for the Olympics.
- From there NBO and No boston 2024 went on a campaign to educate people in about the bid and the reality of what it would mean for us in terms of costs and disruption to our neighborhoods and our daily life The boosters pivoted to this idea that hosting the olympics would spur investment in the T and building more housing, which of course a lot of people want. NBO countered and said that we could fix the T without hosting a 3 week party for the rich international elites, that previous olympics had not in fact improved infrastructure, and again pointing out that Boston would be on the hook for inevitable, massive cost overruns. The more voters learned facts about Boston 2024 as opposed to the PR hype about the olympic spirit and world peace, the more opinion polling turned against hosting the games. In the first couple months the numbers basically flipped and now a majority did not support Boston 2024.
- On March 9, 2015, Boston 2024 released salary information for its staff as well as the details for how much it was paying various consultants.This was an egregious number that showed even bidding for the games was a costly endeavor. All the execs made 6 figure salaries, and the chief made 300k. Boston 2024 was paying $124,000 a month to consulting firms, excluding the $7,500 a week that former Governor Deval Patrick was receiving as a bid ambassador. Stark how much money is spent on consultants that’s not spent on public good. I have some real hot takes on how the consulting industry is a massive boondoggle designed to transfer wealth by sucking it out of public contracts, but we don’t have time to go into it here. More on topic, I want to emphasize that even that much money spent on consultants they couldn’t spin the olympics back to public support. Another development here is that, after pressure from Josh Zakim (Boston City Councilor) , Boston 2024 agreed to hold a referendum to let voters weigh in. Referendums are a rather fraught undertaking in Massachusetts, and it didn’t clearly benefit either side to spend a lot of time and money campaigning. The problem also was that the earliest a referendum could take place was fall 2016, which was after the USOC had to submit the bid to the IOC. And sidebar, we all know what a circus the fall 2016 election ended up being — forced the issue of a referendum (son of leonard zakim for whom our most iconic bridge is named)
- So the referendum didn’t end up happening, and the real death blow to the boston olympic bid was Marty walsh announcing he wouldn’t sign the cost guarantee. This was to address the main criticism of the bid, being on the hook for unknown billions in overruns, but refusing to agree to the IOC’s guarantee was a poison pill. There was no way the IOC was going to choose a city that didn’t promise to cover their costs. So the USOC pulled the bid immediately.
- And we all went out to celebrate! I drove back to boston from my vacation in Maine
- We need to make a materialist analysis of any situation. Who stood to gain from having this clearly half-baked olympics bid? Generally the 1% benefit, like in most things. John fish, the ceo of suffolk construction, gets massive amounts of business building stadiums Marty walsh gets political limelight and this PR idea of boston becoming a “world-class city” The IOC gets to graft off the whole endeavor like always, and the eastern time zone is the most lucrative for live sports
- Whereas the people of boston and surrounding cities stood to lose a lot. Most notably, the massive enclosure of public space that an olympics requires. Not just for building but also security, transit, displacing people from their homes and parks, etc. We have a bad enough police state in the US, but an olympics gives the police carte blanche to hassle people, do sweeps of the unhoused, invade people’s privacy, and worse. And of course the bill is steep. Not just bidding for the olympics and building it but maintaining the buildings after, the inevitable austerity to service that debt. Looking back now, we would have been deep into construction when the pandemic hit. We would have been shockingly behind schedule. The overruns would have been massive.
- Why did the boston bid fail, in the end? I want to emphasize that the boston bid didn’t fail because of one person or one event. It didn’t fail because we posted about it a lot on twitter. Public perception by itself is never enough to prevent the capitalists from ramming through projects that benefit themselves.
- The bid failed because Without the cost guarantee, a Boston bid was no longer attractive to the IOC, and no longer in the USOC’s financial interests The most successful public organizing heightens the contradictions between what capitalists are saying and what is actually happening. It mobilizes mass numbers of people to make the capitalist project costly and untenable. It has to disrupt the flow of business as usual. Marty walsh was benefitting politically from boostering the olympics until the press got too bad. The USOC stood to gain from a Boston bid, until the conditions changed and suddenly they stood to lose a lot. Tthe more the public saw the bids and became informed the more politically unpopular it became to write the IOC a blank check I could talk about Boston and our weird political scene, the various players like the universities and the unions and the wildly corrupt and inept statehouse But in the end, without the cost guarantee, a Boston bid was no longer attractive to the IOC, and the USOC saw the writing on the wall.
- Takeaways! I might have mentioned this a couple times, but mega events like the world cup, stadium projects, and other Olympics are put on by the capitalist class to enrich themselves. The public is wising up to this, and demand better things of our government. The marketing and PR bubble has popped, not in small part because you can’t just launder your message through one legacy mass media anymore. There’s this popular phrase in the museum field, museums are not neutral. I’d urge you as academics and researchers to think the same way. You can’t be neutral on a moving train. So if the data bears out overwhelmingly, every time, that olympics are bad investments for the city, then that’s the message you need to get out there. NBO benefitted greatly from Andrew Zimbalist’s research. And when Boston 2024 came calling, asking him to join the board, he said no. Don’t legitimize these grifters by signing on, thinking you’ll change it from the inside. You won’t. Lastly for the organizers out there my hobby horse is always the admin. You need people do print the signs, to collect the emails from supporters at public meetings, to file the FOIAs. It’s not all grand public facing media. You have to make the admin happen on the back end. Everything we build today is towards the next fight. Because even if the revolution comes there will always be another fight. —- I said a slide or two ago that posting didn’t make this bid fail. But we have to acknowledge that Twitter was a major game changer for us in building mass support, disseminating information, and turning the public opinion tide. Alas, the landscape has changed a lot since then and I want to echo what a lot of great organizers like Mariame Kaba have been saying, that you can’t rely on corporate owned platforms for doing anti-corporate organizing work (Because they’ll ban you, they’ll smear you, and in the case of twitter the capitalists themselves will make the platform unusable or dismantle it for their own petty reasons and short term gain) Opposing the capitalist agenda does indeed make you enemies in our corrupt and bourgeois government, but if you’re an opportunist who only wants a career in government and not a better world, then that’s an obvious choice
- Go forth and demand a better world, with publicly funded recreation and leisure spaces for all. Not 3 week multibillion dollar parties A budget is a moral document! Build yours well
- Thank you all so much for having us