THE RIVER SEINE is at the center of the Paris Olympics, and to showcase its new cleanliness, the city’s mayor recently plunged into the waterway.
To Massachusetts political geeks of a certain vintage, Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s soaking may have reminded them of Gov. Bill Weld’s 1996 dip into the Charles after he signed into law protections for rivers and streams. Ten years after the publicity stunt, Weld told a magazine, “The river wasn’t as clean as I thought. I had an earache for three weeks.”
For the people who live and work in Paris, the ceremonies don’t start for another few days, but the Olympics are already a pain. The Associated Press reports a “special kind of iron curtain came down” on the city, and a code on phones or paper is needed to get through security, even if they’re just trying to get to their jobs. Restaurants and other businesses are seeing a massive drop in foot traffic. “France faces a glut of unwanted Olympics tickets,” yesterday’s Financial Times said.
Asked this week to reflect on the long-gone possibility of Boston hosting the 2024 Olympics, Senate President Karen Spilka didn’t hesitate. “I’m glad it’s in Paris,” she said. “That’s my quote.”
Even so, the Paris Olympics are still prompting some to wonder what might have been if Boston, instead of the City of Lights, had landed the Summer Games. The Games would have been spread out across the state, out to Worcester and down to New Bedford.
Corey Dinopoulos, a proponent of bringing the Olympics to Boston, felt it could have been the catalyst to fix the region’s ailing transit system. “It’s just sad where it is today,” he said this week. “I think the Olympics could have given it the kick in the ass it may have needed.”
But others disagreed, including a former state transportation official. Chris Dempsey still has two front pages of the Boston Globe: One from January 2015, when the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) picked Boston to compete for hosting the 2024 Olympics, and the other from seven months later, when the bid died, in large part due to Dempsey and others spearheading an effort to deep-six it, pointing to taxpayers being on the hook for billions of dollars as part of the bid.
“We dodged a bullet,” Dempsey said. “We might have even dodged a meteor.”
He acknowledged that investments in transportation, and the construction of more housing, are needed. “We still have all sorts of challenges but none of those challenges were going to be fixed by Boston 2024,” he said, referring to the Boston bid’s name.
The bid included a proposal to convert housing built for athletes into permanent housing in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood after the Games. But the housing is now getting built anyway, thanks to the sprawling Dorchester Bay City development project, Dempsey noted.
This wasn’t a “culture of no” at work in the region, since early polling showed that people were supportive, according to Dempsey, who now works as a consultant. It was when people learned more details about the bid that support started dropping, until it became untenable for the bid to continue.
Dempsey and his band were joined by several local elected officials, including Michelle Wu, the future mayor, who questioned the bid and the lack of transparency about what a multibillion dollar bid entailed.
Even then-Mayor Marty Walsh, one of the bid’s earliest and biggest supporters, eventually threw in the towel, saying he couldn’t sign a host city contract with the Olympics that didn’t have taxpayer protections. But in a Boston Business Journal story last December, he maintained that the Olympics were a “tremendous marketing opportunity” and called the opposition to bringing the Games to Boston “short-sighted.”
Dinopoulos fondly remembers meeting local athletes and working with business leaders and decision makers on the bid. But the rules imposed by the secretive USOC didn’t allow a transparent, public conversation early on in the process, and that deeply wounded the bid, Dinopoulos said.
Charlie Baker, who was hit with news of the bid on the same day he held his inaugural festivities, also played a role. The governor was neutral as he faced intense pressure from Olympics boosters to stake out a position. A public records request by MassLive offered a window into the thinking of his administration officials, who seemed skeptical. “This whole endeavor should be treated with caution,” his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, wrote in an email chain after Baker forwarded along a Daily Beast article that argued the Olympics likely would have a negative economic impact.
Months later, Massachusetts officials successfully lured General Electric away from Connecticut, with one Baker economic development staffer reporting the conglomerate viewed its new headquarters, right by Boston’s Fort Point Channel, as a “20-40 year commitment.” In another email to administration colleagues the same day GE announced it had picked Boston, Kadish looked back to Boston 2024’s efforts. “Some of the pundits have said that this is the real gold medal,” he wrote of GE’s decision.
Of course, that didn’t pan out either. GE has since broken into three separate companies, after abandoning plans for a Fort Point tower.
To paraphrase Weld, years after his dip in the Charles, some things, in hindsight, aren’t as clean or clear-cut as they appear.
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