The 2024 Olympics at Boston. Globe retrospective of sites then and now.

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www.bostonglobe.com

If Boston had hosted the 2024 Olympics, these were the proposed venues. What has happened there since? - The Boston Globe

A look back at what the organizers had in mind — and at what has happened at those sites in the intervening years.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com

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Beach volleyball on Boston Common

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Olympic stadium at Widett Circle

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Olympic Village Dorchester

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Equestrian events, White stadium

The Globe article details other sites whose proposed locations were never included in the final submittal, like a velodrome at Assembly Square and an aquatics center at Harvard-Allston.
 
Would have been nice to obliterate Kosciuszko Circle like they did there. Still would be nice.

The amount of new venues that would have been required in the area for a summer games would have been prohibitive, and I don't think many of the venues would have been useful past the games themselves.

The pitch should have been for a Winter Olympics. There's so many existing rinks in the area for hockey, skating, curling, etc., and much of the skiing could be offloaded to NH or ME. Build a speed skating facility by one of the colleges, and then use Fenway or Harvard for the ceremonies. Then the rest of the money could have been focused on infrastructure, the T, etc. Not that the resistance from residents would have been any less.
 
The Boston 2024 bid became the LA 2024 bid which became an agreement that gave Paris the games in 2024 and LA the games in 2028. The correct time to visit a “what if” around a Boston Olympics will be in 2028, not 2024.
 
It is certainly an interesting note that the host city ended up being Paris, a city which many would hold up over the past ten years as "This is what we COULD be doing!".
 
Paris is the capital of a nation that is far more centralized when it comes to supporting this kind of thing than the USA would ever be.


It's appropriate to remember - and celebrate the rejection of - this boondoggle proposal because it was for 2024 and the rejection happened 10 years ago, which is a time period often used for remembrance in our popular culture.

Shirley Leung has never lived down her playing the parakeet for the developers of the boondoggle proposal.
 
BOS2BON said:
Did the 2024 bid assume the Allston-I-90 project would have been completed before the start of the games?

From wikipedia:
Click to expand...

If they had actually proposed using the Allston land for the Olympics, then yes, I think it would have been completed by 2024 (or 2028, as the case may be). The delays in that project have been the result of analysis paralysis and obstructionist activism, both of which might have been at least somewhat alleviated with the Olympics as a deadline.

That's kind of the whole argument, as put quite well:

KCasiglio said:
It is certainly an interesting note that the host city ended up being Paris, a city which many would hold up over the past ten years as "This is what we COULD be doing!".
Click to expand...

The US host ended up being LA, another city many would hold up over the past 10 years as an exemplar of effective transit infrastructure development.

The problem with Boston 2024 ended up being that the bigwig proponents got locked into the unbuildable Widett Circle stadium concept, which looked so pigs-fly crazy that No Boston Olympics had no problem painting the entire concept as a boondoggle for the very wealthy. A better bid concept using more existing venues would have presented great opportunities to force infrastructure forward, but it was actually the failure of Boston 2024 (and Hamburg's competing bid and others) that forced the IOC into its new model of bidding. Under that model, cities partner closely with the IOC to design sustainable and realistic "bids" after already being selected as the preferred bidder, removing incentives to "wow" the IOC with crazy, expensive, and non-functional visions.

Paris and LA will use lots of existing venues, but their bids for 2024 were developed the old way. It's really Brisbane in 2032 that will kick off this model for the Summer games. The two Winter hosts selected yesterday (https://olympics.com/ioc/becoming-an-olympic-games-host) - Nice/French Alps in 2030 and Salt Lake City in 2034 - will be the first to fully apply this method in that season.

I suspect the IOC ends up with a consistent host city in each country or on each continent, and cycles through them rather than having the multi-phase bid process (first US, than World) Boston went through back in 2014. For the US, that would seem to be LA for the Summer and SLC for the Winter. At this point, after the failures of Chicago, NYC, and Boston, I'm not sure what other US city would ever consider hosting.
 
There is also an argument for a single global summer and winter venue:
- Eliminate the repeated venue and infrastructure costs.
- Maintain a consistent time zone offset for broadcast/streaming.
- Make the venues available for training or rental during the off years.
 
RandomWalk said:
There is also an argument for a single global summer and winter venue:
- Eliminate the repeated venue and infrastructure costs.
- Maintain a consistent time zone offset for broadcast/streaming.
- Make the venues available for training or rental during the off years.
Click to expand...
This is one of those ideas that almost everyone except the IOC would be on board with. There's political and financial power in the process of awarding the games - just today there's reports that as part of the SLC 2034 award the IOC was demanding the FBI step back from investigations into the current doping scandal in swimming (https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/07/25/olympic-swimming-china-doping-allegations/).
 
Oh yeah, I know it’s all about the grift for the oligarchs. Athletics are incidental.
 
It's still crazy to me that people wanted to do the Summer Olympics in Boston. The Winter Olympics would have been preferable to the Summer ones, especially if it was for all of New England and not just Boston. (I know there are a lot of major downsides to hosting the Olympics and I'm not seriously suggesting it should happen here, it's just fun to imagine)
 
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themissinglink said:
It's still crazy to me that people wanted to do the Summer Olympics in Boston. The Winter Olympics would have been preferable to the Summer ones, especially if it was for all of New England and not just Boston. (I know there are a lot of major downsides to hosting the Olympics and I'm not seriously suggesting it should happen here, it's just fun to imagine)
Click to expand...

What's so crazy about having the Summer Olympics in Boston? Freaking Atlanta hosted them. If you want to make an economics argument, then sure, but Boston as a city is more than capable of pulling off the Summer Olympics and IMO would have made for an excellent host.
 
lexicon506 said:
What's so crazy about having the Summer Olympics in Boston? Freaking Atlanta hosted them. If you want to make an economics argument, then sure, but Boston as a city is more than capable of pulling off the Summer Olympics and IMO would have made for an excellent host.
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It simply would have been an easier sell. The Winter Olympics would have been somewhat decentralized and distributed the hosting, and the headaches, to a wider area of the region rather than putting all of the pressure on the city itself. It would have required fewer new facilities, and the load of people attending would have been less than for the Summer games. If the Winter games went successfully, then you could start a discussion about a Summer games with the public with a much clearer idea of what's involved in an event of such scale, and that helps the PR battle immensely.
 
I chuckled at this McSweeney's comedy post from the other day on what events would've been held, had Boston hosted the 2024 Olympics.

www.mcsweeneys.net

Sports That Would Have Been Introduced If Boston Hosted the 2024 Olympics

“The bid to bring the Summer Olympics to Boston in 2024 fell apart nine years ago… Many community leaders and residents were supportive of the idea...
www.mcsweeneys.net www.mcsweeneys.net
 
This makes me so annoyed. The can’t do attitude around here. So many cities work like hell to get the games and are never choosen - Boston had it in our laps and said “No Thanks”.

The games could’ve been used as a catalyst to land alot of mass transit funding and other infrastructure funding. It also would’ve spurred A TON of development.

And most of the new venues wouldn’t have been wasted boondoggles - almost all of them could’ve been sold off to local universities.
 
NoShJFK said:
And most of the new venues wouldn’t have been wasted boondoggles
Click to expand...
But the biggest, least temporary one would have been, and that alone would have caused a Montreal sized problem.
NoShJFK said:
The games could’ve been used as a catalyst to land alot of mass transit funding and other infrastructure funding.
Click to expand...
But would the state be capable of not screwing itself over like it did with the Big Dig? The split was supposed to be 85/15 Federal/State funding, but it ended up being more like 45/55 with a massively inflated cost to boot.
NoShJFK said:
It also would’ve spurred A TON of development.
Click to expand...
But would that have been necessary? Real estate demand in Boston is off the charts and developers are already building as fast as we let them. (Which is not very fast.) Zoning reform would do the same thing but essentially for free.
 
TheRatmeister said:
But would the state be capable of not screwing itself over like it did with the Big Dig? The split was supposed to be 85/15 Federal/State funding, but it ended up being more like 45/55 with a massively inflated cost to boot.
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I agree with Ian Coss on this one that framing the big dig as massively inflated is a narrative perspective and not the reality. When he dug into the nitty gritty, it wasn't really a bunch of corruption siphoning government money but really the unknown complexities of the massive project requiring to be addressed. If you're just framing it as Massachusetts payed too much and not the feds, that's fine, but also understand that the rules for inflation forecasting in project bids changed after the big dig started and the original budget assessed was not really about things like the massive utility reorganization that occurred.

On the flip of that, the big dig certainly made people skeptical of mega projects and trust that the state could pull them off. That's really what @NoShJFK is alluding to. People don't want to spend money that big anymore. The only thing of value in the 2024 proposal was the capping of Widett circle and that money could be better spent on much more impactful projects in Massachusetts. Almost all of the MBTA proposals were just knock on effects of things that were already proposed and or funded at the time (New Red and Orange Line cars. South Coast Rail. South Station Expansion. West Station.) and people thinking that Boston was going to radically improve the T with the 2024 money haven't really engaged with the proposal or the critics of it. How many of those critics are now staunch transportation advocates. Chris Dempsey went from leading No Boston 2024 to founding Transportation for Massachusetts which is the second biggest advocacy platform for transit policy in MA after TransitMatters.

Rat is right. Boston has been building without the 2024 Olympic bid and on developer money, not public funds. We didn't need it to get us out of a development bust and it wasn't going to fix much else. It was an excuse for private interest to get the taxpayers to fund private enterprise with little long term benefit to MA. Would it be fun to host a global event in Boston? Probably, but that's the only reason we should do it. Not to fix infrastructure that wasn't ever planned to be fixed by the bid anyways.
 
jbray said:
If you're just framing it as Massachusetts payed too much and not the feds, that's fine, but also understand that the rules for inflation forecasting in project bids changed after the big dig started and the original budget assessed was not really about things like the massive utility reorganization that occurred.
Click to expand...
I'm not saying anything about corruption. The project was massively complicated, more-so than originally expected, and so the cost skyrocketed. I'm saying the same thing would have happened with Widdett Circle, and that like Montreal the stadium wouldn't have been done in time or at the minimum it would have been very close.
 
TheRatmeister said:
I'm not saying anything about corruption. The project was massively complicated, more-so than originally expected, and so the cost skyrocketed. I'm saying the same thing would have happened with Widdett Circle, and that like Montreal the stadium wouldn't have been done in time or at the minimum it would have been very close.
Click to expand...
I'm just trying to understand why you're blaming the state and I still don't think I fully understand your intent. How did the state "screw itself over"?
 
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