New York Bid Falls Short as London Is Chosen for Olympics


Well, it's still hard for me to think about New York's Olympic bid without thinking about the pro football stadium Mayor Bloomberg wanted to build on the West Side of Manhattan -- a stadium that, once the Olympics were over, would have sat idle or underused 300+ days a year and sucked massive amounts of traffic into Manhattan on the remaining handful of Sundays, while almost certainly costing taxpayers far more money than promised. And twenty years after it was built the Jets would undoubtedly have sought a sweeter stadium deal and fled again, leaving Manhattan with a huge open-air flea market. The West Side stadium was written out of New York's Olympic plans at the eleventh hour, after it was rejected by state legislative leaders, but the people who fought for these Olympics sought it with Ahab-like monomania, as if New York were a second-tier red-state city, a Charlotte or Jacksonville, that needs a football team to be "world-class."

But it's moot now. And hey, just try to imagine a 2012 Olympics in America. Remember, we're going to elect a new president in 2008. This person is going to be either (a) a Democrat who will subsequently be attacked for four years as a sandal-wearing peacenik traitor or (b) a Republican psycho, someone who reached the Oval Office after being thoroughly vetted by the Christian Right and the Club for Growth and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, someone who'll be so extreme that he'll make us nostalgic for the relative moderation of George W. Bush the way Bush makes us recall Reagan as a moderate. By the election year of 2012, I think a Republican president elected in 2008 will have horrified much of the world -- anti-American marches in the streets will be a global phenomenon. A Democrat, on the other hand, will have to tack desperately to the right going into 2012, rattling any available saber. Either way, I figure an American Olympics 2012 would have been another 1980 or 1984, with boycotts and denunciations flying around (not that we minded 1984, becauise we had no real competition and we won everything, which is all Americans really care about). Anyway, it's not our problem now.