In honor of this blunder, let's go back and reminisce over all the hilarious times the Olympics organizers fucked up.
St. Louis, 1904: The first Olympics held outside of Europe, and the first in America. (Yes, there was a time where St. Louis was one of America's biggest cities). Since this was in the American Midwest in the time before air travel, most European athletes couldn't make it to the games. Of the 651 contestants, 526 were Americans.
The games were originally supposed to be in Chicago, but lack of adequate infrastructure for the games (and some campaigning by Teddy Roosevelt) led to the game being awarded in St. Louis, which was prepared to host the World's Fair. And not prepared to host the Olympics. The organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition were so furious that they threatened to create their own Olympics (which didn't happen). In the end, it took 5 months to finish.
1916, 1940, 1944: The only Olympics to have been cancelled. 1916 was supposed to have been held in Berlin...then WWI broke out. 1940 was supposed to have been held in Japan, with Tokyo hosting the Summer Olympics and Sapporo hosting the winter Olympics...then Japan invaded China and forfeited the games. The International Olympic Committee tried to salvage the 1940 Olympics, awarding the Summer Olympics in Helsinki and putting the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchin, Germany (after attempts to put it in Switzerland failed)...then Germany invaded Poland. The IOC didn't bother to try and reschedule the 1944 Olympics after that. (For the curious, the 1944 Summer Olympics were to be held in London, and the Winter Games in the Italian village of Cortina d'Amprezzo)
Denver, 1976: With a slick presentation that lowballed costs and airbrushed brown spots out of the Rocky Mountains, the Mile-High City charmed the IOC into winning the Winter Olympics. Then the cost estimates tripled, concerns about environmental damage increased, and the public turned on it. After Colorado voters decided to reject using taxpayer money to fund the Olympics, the IOC scrambled for a replacement, awarding the games to Innsbruck, Austria.
Montreal, 1976: Meanwhile, the Summer Olympics left the city of Montreal so deep in debt that the funds for the Olympic Stadium weren't paid off until 30 years later. The stadium itself was supposed to have been the first outdoor stadium with a retractable roof, but structural failures meant that the mechanism for retracting the roof wasn't added until 1987. (And even then, it wouldn't work in high winds, and was prone to damage. The roof was permanently closed in 199
The financial situation was so bad that some people thought it was going to be the last Olympics ever. On top of that, almost every African nation (and for some reason, Albania, Guyana, Iraq, and Afghanistan) boycotted the games after the IOC refused to ban the New Zealand national rugby for their "rebel tour" of apartheid South Africa. (Bear in mind, most other sporting organizations at the time had
very strict sanctions against doing business in South Africa. The IOC itself banned South Africa from the Olympics until the fall of apartheid)
Moscow, 1980 and LA, 1984: The USA infamously boycotted the 1980 Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This proved disastrous for the NBC network, who had put all their stock in Olympic programming that summer and found itself about to broadcast something that Americans probably wouldn't give a shit about without a home team to root for. Needless to say, they took a huge loss on that. (They reduced their coverage to a single clip show, made to satisfy the diehard fans who didn't give a shit about the Cold War)
Immediately afterwards, the Soviets boycotted the LA Olympics. No biggie...except McDonald's had started a contest where customers could get a free Big Mac for every gold medal won by an American athlete. And since the Soviets weren't coming, that meant that the event was dominated by Americans.
Yep, that's where that one joke in the Simpsons came from. No word on whether the McDonald's CEO spat in every fiftieth burger.
Seoul, 1988: A positive example of an Olympic fuck up. The Seoul Olympics went off without a hitch...except for the ruling military dictator of South Korea, Chun Doo-hwan. Initially intended as a way to legitimize his authoritarian rule, South Korean students said "fuck that noise!" and started mass protests, giving Chun two options:
1) crack down on the protesters, making the country look like a third-world dictatorship in front of the entire world and jeopardizing the Olympics.
2) actually listen to their demands, ensuring that the Olympics would go on as planned.
In the end, Chun chose option 2. South Korea's first democratically elected president opened the Seoul Olympics less than a year later. I, for one, commend the South Korean student protesters for their collective magnificent bastardry that would make Rommel blush like a schoolgirl
(As for North Korea, they tried leading a boycott. This time, nobody listened)
Athens, 2004: Everything was behind schedule. Everything. The tram system and the Olympic stadium were only finished two months before the start of the games. They decided not to put a roof on the aquatics center to save time. So much money was spent on construction that it may have contributed to the Greek debt crisis.
London, 2012: This was the moment where everyone realized "hold up, this is getting way too expensive, and the long-term benefits of this are questionable at best". Part of the backlash was due to the fact that the IOC ran the city of London like their personal fiefdom, leading to things like special traffic lanes just for Olympic athletes and McDonald's getting exclusive rights to sell fries anywhere within the Olympic venues.
Sochi, 2014: Yes, you all remember the terrible accommodations, the ridiculously warm weather, the calls for boycotts over the anti-gay laws, and the fact that Russia immediately invaded Crimea afterwards to save face. What you may not know was that all of the Russian athletes had been doping, and that the government presided over a huge state-run doping ring involving corrupt anti-doping officials, members of the cross-country ski team, two medal-winning bobsledders, and
intelligence officers. (Apparently, they were embarrassed by they poor performance of Russian athletes during the Vancouver winter Olympics) As a result, the Russian track and field team was banned from competing in Rio, and the IOC almost banned the entire Russian delegation.
The fallout wasn't just confined to Russia: due to public pressures, the city of Oslo withdrew their bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics. As a result, the only two bidding cities were Beijing, China, and Almaty, Kazakhstan...both nations not known for their commitment to the kind of democracy that allows angry citizens to reject Olympic bids. So, Beijing becomes the first city to have hosted both the summer and winter Olympics, because the IOC knows that the Chinese can do it, no matter who imperfectly.
BONUS:
I just had to put the failed Boston 2024 bid here. First of all, the proposals were outright stupid. They wanted to build the Athlete's Village in
Southie, or as it's better known, "the place where every story about Irish mobsters ever is set in". The bid was proposed during the worst winter on record, where the aging MBTA ground to a screeching halt, and upgrading it would've been prohibitively expensive. Boston city officials have a track record of starting grandiose projects that go nowhere or get drawn out (like the Big Dig) so its no wonder that Bostonians were skeptical of the thing from the beginning. The fact that employees of the city government weren't allowed to criticize the proposal only cemented that skepticism.
Eventually, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh dropped the whole thing, and most Bostonians moved on with their lives. Good for them!
But now, Los Angeles is the American Olympic Committee's top choice for a 2024 bid.
The ride never ends...
