An intriguing race is shaping up between Los Angeles and Chicago.
One of those two great cities soon will be selected to be the American representative to bid for the 2016 Olympic games. Which is favored?
Chicago may be the sentimental favorite. After all, it’s never hosted the summer Olympics while Los Angeles has hosted it twice (1932 and 1984).
But L.A. would be the favorite if logic and business sense prevails. After all, L.A.’s Olympics actually made money unique among the elite sisterhood of Olympic hosts and it could well do so again in 2016.
Why? It has to do with the construction costs. Just look at what Chicago proposes to build. There’s an Olympic Village that’ll cost an estimated $1.1 billion. There’s a new stadium that’ll cost $366 million. Various other construction is estimated to come in at $500 million. (And you know what happens to construction estimates: they can go up as fast as Howard K. Stern’s reputation is going down.)
Los Angeles, by contrast, needs to build only one permanent venue, a shooting facility. A bridge support in Long Beach harbor must be moved for the water sports, and there are a few other costs, but L.A.’s construction is expected to total about $200 million pennies to Chicago’s dollar.
Barry Sanders, who’s heading L.A.’s bid to get the Olympics, pointed out that Los Angeles doesn’t have much to build because there’s already a big inventory of venues, including the Coliseum, Staples Center and the Home Depot Center in Carson.
Because L.A. does not need to build a raft of glorious and breathtakingly expensive edifices, an L.A. Olympics would likely create a big surplus, an endowment that could be invested. That money could be used to support amateur athletics well into the future. That’s what happened after the 1984 Olympics. And that could happen again, if the Olympics were held in L.A.
Now, some say the proposed construction actually works to Chicago’s advantage because the Olympics have a kind of edifice complex. Olympic officials are sentimental about the idea of the games transforming a city, leaving a physical legacy.
But Olympics officials should start looking at the construction boondoggles that have become closely associated with the games. There are the usual cost overruns, such as the 2012 games in London, which were supposed to cost $2 billion but are now close to $9 billion and counting. And there are white elephants left behind, mainly because there is little market need for Olympic stadiums other than the Olympics. A half dozen of the structures in Athens are down. And remember that $366 million stadium that Chicago proposes to build? It would be torn down after the Olympics, leaving only an amphitheater.
If the Olympic committees swallowed a serious dose of business logic, they would halt their emphasis on building buildings. Instead, they would favor money-making proposals and emphasize building endowments, ones that can support athletics well into the future.
We’ll see soon which they emphasize because the Chicago-L.A. race is nearing the finish line. An Olympics evaluation committee will be in town late this week to look at L.A.’s facilities. Then it goes to Chicago. The U.S. Olympics committee will hear the pitches from the two cities April 14 and pick one.
Chicago is great place and it would not be a bad choice. But L.A. would be a more sensible choice.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at
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