Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has practically guaranteed Rio de Janeiro will be announced host city for the 2016 Olympics Friday in Copenhagen.
Da Silva even has boasted that he phoned Obama and urged him to come to Denmark — just to make Chicago vs. Rio a fair fight.
But something da Silva said Monday, before flying to Denmark, betrayed a tinge of worry. “This is a fight,” he said, according to an Associated Press account. “And if we don’t win, we’ll have to prepare for another one.”
No one from Chicago is talking that way.
Chicago’s 2016 bid is a make-or-break proposition. Look at what it took to put this bid together — a mayor who transitioned from reluctant to obsessed, a billionaire with time on his hands, a civic community willing to pony up another $50 million for a bid campaign just a few years after digging deep for the $475 million Millennium Park — and it’s obvious another bid by Chicago would not happen any time soon.
Daley will be off the scene by 2020 and has little incentive to mount a second bid. And Chicago’s civic community is tapped out.
No one will admit it. No one wants to talk this way and risk offending the International Olympic Committee, but Chicago is a one-and-done city. Let Madrid and Beijing come back with multiple bids. Chicago will take the route of Paris and New York, both of which after an affair with an Olympics bid last time acted ashamed they had entertained such silly dreams in the first place.
Da Silva, with his comments, practically has invited the Olympics voters to put Rio on hold.
You think “wait ’til next year” is tough at the end of a dreary baseball season? Try “wait ’til the next four years.” But if the president of the country is saying he’ll be back again, then expect the IOC to consider taking him up on the offer.
A wait-until-next-Olympiad approach would be just right for Rio in any event. On technical matters, Chicago and Rio are a wash. Rio’s $14.4 billion bid and many billions more in promised government largesse might give it an edge.
But on two material issues, Rio’s bid is so deeply flawed that it is astounding, really, that the Brazilian city is a serious rival to Chicago’s bid.
People talk in general about Rio’s “street crime” problem. But this week’s New Yorker magazine put searing words and pictures to that phrase with a “Gangs of Rio” cover story. The photo spread alone conjures images of wartime Iraq — and soul-shattering nightmares for the Rio Chamber of Commerce.
Rio’s bid-killer, though, is the fact that Brazil will host the World Cup in 2014. That’s two short years before the 2016 Olympics, a mere eye blink for an IOC that measures time in quadrennials.
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Set aside legitimate concerns about Brazil’s capacity to host the world’s two biggest sports events within 24 months of each other. Instead, consider the issue that will rule out Rio for many IOC voters: The world’s oldest sports movement does not like to share the spotlight with anyone; World Cup soccer least of all.
In the Alice in Wonderland world of the Olympics, the IOC is the Queen of Hearts: vain and mercurial to the point of narcissism. Off with the heads of anyone who suggests the IOC must compete for sponsorship money, organizational efforts and the public’s attention. As big as the Olympics are, the World Cup is at least as big everywhere outside the U.S, and “futbol”-mad Brazil is the last place in the world where the IOC would want to show up two years after the Cup.
Remember, world leaders such as da Silva and Obama did not just start showing up to plead for the Games in their cities. The IOC encouraged them by twice awarding the Games to longshot bids — from London and Sochi, Russia — whose government leaders came a-begging.
And on that count, Chicago wins hands down. Obama is a bigger global phenomenon, with a heaping dose of Oprah ladled on.
OK, so there’s the argument why Chicago might win. In a rational voting process, even one that takes into account the IOC’s inherent irrationalities, the case would be made.
But two University of Chicago professors, John Mark Hansen and Allen Sanderson, in a Forbes magazine article earlier this year applied game theory to the Byzantine IOC voting procedure and came up with an incontrovertible result: The system could not be more arbitrary and unpredictable if a committee of Roman Catholic cardinals, Democratic ward committeemen, Vladimir Putin henchmen and Iran’s Guardian Council worked together to make it so.
Chicago is the logical favorite, hands down; Rio, a close second. But with the IOC counting the vote, just watch: Madrid or Tokyo could win.
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