Although it was New York which wound up submitting the official U.S. bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, eventually winding up as one of five finalists before the International Olympic Committee settled on London, several other American cities offered proposals of their own.
Perhaps the most ambitious—and far-fetched—proposal came from D.C.
On NewsChannel 8’s NewsTalk today, host Bruce DePuyt and his guests looked back on D.C.’s short-lived Olympic bid and wondered what the games might have looked like had it been the winning entry.
To put it briefly, it would have been chaotic. A D.C.-hosted Olympiad would have put major demands on the region’s infrastructure, compelling billions of dollars of spending on transportation, housing and, of course, sporting venues. Many locations around the wider region could have been repurposed for Olympic events; still others would have been built from scratch.
The centerpiece of Washington’s bid would have been an Olympic stadium, to be constructed on the site of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. There would have also been an aquatics center for swimming and diving in Arlington a rowing facility elsewhere in Northern Virginia and venues in Prince George’s County.
But in a cost-saving note, the organizing committee did claim that 24 of the 33 needed local competition venues already existed. However, the definition of “local” was far broader than D.C. and its immediate suburbs.
In fact, calling the Olympic bid strictly a D.C. effort would have been quite inaccurate. It would have depended heavily on venues in Baltimore and perhaps even farther away than that. The plan called on using Camden Yards, M&T Bank Stadium, the Baltimore Convention Center and facilities at the United States Naval Academy, along with the construction of a new arena in Baltimore. On NewsTalk today, radio host Joe Madison suggested that some Olympic events might have been held in West Virginia.
Beyond all the stadiums, Olympic Games also require the creation of massive broadcast facilities the the thousands of media professionals from around the world as well as living campuses for more than 10,000 visiting athletes, to say nothing of vastly expanded public transit to ferry around athletes, crew members and tourists. The D.C. 2012 committee’s website—accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—never got too detailed about transit, and the page about the proposed Olympic Village was unretrievable, but a summary page called for relying on about 450 miles of existing rail tracks split between Metro, MARC, VRE and Amtrak, along with “thousands of buses.”
Still, would Washington hosting the Olympics have had the most remote chance of success? Possibly not. The Summer Olympics are a horrendously expensive undertaking—London spent more than $14 billion to prepare for the current games, $7 billion of which was on transportation. And the Olympic footprint is equally huge: This year’s organizers cleared out 757 acres of East London to build stadiums, dormitories, a high-end shopping mall and other facilities.
Before building anything of that scale in D.C., entire neighborhoods would have to be relocated, just as they were in East London.
And what about the centerpiece of any Olympic campus—the stadium that hosts the opening and closing ceremonies along with the track and field events. Many host cities are left struggling to figure out what to do with their Olympic stadiums when the games end. Athens, which hosted in 2004, remodeled an old stadium, many of that city’s Olympic venues have fallen into disrepair. Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, newly built in 2008, is still in excellent condition, but as a tourist attraction and exhibition venue. Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium is the exception, having been remodeled after the 1996 games into Turner Field, a new home for the Atlanta Braves.
D.C.’s organizers might have hoped that their planned 85,000-seat stadium would become a new home for the Redskins, but in 2002, as Examiner sports columnist Thom Loverro pointed out yesterday, the team had only recently decamped to Landover, Md., where they are committed to play through the 2027 NFL Season. And it could have also nuked the District’s hope of landing the Montreal Expos when Major League Baseball decided to move the failing franchise.
The plan was a reach, even though it had the backing of the D.C. Council, Baltimore City Council, Arlington and Fairfax Counties and several regional chambers of commerce. But as much civic and national pride as the Olympics can inspire—and East London does look like the funnest place on Earth right now—as City Paper editor Mike Madden said on NewsTalk today, they’re probably not worth the local headaches. Better to have them an ocean away.
