If we get 2016 Olympics, let's do it right
If Chicago wins the 2016 Olympic bid, there will be a lot of bummed-out people in Rio de Janeiro, that's for sure.
The Brazilian city wants it bad.
(AP)
''There is the distinct sense that this famous party city is ready to explode on Friday with a delirium rivaling its famed New Year's and Carnaval celebrations if the vote for the 2016 Games goes Rio's way,'' wrote New York Times correspondent Alexei Barrionuevo earlier this week.
You know about those celebrations, right? Much of them can't be shown on family TV. Still photos can give you a hangover.
''It would be overwhelming for our city, for our citizens and for Brazil as a whole,'' Carlos Osorio, the secretary general of Rio's bid committee, told reporters.
But what about Chicago?
This is supposed to be a smiley moment of anticipation and group hand-holding and cheerful unity as the citizens of not just Chicago, but the entire United States, count down the minutes until the Copenhagen decision.
If the vote goes our way, there will be proud celebrations throughout town and quite a bit of back-patting and down-the-hatching. Maybe we'll hear the champagne corks from across the ocean as they blast from the bottles held by our huge, giddy, blue-jacketed delegation in Denmark.
And why not be happy?
We will be winners, after all. We will have beaten not just Rio -- and Madrid and Tokyo, the other finalist cities -- but the world.
We sent a three-headed publicity monster over there -- Obama, Daley, Oprah -- that could sell green to grass.
Yaay capitalism! Yaay us!
Yet after the joy fades and reality sets in -- all too quickly, I suspect -- there will come hesitation, uncertainty, second-guessing.
The big whoop-de-do will not take place for seven years, remember. And here we are in a town where kids get killed as if in a war zone. And our schools are terrible. And our streets are worse. And our city is in debt. And our feudal government runs on backroom deals and clout and eats corruption for breakfast.
We will wonder if this Olympic gift -- this privilege meted out by a committee that reminds one not so much of an evaluation team as a court of multitudinous kings, queens and fops -- is really much ado about, as the No Games Chicago foes put it, ''a three-week party''?
We will mortgage our city's future for that?
We will sacrifice our children and their education for that?
We will let the fat cats purr -- as they always do -- for that?
Chicago will be on the hook for cost overruns should we get the bid. That's part of the deal. That's what Mayor Daley sold to the International Olympic Committee, and what all the city's aldermen, some nearly climbing onto their City Hall desks and raising beer steins in high salute, seconded.
And that makes us fearful.
We know how this city works. We know how promises become cigar puffs vanishing into the night.
It was only five years ago that Daley sneered at the idea of Chicago hosting the Games. Hizzoner called the Olympics a ''construction industry'' tinged with IOC extortion: ''They wanted $2 million from me just to make a proposal.''
Times change.
Dat was den. Dis is now.
So here is what I, a mere sportswriter in the midst of demi-gods and civic leaders chiseling their names in marble for all time, propose:
If Chicago gets the 2016 Games, let us use the moment to become more than we ever have been.
Let us use the Olympics to become the greatest city in the country.
There will be noisy construction and inconvenience and boondoggles and foul-ups. Of course, there will. We are human.
But our politicians must put down their self-service. Our leaders must think of the little people -- all of us -- first. They must stop taking and start giving.
Even as children are disrupted from their parks, let us build new and better parks. Let us take those children and their needs seriously. Let us remember they're all that matters.
Let us stop the violence that wracks us like a tubercular cough.
Let us spend money wisely and artistically and with empathy.
Let us come together with a civic spirit based on trust and vision rather than greed.
Let us show the foreign journalists and visitors who will be coming here for years to check up on us, should we get the bid, that we are special and worthy of the world's envy -- not because of our Olympic venues, but because of our neighborhood infrastructure.
Deep in our hearts we know Chicago is beautiful and rare. To present our greatness uncorrupted -- changed, that is -- would be something.
It would be terrible to take Olympian victory and make it evil.
Especially when it could mean redemption.