Image by Tak Toyoshima
It was never as if the Dig stood alone in our crusade against Boston 2024. From the beginning, skeptics in the media and countless others have called “Bullshit” on the presumptuous tone of organizers, and relentlessly lambasted Olympics boosters. They haven’t stopped, their dissent running from public protests to an open Twitter chat that Mayor Marty Walsh participated in last week.
In addition to local critics, writers from virtually everywhere who cover the Games have jumped on the pile. At the head of the posse is Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, who absolutely butchered Boston 2024 in a March op-ed in the Boston Globe. Also the author of the new book Circus Maximus, the prof has tempted us to invent a new adjective: zimballistic. Definition: extremely and usually suddenly excited, upset, or angry about shameless Olympic profiteering.
Moving on, earlier today sportswriter Alan Abrahamson, who bills himself as “the world’s best source of information about the [Olympic] Games and the culture that surrounds them,” threw even more haymakers on his 3 Wire Sports blog. We don’t want to jump to conclusions, but you might say that Abrahamson went zimballistic …
The U.S. Olympic Committee should yank the 2024 Olympic bid from Boston, and now. This is a bad situation. It’s almost guaranteed to get worse … The damage to the USOC’s brand and its future is verging toward grave, and that would be intolerable to anyone who thinks reasonably and cares about the Olympic movement in the United States of America. Doubling down on Boston would be a very, very bad bet.
The USOC has spent the past five-plus years, since getting kicked in the pants in October, 2009, when Chicago was booted in voting for the 2016 Summer Games, tirelessly working to rebuild its brand, particularly internationally, working on person-to-person relationships and building goodwill. Now, in the space of not even three months, the whole thing is devolving perilously.
Finally, on a slightly different coverage trajectory is the Boston Herald, which hasn’t quite caught up to bloggers from outside the city. In regards to their latest contribution, today’s “New foe joins fractured field fighting Olympic bid,” we’re not sure if they went in that direction merely as a ruse to use the subhead, “Another hat thrown in rings,” but in spite of their existing in the narrow Massachusetts annex of the Fox News echo chamber, Herald hacks should nevertheless be aware that No Boston 2024 is hardly a “new foe.”
With that said, the Herald‘s overall assessment was comprehensive, and painted more or less the same increasingly skeptical picture seen in most recent Olympic coverage. Of course, had the Herald been studying their enemies like competent villains, they would have known about No Boston 2024 a week earlier, when The Nation ran a piece by anti-Olympics organizers Jonathan Cohn and Robin Jacks (the latter of whom has contributed to DigBoston). Titled “The Boston Olympics Con Job,” the polemic raised a number of particularly damning points that reporters, not just at the Herald but everywhere, should consider as they move in for the final kill …
Although the origins of the campaign for a Boston Olympics can be traced to shortly after the 2012 London Games, the political effort became clear during the summer of 2013, when the State Senate nearly unanimously passed a bill to create a feasibility commission to study the prospect of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics. When the commission was officially formed that November, it was filled with political staffers and titans from the construction/real estate and tourism industries rather than economists who study the impact of the Games. The commission was chaired by John Fish, the CEO of Suffolk Construction, the largest construction company in New England.
THIS JUST IN: Globe columnist Joan Vennochi gives Fish the kind of ass-kicking that he’ll never get from any of the whores and sycophants he gainfully employs. For starters …
Fish is the main force behind Boston 2024, the effort to bring a summer Olympics to this city, and also its public face. He has grit, determination, and dedication to the Olympic dream — all important ingredients to a successful campaign to win the bid for Boston … But he also has thin skin, a tin ear, and a habit of blurting out what he really thinks about people who don’t share his vision.
The op-ed was so badass, in fact, that it inspired yet another new word (and a meme to go along with it) …
[Media Farm is wrangled by DigBoston News + Features Editor Chris Faraone]
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.