Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and Activism

"Yes, my book does cover this aspect of the Olympics. I started with the bribery scandals in Salt Lake City, which sort of fell into my lap when I joined Bread not Circuses in 1998, and then in 1999 all the bribery was exposed, and I started documenting that. As an active member of Bread not Circuses, I was able to integrate my personal experiences as an anti-Olympic activist into the book, what sociologists call “participant observation”. I was more of a participant, less of an observer. I didn’t get arrested or anything dramatic, but we did a few things sort of close to the wire and got away with it. We were pleased with our interventions and we actually took credit as an anti-Olympic group for the fact that citizens of Toronto were made aware by the publicity we got, the advertising we did, and the booklets and leaflets we distributed at rallies and that kind of thing. And we prepared a document that we called an Anti-bid Book. This was in an era where there was no social media, and the only electronic communication would be email. We had an email list of supporters and we sent out notices to them, but we were relying on paper, basically, to get the message across, and doing media interviews and getting our critiques published in Toronto newspapers, with some radio and television, too. I also write about this in the chapter of the book called “Toronto and Sydney Olympic bids: when winners are losers”, because I was also involved with anti-Olympic and Olympic watchdog groups in Sydney during my trips there. Unfortunately, Sydney won the bid, with largely negative social impacts on the city and its disadvantaged populations. I document the resistance efforts in Sydney, Toronto and Atlanta. People in Bread not Circuses had close connections with Anita Beaty (of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless). She and her partner and colleagues were frontline workers before and during the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, trying to stop the worst impacts on the homeless population in Atlanta. It was widely documented that thousands of homeless African-American men were picked up and put on buses and shipped back to “where they came from”. They didn’t come from the regions outside of Atlanta, but they were out of sight if they were bussed out. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s what happened, as with all the Olympics cities: the idea of cleaning up the image involves cleaning up the streets and removing homeless people and panhandlers from view, because the eyes of the world will be on the city. International visitors and (more importantly) the eyes of international businesspeople who might consider relocating or setting up branches in the Olympic city, because suddenly it’s on the world map as world-class city—none of that is compatible with having homeless people begging on the streets. This process has occurred with virtually every Olympics, and will continue to do so because there’s no political will to protect homeless people. In Los Angeles, where they’ve got the 2028 Olympics, the local councillors are already cracking down on homeless people by means of bylaws. Not speaking personally, but yes, absolutely. The group in Toronto, the other groups in Vancouver and Sydney, London and other bid cities have had significant impacts. The fact that groups in bid cities around the world over the past 10 years or so have been successful in demanding referendums really reflects the changing climate around Olympic bids. Thomas Bach, the current president of the IOC, is really pissed off at that. He said, “why do people think there has to be a referendum for this kind of thing?” as if public money isn’t involved! He says there’s this nasty anti-establishment movement going on, particularly in Europe. And that’s why there are all these referendums, and he just whines a lot about that because he can see that the declining numbers of bids is a bad sign for the Olympic industry. On the other hand, they came up with a bit of a grand coup when they decided that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. They knew that there were declining numbers of bids. They had two viable bids for 2024. So, they chose Paris for 2024 Summer Olympics and LA for 2028. LA was not bidding for 2028, there were only interested in 2024, but it would have been a stretch to tell the IOC, the great God of the Olympics, that you don’t want 2028, you want 2024 or nothing. So, of course, LA organisers grabbed that and saw it as a big victory. “Simson and Jennings have a chapter called The shoe size of the second daughter, and that is a reference to the way that bid committee members compiled dossiers on IOC members so that they could choose gifts—and these weren’t just trifles” In reality, it was simply the IOC hedging its bets. They had two viable bids, so they went for a double award and decided they could change the rules, if they wanted to. In theory the competition is for one Olympic year only and the bids are geared towards that in terms of costs in particular. The organizers in LA are now having to take into account in their budget that the event will be four years later than expected. Everything will be more inflated and more unpredictable."