Another Olympics fan weighs in

Mark writes:

I've been following the Olympics issue with some interest. To be honest, I've been torn on the subject, mainly because I come at it from the perspective of someone who was a resident of Lake Placid, N.Y. from 1968 through more than half of 1980. Lake Placid, you'll recall, hosted its second Winter Olympiad in 1980. It is true that anybody who is able to cash in on the Olympics makes out like a bandit, and that includes owners of restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in and around wherever the Games take place. It is also absolutely true that the public gets saddled with the debt. Ironically, it's a Republican style implementation of redistribution of wealth, from the public coffers to private pocketbooks. (Note that Lake Placid, like most of rural New York State, is heavily Republican, and both the 1932 and the 1980 Winter Olympics were welcomed with open arms.) An Olympiad always leaves behind an infrastructure that can be publicly beneficial, assuming there were practical plans in place from beforehand to make that benefit happen. For example, Lake Placid's Olympic Village was destined to become a medium-security prison after the games were over. (Yes, the Soviet propaganda machine had a field day with that when they caught wind of it!) Without that forethought, though, you end up with structures that just sit there and rot afterward - isn't that what happened in Atlanta? The best-case scenario is that amenities like the CTA and Navy Pier see vast improvements that we enjoy, albeit at a cost, after the games are over. My concern, of course, is that since this is Chicago, the games will end up costing the public 10 times as much as they should, and the primary beneficiaries will be Mayor Daley's cronies, who will be allowed to double-dip by getting sweetheart contracts to build the stuff in the first place and then be handed title to the unneeded facilities to dispose of as they like for additional profit.