One year ago, members of the United States Olympic Committee gathered to decide which bid they would endorse for the chance to host the 2024 Summer Games. Of all places, the committee gathered in the random setting of Denver International Airport. Even at that early stage, total secrecy was already a prominent attribute of the bidding process. There were no leaks of information before the announcement was made and most of Boston had little indication of the acrimonious seven-month fight they were about to get in the middle of.
But at 6:29 EST on January 9th, 2015, the USOC tweeted news that was greeted by both euphoria and, as time would show, disapproval:
BREAKING: The USOC selects #Boston2024 as U.S. bid to host the 2024 Olympic & Paralympic Games http://t.co/P7IDlycrJ6 pic.twitter.com/zWS1i3WRo5
— U.S. Olympic Team (@TeamUSA) January 8, 2015
With the aid of hindsight, it's easy to surmise why Boston's bid for the 2024 Olympics was the shortest USOC-endorsed campaign in American history. Public faith in the process deteriorated quickly, a fact that became more and more apparent each month as MassINC's polling numbers rolled in. The problems the MBTA experienced during the historically severe winter played a role, but the average state resident simply stopped believing what Boston 2024 was telling them at a certain point.
Whether it was due to a lack of transparency on the part of the bid itself, or the effectiveness with which Boston 2024 opposition argued its case, the result was the same. Approval numbers dropped:
January: 51%
February: 44%
March: 36%
April: 40%
July: 40%
And opposition increased:
January: 33%
February: 46%
March: 52%
April: 50%
July: 53%
By the summer, Boston 2024's position was untenable and the USOC left town, heading to Los Angeles (where much less frequent polling showed more favorable support).
In the aftermath, it's become easy to forget many of the particular details of Boston 2024's story. From start to finish, it was a fascinating intersection of many seemingly disparate causes and groups, all flung into a wide-ranging debate over not merely the hosting of an Olympics, but the future of Boston (as well as Massachusetts).
And for many (an eventual majority), they were united in opposition. To them, this was not some ultimately productive civic discussion. It was a desperate fight to prevent agreeing to partner with an international organization that routinely leaves Olympic host cities in debt.
It's important to remember how residents were never formally told that they would have to pay a dime towards the bid's budget. Yet fears of budget overruns were confirmed only after a previously redacted version of Boston 2024's bid was released due to FOIA requests.
Added to that, the public process pursued by the bid was seriously lacking. The first formal meeting after Boston was given the Olympic bid was actually one hosted by No Boston Olympics, one of the two major opposition groups. And a ballot question regarding Boston 2024 (the most logical and democratic method for deciding on a bid) was only agreed to after months of denials from (then) bid chairman John Fish.
Perhaps no one symbolized the poor handling of the bid more than Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. Having pitched the bid to the USOC in December, 2014, Walsh later admitted to having never actually read the bid. And when the writing was clearly on the wall in July that Boston 2024 was finished, he changed course dramatically. Claiming that he could not commit Boston to a project that it might be left on the hook to pay for, Walsh also neglected to disclose that he had, in fact, already committed Boston to guaranteeing the Olympics in several signed documents.
In all, it was a minor miracle that the opposition to Boston 2024 won. While many of the region's most powerful individuals and business interests (not to mention the mayor) were locked in as boosters, an initially small but motivated group of citizens represented the pushback. Displaying the community's strength, they won by finding methods of making their voice heard.
It can be argued that the moment Tea Party Republicans united with liberal Democrats in opposition to the bid was the beginning of the end for Boston 2024. Essentially, it illustrated a pattern that would become all too familiar: people who agreed on very little in how the state should be run somehow seemed to agree that an Olympic bid was a bad idea. The bid occupied too narrow a place on the spectrum of public opinion, allowing both a moderate and more uncompromising opposition (in separate groups) to not only exist, but flourish.
And perhaps more than anything else, that's the legacy of Boston 2024. It did not produce a lasting plan to fix the MBTA, or how to further move Massachusetts into a new economic era. What it did do, without a doubt, was showcase that local residents are perfectly capable of reading between the lines, and that they would not be fooled by unsubstantiated claims, regardless of how powerful the source of the claims might be. In other words, public opinion on Boston 2024 was won by factual analysis. For the now-defunct Olympic bid, the facts simply did not add up.