Capital Is a Long Shot for the 2012 Games

Muscovites have been asked for months to “Imagine It Now” – to imagine an unlikely victory in the city’s bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Posters emblazoned with this slogan have been part of a wide-ranging public campaign on the part of the city government. But, while it might have increased support for hosting the games in the capital, the proposals and campaign to host the games met with a lukewarm response in an International Olympic Commission (IOC) report, released on Monday, on the bids of the five remaining contenders.

Moscow’s proposal was easier to visualize than those submitted by the four other cities. After all, most of the required infrastructure and competition venues are already in place, courtesy of the 1980 Games, which were held in Moscow. The nature of the bid also encapsulates the paradox of a contemporary Russia trying to preserve vestiges of the past while repackaging them and brandishing them for present-day use.

That the proposal is aimed at raising Russia’s international image was clear enough from the language of the bid materials: “The 2012 Moscow Olympic Games will allow Russia to share this dream of rebirth, freedom, and fraternity with people.”

But the IOC report clearly placed Moscow in fifth place among the contenders. While Paris and London received praise and the blueprints for both the New York and Madrid were commended, the Moscow committee came in for some criticism. The report stated that “a lack of detailed planning in the candidature file and background information made it difficult for the Commission to evaluate the project.”

Despite the criticism, Valery Shantsev, deputy mayor of Moscow and the head of the bid committee, remained upbeat in the immediate aftermath of the IOC review, saying that the assessment confirmed the city bid committee’s view that Moscow is “a worthy candidate to host the Summer Olympics of 2012.”

Shantsev also tried to counter the report’s criticism regarding the insufficient planning, maintaining that it was never the organizers’ intention to provide a meticulous presentation of all their ideas. “We stressed the conceptual elements of the preparation,” he said. “We were not going to detail our program, and chose instead to address the more global aspects.”

Moscow is trying to become only the third city to stage the Summer Games twice. Paris and London both had that honor during the first half of the 20th century.

But in 1980 Moscow played host to one of the most contentious and ideologically charged Olympic Games in history. Numerous Western nations boycotted the event to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Ironically, that history may actually be a point in Moscow’s favor this time out.

“It is not a limitation for Moscow to host again,” said Kevin B. Wamsley,
director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies, at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. “There is a good case to be made that the Games should be hosted there again, given the boycotts of 1980.”

In addition to upgrading the venues from the 1980 Olympics, the Moscow plan is based around the “Olympic River” concept, which would have every major venue situated along the Moscow River. The waterway would serve as the main transportation route – thus bypassing the city’s notorious traffic jams – and provide a long axis for the overall layout.

The planned athletes’ and media village would be one of the few important sites that would have to be constructed in order to host the games. Located in the northwest part of the city, near the 80,000 seat Luzhniki Olympic Stadium, the futuristic complex would be able to accomodate over 10,000 participants in the games.

But an undue reliance on the legacy of the 1980 Olympics could have been the one of the principal shortcomings of the bid. Moscow’s price estimate of $1.84 billion for the Games was the lowest among all candidate cities.

“The venues from Moscow are too old and do not really fit all modern requirements,” said Holger Preuss, a professor at the Institute of Sport Science at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, who has worked as a consultant on the bids of six different candidate cities in the past. “So the IOC might have been aware that huge investment would have been required to renovate the venues.”

The IOC did note the merit of the Moscow plan’s balance between new and existing facilities in providing the infrastructure necessary to stage a modern Olympics.

“The high number of existing competition venues and those under construction mitigate financial and construction schedule risks for competition venues,” the committee wrote in the summary to report.

Experts agreed with this assessment, pointing out that the Games have become increasingly costly, requiring a substantial investment of resources and a massive building campaign. This became apparent during the run up to the 2004 games, as the Athens organizing committee was chastised for the length of time it took to complete the ambitious construction plans for the event. The final price tag for the Athens games was $11.6 billion – $3 billion above the cost in the original proposal.

“Using the 1980 facilities could have worked to their advantage,” said Wamsley. “This was the strategy employed by Peter Ueberroth in 1984, the only reason that Los Angeles turned a profit.

“More conservative, cost efficient, and environmentally friendly proposals will certainly carry more weight in the future,” he added.

The IOC report represented the committee’s collective judgment, while each of the committee’s 116 members will cast individual votes in the final balloting, scheduled for July 6 in Singapore. Thus, the outcome of the contest is still difficult to predict, Preuss cautionoed.

“The IOC is not only an institution but also a constituencyof 115 IOC individual members [plus the IOC president], who all have different preferences, memories and perceptions of the movement and what is best for the future of the Games,” he said.

Four years ago, Toronto was given the most positive review in the IOC report ahead of the selection for the 2008 games, but Beijing prevailed in the final round of voting.

Beijing’s selection may also be a negative harbinger for Moscow, however, as the choice of the Chinese capital was greeted with some dismay around the world and could introduce a greater political element to the July vote.

Preuss noted that outside perceptions of an authoritarian drift in Russian politics could prove an added obstacle. “Some IOC members might want another city following Beijing,” he said.

But political considerations should not be overstated. After all, Moscow officials presented their vision of the Olympics as an acknowledgment of the tangible transformation which Russia has undergone in the past 15 years.

“Every nation has its negative politics,” Wamsley noted. “I would not put the political situation in Russia at the same level as China.”

Perry Binder, a professor of legal studies at Georgia State University in the United States, who has written about the Olympic movement, echoes this view.

“The Olympics needs to return somewhat to its roots – focusing on athletes, rather than the bottom-line profit,” he said. “It would have been intriguing to see American athletes compete in Moscow in 1980.”

Although the IOC report does not explicitly rank cities and formulates its assessment in neutral terms, Paris emerged as an odds-on favorite, with London trailing closely behind. New York’s hopes were dealt a severe blow when the New York State Public Authorities Control Board declined, only a few hours after the publication of the IOC report, to endorse the proposed Olympic stadium on Manhattan’s West Side.

As for the skepticism about Moscow, this is nothing new, as its bid has largely been considered a long shot since the beginning of the selection process. But the city’s imaginative and manageable scheme could still appeal to IOC members as they weigh their decision.

“There are some members of the IOC who agree that the Games need to be downsized,” Wamsley said. “However, such compact proposals need to be sold or marketed themselves in public relations campaigns.”