In less than five days from this writing, the International Olympic Committee will decide which city will host the 2016 Olympics. The top contenders are Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. Officials from each city have spent months (or years?) trying to convince the world (or, at least the Committee) that their city is worthy of hosting the Games. In similar fashion, a grassroots organization of purported Chicagoans has launched a marketing effort promoting the Olympic bid...for Rio.
The group's website, www.ChicagoansForRio.com, quite attractively displays information about the Olympic Games and why Chicago should NOT be the host in 2016. The main reason why not? Finances. These Chicagoans do not want their city to go bankrupt with all of the obligatory Olympic-sized construction and infrastructure projects.
The "Chicagoans for Rio" site features an animated counter claiming to show the "2009 City Deficits to Date," plus fun facts about the debt incurred by previous host cities of the Olympics, a photo slideshow of the now-unused 21 (out of 22) Olympic venues in Athens, and a scrolling marquee of supposed site visitor comments supporting Rio de Janeiro's bid over Chicago's. Other helpful (or amusing) features of the site include links to recent crime records from Chicago; a "head-to-head" comparison of Rio vs. Chicago; and links to purchase "Chicagoans for Rio" merchandise, to email the IOC, and to support Rio's bid on the Rio 2016 website.
Last Thursday, a Chicago Fox News station broadcasted the story of "Chicagoans for Rio", but was politely asked to stop talking about it, as the report "would harm Chicago's chances" for being awarded the bid. Ironically, this shushing only garnered more attention for the movement, as Drudge Report, Twitterers, and several online journals and blogs spread the word about the cease-and-desist.
The publicity about "Chicagoans for Rio" has also drummed up some questions about the group's veracity: given that the website lists no contact information, how do we know for sure that the group members are truly from Chicago? Who's to say they are not really from, say, Rio? And where are they getting their budget deficit facts, anyway?
Nevertheless, let's assume for the moment that "Chicagoans for Rio" truly is a group of Chicagoans willing to forego the honor of hosting the Olympics in exchange for some semblance of fiscal responsibility. Assuming that they are a spontaneous grassroots organization with no budget, here is what I would recommend if they truly want to dissuade the International Olympic Committee by Friday:
1) Get people talking. The shushing of Fox News generated some buzz already; "Chicagoans for Rio" needs more. Start a blog telling the full story behind the website, behind the Fox News story, behind the shushing - everything! - and include buttons to make it easy for people to Tweet, email, embed, Digg it, and post it to Facebook. Invite people to use the Twitter hashtag #chicagoansforrio to share reasons why the Olympics should be hosted in Rio and not in Chicago. Post YouTube videos in which Chicagoans share these reasons audio-visual style.
2) Get people involved. The whole anonymous website thing might be the "safe" way for the organizers to go, but they need some legitimate method of showing how many Chicagoans support Rio for the 2016 Olympics. They could start a petition (secure, of course) on the website in which visitors submit their names and email addresses to show their support for Chicagoans for Rio. Or they could start a Facebook group (the group "2,000,000 for the olympics in chicago" currently has only 99,540 members). Or they could invite Chicagoans to tweet their "send the Olympics to Rio" messages to the IOC (@Olympics).
3) Be the anti-Chicago2016. For everything that the Chicago Olympic Committee has done to promote Chicago as the host city for the 2016 Games, the "Chicagoans for Rio" group should do the same to plead against Chicago as the 2016 host city. So maybe they cannot replicate the entire Chicago 2016 site by Friday, but they could still create some videos or write some articles to counter the COC's arguments point-for-point. They could post a nice slideshow describing why Rio, rather than Chicago, is ideal for the 2016 Olympics.
But again, these suggestions could only be worthwhile if "Chicagoans for Rio" are truly in earnest. And even if "Chicagoans for Rio" do try some of these tactics, the plan could always backfire - the International Olympic Committee might vote for Chicago 2016 just to spite them.
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The Chicago area has been hit really hard by the recession. Wouldn't this create a ton of jobs, bring in a lot of visitors/tourism, and be really good for the local economy?
ReplyDeleteOlympic hosting does take some real startup capital, but isn't it shown to pay off?
Very interesting. I was just thinking about how crazy it is that the cities that host the Olympics are required to build stadiums. It's a big deal. Nice article!
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