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Please Lord, Give the Olympics to Chicago
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Los Angeles' Olympic boosters might not want you to know this, but yesterday London, the host of the 2012 Olympics, finally revealed their projected budget for their games. And the magic number is...drum roll please...9.3 billion pounds, a new Olympic record! Now, before you shout "holy fucking shit!," please remember that number is in UK pounds. In US dollars, that's $18 billion.
Okay, now feel free to scream "holy shit!"
LA seems to have a very good chance of becoming the US representative to host the 2016 games, but here's one person who prays that someone, anyone, gets the Olympics instead of LA. Yes, team LA has been touting the city's Olympic readiness as one of our most alluring factors, but I'm not drinking that Kool Aid.
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Let's say our "Olympic readiness" means we only need half or one-third the budget of the London games. Is $6 billion a reasonable amount to spend simply to make our traffic worse for a few weeks and get a shiny new polish on the Coliseum?
Here's the thing, the infrastructure improvements that Olympics occasionally spawn (see Barcelona and Atlanta) are already underway here. Regarding mass transit, the Gold Line is online, with the new East Side extension scheduled to be completed by 2009. The Expo Line is also under construction, which will bring the west side into the fold a year later.
Despite being the object of scorn to so many in California, throughout America and abroad, the fact remains that Los Angeles is a superstar city, with no end in sight to the rise in property values. Despite our much publicized gang problems, the city is gentrifying at a dizzying rate.
Most importantly, we don't have any second city syndrome, and we don't need the Olympics to prove our global worth. Chicago's a great city. It's cleaner. The people are nicer. It's more walkable. It's a world-class city. It's streets are paved with platinum, the water in Lake Michigan is the fountain of youth and Chicago police officers have been rumored to shit rainbows. Please please please let them spend the money to host the world for the 2016 Olympics. There are so many things we could be spending that kind of money on. Attracting more whiny, complaining tourists to Hollywood and Highland shouldn't be one of them.
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