Learning By Rota

Sharing Olympics and Comm Games between super-hosts is one way of stopping one-off bidders from going bust. 

The tables and chairs are still out from the last party, so why not hold another Olympics here? Image: Getty Images

The Nine Network held a recent launch event to mark some kind of date or countdown on the way to the 2012 Olympics. Amid the swell of breathless five-ring promotion came mention of host London deploying some of its iconic settings to serve as venues for the Games, the most stirring of which was Horse Guards Parade for the beach volleyball.From the headquarters of Wellington to ... a backdrop for a sport that has official rules about how scantily clad the women have to be. The entire London Olympic ramp-up called to mind the reaction of this columnist’s pragmatically minded father when he first heard that the British capital was bidding for the Games along with fellow metropolis New York. “How much more famous do these cities think they will get?”

September marks the passage of a decade since the Sydney Olympics, which brings its own curious feeling. The event was seen in such epochal terms, with so much physical and emotional resource poured into the seven-year lead-in, that it was hard to keep in mind there was going to be a day after. There was airy talk of the “legacy” that would be left for city and nation, which no one really cared to define at the time.The memories of Freeman and Thorpe still glow, but it’s telling that the country has just passed through a federal election in which infrastructure wrangling in western Sydney became an issue. Meanwhile, the colourless pachyderm out in Homebush hosts rugby league crowds at a sixth of capacity. Sydney’s Games, so sparklingly executed over those two weeks in 2000, have given way in the aftermath to the Montreal moment. Notoriously, the 1976 host finished final construction of its Olympic stadium a cool ten years after their Games, and cleared the taxpayer debt off the books in 29.

Here’s hoping London fares better. But there’s a useful idea, a meme in waiting for the sports world, to be derived from another quarter of Britain. The Open Championship, golf’s most important tournament, is limited to nine designated classic courses known as the Open rota. Five are in Scotland, four in England and each can anticipate holding the event once or maybe twice a decade, with the exception of St Andrews, whose turn comes around every five years.Some of these courses aren’t exactly in the centre of civilisation. As one veteran golf writer put it: “One of the most amazing things to me is how they stage the Open in these dinky little towns, and they somehow stage it beautifully.” That’s the genius of the rota, and it’s the reason why the Olympics or World Cup would do well to adopt such a concept. Instead of awarding one Games, how about giving three cities, spread geographically, two each? By that logic, a host city could have Olympics 12 years apart, with all the spin-off benefits to be had in the interim. Imagine how much economic sense it would make if the Games were back in Homebush in two years’ time?

But hosting these pan-global sporting spectacles has become so grossly expensive that economic impact really is not enough. The pay-off is now metaphysical; to have a Rogge or Blatter step up and consecrate your locality’s efforts as a host is a status symbol of having “made it” in the world.This used to be the province of noveau riche, beta cities such as Atlanta, but the costs involved have caused it to be exported to new greenfields. Observe the run of events occurring in the emergent economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRICs, – from the Olympics in Beijing, to what could be a gruesomely run Comm Games coming up in Delhi (one British paper reported a budget blowout of 18 times original estimates). Then there’s a Winter Games in Sochi, and afterward Rio and company’s daring attempt to pull off a World Cup/Olympic double in a three-year window. At least they’ll have a sensible place to play beach volleyball.

   – Jeff Centenera