OLYMPIC EXCESS

The 2002 Winter Games left Americans with a sense of national pride – 34 medals, the most ever by far – and accomplishment – a few judging controversies aside, the massive undertaking of hosting the world was pulled off flawlessly. And, despite the eye-popping $2-billion price tag, Salt Lake City’s upbeat organizers say they’ll easily break even, perhaps even turn a profit.

They concede, of course, that TV revenue, ticket sales, merchandising and private-sector support left a $625 million hole that only federal, state and local taxpayers could fill. Pride and accomplishment, after all, have a price.

Their estimate of the public subsidy for these Games is, literally, only half the story. According to the General Accounting Office, the true amount of federal funding and support was nearly $1.3 billion. That’s more than double the federal subsidy of the much larger 1996 Atlanta Summer Games; it comes 18 years after Congress – stung by the now-paltry $75 million federal subsidy of the “profitable” 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games – swore the American taxpayer would never again underwrite such wretched excess.

Wretched excess was Salt Lake’s strongest event. The glib response to concerns about the escalating cost was, of course, the need for heightened security in the post-Sept. 11 world. But security cost only $300 million. What really ran up the tab was the $1 billion spent on highway and transit projects for a city of 1 million that, according to the sales pitch, was supposed to be big enough to handle 50,000 or so extra daily visitors.

Utah officials defend the expenditure by saying the road, bridge and airport improvements, plus the new light rail and bus systems were in the state’s long-range transportation improvement plan; all the Olympics did was speed things up. That assumes, of course, that all these projects would have received federal funding, a very competitive process, and it ignores the fact that speeding things up in Utah slowed things down everywhere else. Additionally, at least 10 federal agencies, from the quasi-federal Postal Service to the EPA, say they each had expenses of $2 million or more for projects that would not have been necessary had Salt Lake City not hosted the Olympics.

Still, all that federal funding freed up money for other necessities: $37.6 million for ceremonies; $8 million for the Olympic flame cauldron; $1.3 million to put up International Olympic Committee members, spouses and assorted hangers-on at Salt Lake City’s most luxurious hotel. Not to mention the $322,000 for the chauffeured limos IOC members, et al., required to get to the various venues (the $1 billion in taxpayer-funded transit improvements notwithstanding). All this, incidentally, at a time when the IOC has a stated policy of trying to steer Games to impoverished places, such as Africa and South America, in order to spread the wealth.

There’s no point in crying over the excess of the past, but it is important to prevent it in the future. The next available Olympics are the 2012 Summer Games and several American cities have indicated their interest in bidding – New York, Houston, San Francisco – and all say they’re already big enough to handle the extra visitors without gouging the taxpayers.

In case they’re not, Congress should heed the GAO study it ordered more than two years ago. That study found, among other things, that there is no government-wide law or policy that defines the federal role in hosting the Olympics, that no single agency monitors or oversees the appropriateness of federal funding and that states, localities and organizing committees often take advantage of the absence of centralized oversight by requesting overlapping assistance from as wide a range of federal agencies as possible. Everything, after all, has a limit, even the price Americans should pay for pride and accomplishment.