SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/478870
3 8 S X S W o r l d | F I L M / I A M A R C H 2 0 1 5 | S X S W. C O M Large-Scale Sporting Events Need a Sustainable Future by Dan solomon S B r azil's E s ta d io N a cio n a l M a n e G a rrin ch a in B r a s il i a (a b ove) a n d A re n a Pa n ta n a l i n Cu i a b a . 20 14 Wo rld Cu p ve nu es , n ow b a rely u s e d . T O M A S FA Q U I N I / C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S On the surface, the idea of hosting a sports mega-event seems like a great chance to put a city on the map. How many people knew of Sochi before the 2014 Winter Olympics? How many people around the world will learn how to pronounce "Qatar" after the Middle Eastern country hosts the 2022 World Cup? But despite the appeal of focused, international media attention informing the world about the host site—and the tourist dollars that come as a result—there has long been a dark side to hosting sports mega-events but recently, that underbelly has come to the fore. The consequences of hosting events like the Olympics and the World Cup are real, with huge expenses, frequent suppression of pro- tests, risks of injury to workers—especially in countries with lax safety standards—and residents displaced by facilities that provide limited long-term value. These factors have caused many to wonder why anyone would want to host large-scale athletic competitions. One person beating the drum about the formerly seldom- mentioned costs of these events is author and journalist Dave Zirin, who writes about sports and politics for The Nation, and hosts Sirius XM Radio's "Edge of Sports Radio." Zirin will be speaking on a panel focused on this subject as a part of SXsports, and he is delighted that the conversation is even happening. "It's not just encouraging; it's thrilling! It's invigorating. The fact that I'm going to SXSW to talk about this—are you kid- ding me?" Zirin says. "In 2004, after Greece [hosted the Summer Olympics], I felt like I could have done a lecture about this to everyone who cared inside of a phone booth. There's only so often that you can tell the story of debt, displacement and militarization— but the movement makes it different." Zirin discovered the power of the movement while researching his 2013 book, Brazil's Dance With The Devil, about the World Cup that that South American country was gearing up to host in 2014. Brazil is geographically huge, and Zirin nearly abandoned the book because of the difficulty of contextualizing the issues at hand. Then the pro- tests started. "Suddenly I had a narrative, with these mass movements that put millions in the streets," Zirin says. "It was like, 'Whoa—people in Brazil are protesting soccer.' " With Brazilians making up some of the sport's most rabid fanbase, the question of the costs of an event, even as popular as the World Cup, have finally begun to stack up alongside questions about the benefits. Those benefits, Zirin argues, are dubious. He points out that the public reason cities and countries tend to court these events is the prestige—"When you host these events, it's very flashy," he says— and while the public relations benefits might attract some tourists, that is not the real reason these things are so sought after. "They tend to line the pockets of the people who are the contribu- tors to a politician's future, so there's no money in opposing these bids," Zirin says. "There is money in facilitating them and seeing them through. That's what's so frustrating about this—when you scrape away all the niceties and confetti, what you're talking about is a massive exercise in corporate welfare." As an alternative to the current system, Zirin sug- gests that the same cities and venues be used repeatedly for the Olympics and World Cup, to mitigate the debt incurred and displacement created by the construction of the facilities. Alternately, FIFA or the International Olympics Committee (IOC) could underwrite more of their own costs—as could the corporate sponsors. The 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, for example, were the first Games to have corporate underwriting, and the city actually turned a $200 million profit on the event. (After that year's Olympics, the corporate spon- sors adjusted the amount they spent to get the city to pay more, Zirin explains.) Getting organizations like FIFA or the IOC, as well as corporate sponsors to pay more of the costs of these events is appealing, but difficult—one of the incentives to these entities for holding the events is that the hosts bear the brunt of the costs. Regardless, pursuing a solution—be it the organizations under- writing their own events with the help of corporate sponsors, or cycling through a series of two or three cities for each event—seems essential. Otherwise, the growing popular resistance means that finding cities that are willing to host the events becomes increasingly difficult, and the dark side of these events could get even darker. "For the 2022 Winter Games, it's down to Kazakhstan and China. Both choices are autocracies—dictatorships—and neither is appealing," Zirin says. "From what I've heard, the IOC wanted it to be either Krakow [Poland] or Oslo [Norway], but there was resis- tance in both of those cities. So the future is really—we're going to have to operate very differently, or they're going to have to roam the world looking for dictatorships to host the games." The "Sports Mega-Events: Do They Have A Future?" session takes place today (Sunday, March 15), at 11am in the San Jacinto room at the Four Seasons Hotel (98 San Jacinto). For more information on SXsports programming, please visit: sxsw.com/convergence/sxsports.