A Stitch in Haste

New York City was the second city eliminated in the voting rounds for the 2012 Olympics.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20, and it's gauche to kick an opponent when he's down, but this silly idea was stillborn from the outset. Mayor Bloomberg should simply issue a public apology for the embarrassing and unnecessary distraction and move on.

Two hasty stitches:

1. Many New Yorkers, Mayor Bloomberg obviously among them, seem to think that New York City can get by on its name alone. Um, no. Visitors — whether individual tourists, major conventions, the Olympics — not to mention long-term newcomers such as workers, college students, immigrants and new businesses — will only come here if it is a place worth coming to. And that means sticking to the basics: keep taxes low, regulation to a minimum, basic services such as crime fighting and street cleaning high on the agenda, and so on.

New York's failed Olympics bid had it exactly backwards, focusing too much on "If we build it, they will come...' ("it" of course being a scandalously planned Manhattan stadium for the New York Jets).

New York is already "built," so the proper approach is something closer to "If you treat it right, they will come..."

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2. From the news story:

Paris is bidding for the third time in 20 years after defeats for the 1992 and 2008 Olympics — and the IOC tends to reward persistence.

From an earlier post:

[A] new motto already seems to murmuring among Bloomberg's Olympics cheerleaders: "There's always 2016."

Ugh.

UPDATE: Nicole Gelinas echoes my thoughts about how NYC is "too capitalist" for the Olympics. Mayor Bloomberg, meanwhile, is engaging in some pretty brazen revisionism by suddenly declaring that NYC's bid was always a "long shot."