For a fleeting flash, Boston looked like a bona fide contender to host the 2024 Summer Games. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee chose the city as its candidate, but then, armed with facts, gumption, and a penchant for democracy, an unlikely alliance of two anti-Games groups teamed up to torpedo the bid, forcing the USOC to hand the role to Los Angeles instead. In truth, Bostonians dodged disaster, and they have a plucky band of political activists to thank for it.
Confronting the Olympics is a classic David vs. Goliath battle that often pits raw economic power against scrappy people power. Boston’s bid for the 2024 Olympics was no exception. Games boosters included John Fish, the construction tycoon who served as the Boston 2024 chairman, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Steve Pagliuca of Bain Capital, and then-Boston mayor Marty Walsh.
Opposing this formidable network were two groups: No Boston Olympics, largely comprised of 30-something white-collar professionals and up-and-coming policy makers, and No Boston 2024, made up mostly of grass-roots activists, some of whom participated in the Occupy Boston movement and felt comfortable frequenting radical political circles.
The orchestrated frenzy of the Olympics, that festival of sporting brilliance, arrives with serious, entrenched downsides for the host city. Anti-Olympic activists in Boston illuminated these pitfalls, drawing from social-science research. Looking at the evidence-driven claims of Boston’s Olympic critics as the Paris 2024 Games unfold helps us see with piercing clarity how right they were.
Olympic costs were a vital arrow in Boston’s anti-Games quiver. As No Boston Olympics cochair Chris Dempsey told me: “The financial argument for us was front and center.” Activist Reginald Mobley added, “The Olympics are deft at hiding behind sports,” but the numbers don’t lie. Indeed, the Games are a real-deal budget-buster: Going back to 1960, every single Olympics for which reliable data exist has gone over budget, according to research from Oxford University.
Researchers found Paris 2024′s current “cost overrun is 115% in real terms,” although “final cost and cost overrun may be higher.” The financial argument helped Boston activists nab the support of fiscal conservatives, thereby broadening their alliance. Activists also raised the opportunity-cost argument: Money spent on a two-and-a-half-week optional sports event would not be spent on schools, roads, or public health.
Another reason activists opposed the Boston bid was the Olympics’ history of turbocharging the displacement of poor and marginalized people. No Boston Olympics activist Claire Blechman told me she expressed concern that building an Olympic venue on Boston Common would have “affected the unhoused people that lived there” and impinged “freedom of movement around the Common,” as public space was converted into private space designed to be safe for profit-making. The city’s poor residents would have been swept aside.
This is precisely what has happened in Paris, where security officials have rounded up unhoused people and migrants and placed them on buses destined for distant French cities before foreign journalists arrive. Activists in Paris call it “nettoyage social,” or social cleansing. The Paris-based activist collective Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) carried out a study that revealed a marked uptick in evictions in the lead-up to the 2024 Games affecting more than 12,000 people.
Those opposing the Boston bid also explained how the Olympics intensify surveillance and policing. The state of exception that mega-events inevitably bring provides local and federal law enforcement agencies with an opportunity to secure special weapons, laws, and funding that would be difficult to obtain during normal political times. Crucially, these weapons and laws can remain in place after the Games, cohering into the new normal for policing.
Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in an interview that “fundamental questions about what impact the Olympics could have on basic civil rights and civil liberties in Boston, not just during the Games or in the run up to the Games, but forever” were a massive red flag. As if on cue, the French National Assembly passed an Olympic Games Law in spring 2023 that green-lit the use of AI-driven video surveillance to police the Olympics, making France the first nation in the European Union to do so.
In challenging Boston’s Olympic bid, activists fully embraced democracy, organizing public meetings, engaging with local media, and filing a flurry of public records requests. Organizer Robin Jacks of No Boston 2024 explained, “We wanted all the transparency” while Olympic boosters “wanted zero.” Such engagement could galvanize vitriolic flak. But activist Jonathan Cohn told me, “I don’t mind attracting the hatred of people in power, because I feel that makes me stronger.”
When, back in 2015, activists in Boston stood shoulder to shoulder with concerned residents of all stripes to jettison the city’s Olympic bid, they sidestepped calamity. This was a complex “cacophony of dissent,” as No Boston Olympics cochair Kelley Gossett put it, not merely “10 people on Twitter,” as Walsh infamously quipped.
You can’t spell Olympics without an L, and Parisians are taking a big L in hosting the Games. They’re painfully aware of it, too: One recent poll found that a whopping 44 percent of locals believe the Games are a “bad idea.”
The sad truth is that the modern-day Olympics are both a glorious gala of sport and a massive albatross slung over the neck of the host city. No Boston 2024 activist Joel Fleming said he was “crossing my fingers for the people of Paris.” Paris might need more than that.
Jules Boykoff is a professor and chair of Department of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Oregon. He played professional soccer and represented the US U-23 Men’s Soccer Team in international competition.
