Jeff Jacoby is exactly right that Boston dodged a bullet — no, make that a cannonball — in not hosting the Olympic Games this summer (“I rejoice that Boston didn’t get the 2024 Olympics,” Ideas, May 12). The likely costs and disruption were staggering. Imagine Boston’s current fiscal woes with a few hundred million dollars of Olympic shortfall added to the mix.
Unfortunately, the laudable goal of international, peaceable athletic competition has been sullied by an untransparent, unaccountable organization, the International Olympic Committee, and the trail of financial and physical ruin to its host cities is long and well-documented.
So it’s especially heartening, and an important lesson for us today, that the determined efforts of a few committed citizens can overcome the powers that be every once in a while. The grass-roots effort that beat back Boston’s proposal about 10 years ago was much like the successful effort in the late 1960s to prevent the Inner Belt freeway from destroying city neighborhoods. A few so-called little guys said no to the self-aggrandizing plans of Boston’s monied and political elite and won. Sometimes it takes a few Davids to take down a Goliath.
Mark Lohr
West Roxbury