Bostonians active in the fight against the 2024 Olympics helped similar efforts in Toronto, Hamburg

If whoever does get 2024 runs at true break-even, shame on us

No, that just means that the other city is better equipped to handle the event than Boston could be. Los Angeles has the experience and many venues that can be reused from two previous Olympics, so I have some confidence they could pull it off again.

I thought it would have been interesting if Boston could have been the smartest people in the room and figure out how to make a sustainable (versus black hole of lost tax dollars) Olympics work.

The problem is, Boston2024 was made up of easily some of the worst project managers that ever managed a project. It was not our best and brightest-- it was the usual revolving door of well-connected but dimly-lit bulbs who somehow manage to survive when there's no real scrutiny, so they figured they could do it again in a half-assed way and no one would notice or care.

The repeated failures of this group, no matter how many local celebrities they forced onto their board (with or without notifying said celebs in advance, of course), were so numerous, obvious, and egregious that to think they'd be able to handle the actual running of the games is laughable.

To whit: claiming they had cleared the use of Widett Circle as the main venue with all the current businesses, a claim that was repeatedly proven false; deciding to use Squantum Point Park for volleyball without informing DPR, the actual owners of the park; deciding that taking over Franklin Park for a destructive activity and then promising a pool as a legacy that no one wanted because no one at B24 every actually, you know, asked anyone; refusing to release the bid documents for weeks, then only releasing heavily edited and redacted versions that, in their original form, showed a $500m deficit that they repeatedly claimed never existed until their own documents (released under public records laws, after a fight) showed it did; promising to not require public financing when their own internal super-secret documents proved otherwise once the public was allowed to see them; having uninformed people like Shirley Leung, who didn't realize that four of the largest venues weren't already in existence and would need to be built from scratch, as some of your main proponents; on and on and on.

We as a community dodged a huge bullet with this. I think the Olympics *might* be good for Boston, when it isn't thrown at the community from behind closed doors and with the only people making decisions being the same ones who will wildly profit from them. Next time, put together an open planning process over a few years that brings together neighborhoods to find ways to make this work on the city's timeline and with the region's goals in mind, then put forward a bid. Trying to cram billions of dollars of one-time use construction into a shortened timeframe to suit the wealthy and privileged elite of the IOC was a sure-fire recipe for graft (oh, sorry, I mean "overruns") and spoils that we would all be left holding the bag for.

I disagree that this is interesting.

I thought it would have been interesting if Boston could have been the smartest people in the room and figure out how to make a sustainable (versus black hole of lost tax dollars) Olympics work.

I think we already have several more interesting projects. For starters, I would like to see our smartest come up with a reinvented MBTA that runs on time, efficiently, cleanly, and is sustainable financially. Perhaps someday, someone will figure out how to prevent 3 or 4 bus 39's from riding in a convoy between Forest Hills and Back Bay as well.