[ARETE] Berg, Olympics

[Duncan Jamieson]

Please find below Jack Ryan's review
Thanks,
Duncan
Berg, Adam. The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver ’76 and the Politics of Growth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. 293 pp. $40.00
Reviewed by Jack Ryan, English Department, Gettsburg College

One city publicly rejected the Olympic games, returning the honor to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) after landing the hosting opportunity for the global completion: Denver, Colorado. Many Olympic sponsors wished they were prescient enough to cancel before the final Olympic bills arrived.  Adam Berg’s The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver ’76 and the Politics of Growth maps Denver’s unique place in Olympic history with overwhelming detail by explaining how an unlikely, unaligned collection of dissenters put common sense before Chamber of Commerce zeal.
Even in the long shadow of political protest, violence, and death cast by Mexico City’s games in 1968 and Munich’s 1972 games, hosting the Olympics remained a goal, especially for the civic elite who saw profit and promotion from the games as the drivers for a sponsoring country, community, or city. Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics, but issues mounted over civic responsibility, finances, and the environment. In 1972, a presidential election year, Coloradans vetoed the International Olympic Committee’s hosting invitation and debunked the ersatz promises of influential Coloradans.
Nationally, the 1972 election returned the ignominious Richard Nixon to the White House for four more years, until, of course, Woodward and Bernstein investigated a third-rate burglary, which revealed Nixon for what he was, a powerbroker who would do anything to maintain power. Nothing as nefarious as the Watergate affair occupies the core of Berg’s book, but he does expose the extreme measures the political and commercial classes used to bring the ’76 Olympics to Denver. With precision, he also illustrates what went into adding a ballot initiative for the citizens of Colorado, a vote spurred by the behind-the-scenes diversions upholding Denver’s Olympic bid. Like the Watergate Plumbers, Colorado’s greedheads were too cocksure to recognize their mistakes or to think someone might be watching.
Nevertheless, like the prospect of evicting Nixon from the White House, the activists and politicians working against the Denver ‘76 Winter Olympics realized their task was monumental. Colorado’s most powerful business leaders, Governor John Love, the International Olympic Committee, and the Nixon White House were allied against them. Berg uses a tripartite design structure to present his historical account: Part 1: The Bidders; Part 2: The Opponents; and Part 3: The Fate and Legacy of Denver ’76. He begins Part 1 with a brief history of Denver, a city that offered the promise of Western expansion. After World War II, Colorado evolved as a place for recreational tourism, especially skiing. Colorado business investors expressed interest in both the 1956 and the 1960 Winter Games, fully aware of what the 1932 Games did for Lake Placid, New York, turning the Adirondack village into a winter resort. Bringing more people to Colorado as tourists and growing Denver were the primary goals of these failed endeavors, but the experience of seeking IOC support was invaluable.
Berg, a professional-track associate professor of Kinesiology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, traces the foundation of the 1976 bid to 1963 when “a collection of leading businessmen and politicians began to assemble another Colorado-based Olympic bid” (25). The pistons of growth and development propelled the engine of the Denver Organizing Committee (DOC). Denver was becoming a major American city, and according to the DOC, landing the Winter Games would only boost its increasing popularity. The DOC claimed most of the potential competition venues were already constructed; in truth, a ski jump, bobsled run, luge tracks, a speedskating facility, a media center, and a downtown arena had not been built. Because the International Olympic Committee insisted that potential venues be within fifty miles of where athletes resided, the DOC’s campaign was in trouble from the start. Berg details all the efforts to keep the ’76 Winter Games in Denver.
He also illustrates how the movement against the Winter Olympics began and evolved. The story is complicated. Both the cast of Olympic supporters and Olympic detractors expands before the 1972 vote.  Berg includes a list of sixteen acronyms for the organizations, committees, and groups connected to the Denver Olympics narrative before his introduction. A list of the essential players connected to these groups would have been helpful, too. Some of the first Cassandras emerge in the city, with Denverites of color striving for involvement in the Olympic planning process to spotlight the lack of housing for low-income families. Middle-class residents of the exurban foothills came next uplifting environmental damage while protecting the value of their own property. They typed brochures, handed out leaflets, visited community centers, and sporting clubs, and talked about overpopulation and Olympic budgets filled with hidden costs, always asking the same question: “Who pays, and who profits?” Then came a Democratic tax revolt led by state representatives Richard Lamm and Robert Jackson, the Citizens for Colorado’s Future (CCF), who framed the Denver Games as a boondoggle designed to stiff taxpayers, damage the environment, and increase the sprawl encroaching Colorado. Their political positions generated the most authority among the opponents and, as Berg explains, catapulted Lamm into the Governor’s Office.
Market-driven thinking wed to transgressive environmental sense lies at the core of Berg’s narrative. The true villain here is the International Olympic Committee, which extracts money from cities and counties with vampire precision in concert with influential local powerbrokers and deal makers. Los Angeles, as Berg notes near the conclusion of his book, learned from the Denver debacle and in 1984 hosted a successful, cost-efficient Summer Games by allowing citizens to participate in the decision on using city funds to cover the cost of Olympic development. Berg’s historiography is complicated and, at times, confounding, but it explains the appetite driving initiatives that seem to help communities, especially when they are wrapped as patriotic gifts devoid of community scrutiny, until the community acts.











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