Should We Abolish the Olympics?

Police officers try to control anti-Olympics group's members during their protest march, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, at Shinjuku district in Tokyo, Japan August 1, 2021. [Reuters/Issei Kato]

By Samantha Grasso

For decades, Americans have celebrated the Olympics as a showcase for exceptional athletes and American prestige. But the event’s reputation has begun to wear thin.

Observers of the 2016 Rio Olympics may recall the stories of locals being displaced by the games. This year, the 2020 Olympics proceeded despite the pandemic and vocal opposition from volunteers in Tokyo.

I spoke with Taylor Carr, an organizer with NOlympics LA, a group that wants the games, along with the International Olympic Committee, abolished. NOlympics LA started in 2017 out of a local Democratic Socialists of America committee, in response to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s attempts to win hosting duties for Los Angeles. It’s made up of several LA activist groups, and is currently protesting the 2028 Olympics, which the city is set to host. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What exactly is the problem with the Olympics?

I have fond memories of watching the '96 games in Atlanta and feeling a real connection [to them]. But if you look at the receipts of the modern Olympics, it’s not at all what they're selling on TV. The IOC is a bunch of royalty and billionaires, and they have turned the Olympic machine into a big TV rights package that leapfrogs across the globe every two years, and comes to a community selling the Olympic message.

In reality what they do is create a real estate scheme. There's relentless gentrification whenever these games come, because stadiums and [other developments] have license to clear out portions of the community that the city thinks need “renovation” [Carr calls this “sportswashing”]. LA’s bid for 2028 was sold as a no-build game, because so many of the [former host] communities – like we saw in Rio in 2016 – get stuck with these big stadiums that just become cathedrals to all the corruption. In Los Angeles, there's technically no new stadiums being built for our Olympics, but we are getting three new stadiums, all plans for which mentioned the Olympics as a reason to be built.

The Olympics also brings a lot of speculative buying, in terms of landlords gobbling up older properties. You have a bunch of developers coming in, building these massive hotels, and they're citing all this tourism that's going to come in, even though these are billion dollar luxury properties downtown. The average tourist is not coming into town for the Olympics to spend $800 a night on a room, you know? One of their big partners for the next two Olympic cycles is Airbnb. We have an ongoing project called “Locks on my Block” where we're mapping Airbnbs across Los Angeles and looking at how they’re [impacting] communities.

And what about the policing of these cities?

Cities dump quite a bit of money into law enforcement, by our analysis often [leading to] as much as a 30% expansion to local law enforcement systems. There's almost a direct line between the LA ’84 games and the 1992 uprising, because you have a security apparatus that demands a ton of capital and extra people. I think in ’84 both the sheriffs and the LAPD hired tens of thousands of new officers. Now our current sheriff and police chief are saying, “We need to start hiring now in order to be fully staffed by 2028.”

In ''84 they actually got a full-on tank, this massive all-terrain vehicle with multiple-inches-thick steel they would use to terrorize and brutalize neighborhoods and [do] drug raids throughout the '80s. Operation Hammer, which was like a big gang database where they would loosely use details from other arrests to put people into gang databases and then turn that back around into convictions and arrests, all came out of the security operations and started with the LA '84 Olympics. That stuff just doesn't go away. It just hangs out in these communities and it continues to hurt people, especially nonwhite populations across the city.

How has NOlympics done this analysis on the impact the Olympics have on its host communities?

Our membership is plugged into other efforts like tenant justice or housing issues that have realized that the Olympics is a big arbiter of all that stuff. We've been really inspired by the work of Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University, Oregon. He was an Olympic soccer player in his youth and then in his academic career has come to be highly critical. He wrote the book Power Games, a really great rundown of all the damage the Olympics has brought.

In preparation for the 2028 games, what are the demands of NOlympics LA?

We want the games canceled and we want to abolish the IOC.

It's very difficult to get rid of a game's bid once it’s moving forward. It only really happened once in Denver [in 1976], for the Winter Olympics. It was sort of a perfect marriage of the huge libertarian base and the environmental activists there. They were able to actually put a referendum on the ballot and get the Olympics canceled by vote. Because of that, even though that was decades ago, we now see that most of these bids are pretty closed-door. So we are taking a couple of different approaches.

We're always trying to have conversations with our elected officials and to inform them [of how the Olympics] harms their constituents, and try to open up to any solution. We're always trying to mobilize folks in the community to try to make Los Angeles inhospitable to the Olympics, just by getting out the message of how dangerous and awful the Olympics are.

We actually sent a delegation of 15 or so members to Tokyo in July of 2019, one year out from the original launch date of the 2020 games. This year, on June 23, in coalition with these other international groups, we did an anti-Olympic protest day while similar actions were occurring in Paris and Tokyo, and in other locations across the world.

They’ve announced a rubber stamp bid on Brisbane for 2032, which is crazy far out. But they’ve realized that there aren't a lot of cities interested in taking this on, and it's better for them to get the games in the pipeline rather than risk having communities weigh in on it.

Is there any way for the Olympics and the IOC to exist in a form that’s more ethical and community-based?

Reform is an excuse to let the monster crawl on a little bit longer. Every effort to reform the games has unequivocally failed.

A lot of people’s reaction [to our message] is like, “But I love watching the Olympics. I love these sports. How can you say that?” We're not anti-sports. We're not anti-fun. We're anti-IOC and anti-corruption. And what we find is that if folks are really a fan of those athletes and those sports, they don't really want to fuck with the IOC. The IOC treats its athletes terribly. We want to support all these people that are doing their best and putting their life's work into putting on a good performance at these games. We just want them to have better games.

We don't have a blueprint for what that would look like, but we can kind [of imagine] one. In the '30s, there was something called the “Workers Olympics,” a counter event to the Olympics. It was just a bunch of people from the international community competing together, splitting the money and profits more fairly than the Olympics ever did.

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