Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York

Abstract

lead the IOC. They used compressed and air brushed photographs making it look like ski courses were minutes outside of the city rather than hours. Statements about travel times between downtown Denver and race venues were not technically lies since they were at the outer limits of what the laws of physics allowed, but they were profoundly misleading. The Denver organizers even spied on other groups bidding for 1976 and paid for IOC members to visit their city. The records of the Denver Olympic Committee make it clear that the people in Colorado considered these trips bribes. The attitude of these sports administrators was that having a successful bid was the most important issue. Once the IOC gave Denver the Olympics, the Denver bidders planned to revise their plans to accord with reality and believed the Committee would basically accept these adjustments— which was probably an accurate assessment of how things stood in 1970. In short, Berg does a good job in letting the brazen dishonesty of these individuals speak for itself. Since many of these facilities needed to be in the mountains, the Denver Olympic Committee placed them in towns littered all over the Rockies. The problem was the people living in these municipalities were wealthy, influential and had no interest whatsoever in cooperating with Denver. They liked their communities as they were, and had the resources to object in ways that politicians had to heed. The plans to build facilities for which there was little post-Olympic utility was a big issue. Since the number of Americans that bobsled and luge can probably be measured in the hundreds, the tracks for these medal events had the makings of a boondoggle. Who was going to pay for these facilities and how much would they cost were other difficult issues that Olympic organizers preferred not to answer. At this point, the people of Denver and Colorado were not opposed to the Olympics per say, but when the Rocky Mountain News published a series of article on the misleading efforts of the Denver Olympic Committee and how it had hidden the price of building facilities, a majority of the public in both Denver and Colorado turned against hosting. The coalition that had opposed the Olympics quickly fell apart. The city and state continued to grow. “In that historical backdrop, it becomes clear that the Denver Olympics represent the zenith, not the genesis, of Colorado’s anti-growth resistance” (185). As Berg points out, the story of the Denver Olympics has contemporary relevance. Since the lavish waste of the 2008 Summer Olympics, citizen opposition in a number of cities have shut down host bids for many of the reasons that the people of Colorado faced in the 1970s. Many U.S. cities also face issues about building stadiums for professional sports teams that involve similar issues about public subsidies for sporting events. As a result, this book is going to be relevant for scholars in several fields of history but also in urban planning and public policy.