Cape Town Olympics debate already decided
Sports minister Gayton McKenzie has suggested South Africa could host the F1 Motor Race. Also, others are calling for him to initiate a feasibility study into hosting the 2040 Olympics in Cape Town. Consultants Our Future Cities say it could be done "cheaply" using the Cape Town Stadium as main venue and other existing facilities. They've named the proposal Cape Town 2040 and CT2040.
But can Cape Town bid for the games cheaply even if the "deserted monstrosity" CT Stadium is used as main venue? As mega-projects around the world including SA show, they're always over-budget. The World Cup 2010 was originally budgeted around R40 billion but ended at R60 billion.
Incidentally, about the CT Stadium. In 2016 I calculated, after adding costs like employee costs of R21 million and other eg municipal services and routine maintenance the city declined to disclose saying the information "simply did not exist", that the annual running cost was about R80 million, excluding significant repairs like the glass roof that's ongoing (looks nice but not practical). It's income then and since is far less.
Until 2013 it had cost the city over R400 million, which the DA council had misrepresented as a tenth of that until an independent councillor investigated and the discovered the truth.
CT Stadium was not designed as an athletics facility - the original Green Point Stadium, which it replaced, was. Afterwards a new, smaller athletics stand and track - Green Point Athletic Stadium seating 4,500 - was built next to it. It cannot be converted to an Olympic-level athletics facility. So nix that idea.
Cape Town bid for the 2004 Olympics and failed for reasons, and local conditions, that are worse than then. Why and how could it succeed now?
Ex-banker Chris Ball headed the the bid committee then. It started as an on-spec private proposal (as Cape Town 2040 now) by Raymond Ackerman which the city and government then enthusiastically joined. At the time I wrote to Ball it was a bad idea. He replied why it was not, citing alleged benefits, economic and other.
Soon after, by accident rather than design, I joined the local bid sub-committee for one of the Games' facilities which had commenced construction late 90s, without any community consultation. We had monthly meetings, which included bid and city members, as construction proceeded. The politics of it!
Until the IOC announced the bid result, the city and bid committee were 100% certain Cape Town would get. But Athens won and Cape Town breathed a sigh of relief. Immediately after the announcement though, realisation dawned that we had been spared a financial, spatial and logistical burden, that it would have been too much. Cape Town dodged a bullet. It was commonly accepted the IOC had included Cape Town's bid to acknowledge the country's political transition rather than on its merits.
To avoid responsibility for the blowback and tens of millions spent on the bid, the ANC-run council turned on Ball, claiming he and the committee (which included city members) had misrepresented the bid and misled the city!
Olympics cost more and are more complex than single-sport events because one city hosts it and the number of events, athletes and visitors gather in one place. There's a reason why African cities cannot host it, now or in the future, SA included. It's not racist or colonialist as the left cry but practical.
Cape Town is different to other SA cities - better in many regards - but, by degree, it faces the same problems, challenges and choices others do. Beyond the southern, Atlantic and northern suburbs there's tremendous need visitors don't see except to and from the airport as they drive pass (unless Google Maps directs them through dangerous places!).
This is also a reason I think why the IOC passed CT's 2004 bid - that, like FIFA with the World Cup 2010, they didn't want to expose the world to ugly townships, shanties and poverty typical of any SA, or African, city; spatially it's impossible to locate all Olympics events in the beautiful places tourists visit and ohh and aah about in travel blogs. Other reasons included Cape Town's (SA's) high crime, poor transport system, no suitable existing facilities and quality of proposed facilities not meeting IOC standards.
It's conceited and self-indulgent of people who ought to know better, whose money or reputations are not at stake, to seriously suggest SA could host the Olympics. For example, Daily Maverick's Tim Cohen, who ironically called CT Stadium a "deserted monstrosity", recently wrote “it’s a travesty that no African city has yet won the right to hold the Summer Olympic Games. Cape Town is one of the world’s great cities; it deserves a (second?) shot.”
To suggest a call for a feasibility study is not a call for the Games, as Cohen did, is disingenuous and facile. Why suggest it if not because they're positive about the event? The study, which would cost millions, would be pointless unless there was some interest in it. It's ridiculous to say we should have the Games and the hundred of billion it would cost just so we can hold politicians to deadlines.
The history of hosting these events - football World Cup and Olympics - is replete with wasted and unused facilities after the event, which taxpayers must bear. SA can't afford it, though. Cities and countries never recoup the cost. Economic promises never materialise. Facilities lie empty and/or decay afterward, eg CT Stadium, many seldom if ever used again. So what's the point except a few weeks of feeling good which is soon forgotten.
As to London, it's uncertain if development around the former Olympic village to benefit the entire community materialised. Paris is lucky if it only cost $4 billion - as a rich, developed country, it has existing facilities it could use (like LA that made a profit) and its cost is a small percentage of its budget. Not so for SA. Paris is arguably the most tourist-visited city in the world so can handle it. The country rebuilt the fired damaged Notre Dame Cathedral in less than five years, an immense feat. So of course, to them hosting the games is a minor thing.
Our Future Cities' 2040 scenario optimistic, lacks economic sense and practicality
On its website Our Future Cities (OFC) describes itself as an "urbanism practice, consultancy and thinktank". Among its clients is the City of Cape Town. Its core business is a consultancy. Therefore, its interest in making the 2040 proposal is not pure futures research by a "thinktank", as some media sites are calling it, but professionally speculative. Unlike the 2004 bid that began as a not-for-profit initiative.
Unless the city commissioned the study, there's the potential for OFC of work and reputational benefit, to add to its curriculum vitae, should the bid proposal be taken up by the city and government, win or lose.
Cape Town Stadium (aka DHL Stadium) was designed as a football stadium. At the time, the city said it would cost too much to make it an Olympic-standard athletics facility. The Green Point Athletic Stadium which seats 4500 is clearly not an Olympics-standard venue. It's unclear what OFC intends with the Coetzenburg Athletics Stadium in Stellenbosch.
CT Stadium's field size is 125x68m. The minimum size space to host IAAF/Olympic athletic events - the core feature of the Olympic Games - is 177x93m which incorporates a 400m running track. So CTS is no good. To host the Olympics, a new stadium must be built. CTS cost R4.5 billion. At current inflation rates, by 2040 a new stadium could be over R150 billion present value. Add other facilities plus financial and social opportunity cost.
Putative economic and tourism benefits from the Olympics and World Cups are exaggerated, as a HSRC study found for WC 2010. SA's growth and unemployment, which began to decline in 2009, continued on their paths after 2010.
Our Future Cities' 2040 scenario is highly optimistic, as these what-if presentations usually are. They're tendentious, void of common and economic sense and practicality. OFC's proposal to scatter venues throughout Cape Town metro and a few beyond is logistically impractical from transport - poor to non-existant - and security - unsafe due to SA's high crime.
Proposed facilities like Athlone Stadium, renovated for World Cup 2010 but unused as a training venue, is in a socially depressed neighborhood. The IOC (like FIFA) would not subject spectators or teams to that. While some of the existing venues meet minimum international sports code standards, others don't. None of them meet IOC standards.
The debate about Cape Town was decided when it lost the 2004 bid when the auspices for the country were positive - economic growth, Mandela, governance, corruption not yet manifest. SA successfully hosted the World Cup, cost it never recovered except a small part indirectly through fast-tracked infrastructure it had to build anyway.
A bid is idle speculation that only the affluent - middle class, elite, sports bodies, politicians - indulge in, and it shows. Those who propose it obviously live in a bubble. My objections then to the 2004 bid and future ones are based on sound reasons, as to anyone who read the pros and cons of mega-games.
So why open the Olympics discussion again when we know the answer and really have more urgent things to think about. There are irrefutable reasons why Cape Town or any SA city - or country as a whole - can't and shouldn't host these large events. The country has to rebuild from a decade of state capture and 20 years of ANC mismanagement, neglect and corruption. It has to find a way of mitigating the R1 trillion stolen by corruption.
The DA presents itself as a responsible and prudent administrator, notwithstanding its at times questionable management of the Cape Town Stadium albatross. Unless council is behind this proposal, so far only a what-if that's already being commented on by local and international media, it must state it has no intention of bidding for the 2040 Olympics or any other games and nip this hubristic fantasy before it goes too far.
Rather, the city and the Games' advocates should devote their energies and time, or which they apparently have plenty, where it's really needed to contributing to eradicating the desperate need of most of Cape Town's citizens who live in dire circumstances. The Games won't lift them out of it - they would not able to afford to attend the events.
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