I am just looking at olympic stuff again, catching up on the gossip about the bids for 2024. Looking at Boston’s bid, I keep coming across quite a strange attitude. There is currently a lot of opposition to the bid; one of the arguments I keep seeing from the locals there is ”Our city is already special. we have x, y and z pieces of infrastructure. We don’t need the olympics to prove how great our city is.” Of course, they make other arguments over funding etc too. Yet this argument strikes me as oddly telling: it is an argument any city can make. All cities across the world have aspects of greatness. London is renowned the world over as a truly great city, yet it still went in for 2012; Paris is arguably the greatest and most beautiful, but it is still bidding for 2024. If everyone took the attitude of those bostonians, no city would ever bid for the olympics.

I think this tells us quite a lot about the American mindset. It reveals a kind of arrogance. While other peoples see themselves as part of the world and take pleasure in hosting others, americans do not feel the need to reach out in that way. Hosting the olympics is a huge status symbol for a city and a country – a sign that it is a player on the world stage. I get the impression that americans feel they are above that stage, and that the opinions of others don’t matter because only america matters. It implies they feel those cities which have hosted the games are not as great as Boston, and that Boston is somehow automatically superior to places like London and Beijing because it is american. I think his is what is known as american exceptionalism. Thus they shun any initiative from overseas because it is not american. They feel too good to participate with others, above the competition, so many oppose bidding, writing things like ” We don’t oppose the Olympic bid out of an ingrained negativity or a resistance to new things. We do so because we believe that our home is made for bigger, better, and more important things than playing party host.” and when they bid and lose they cry foul. It reveals a kind of arrogance I find worrying, for it betrays a reluctance to participate with the rest of the world, an attitude of superiority and arrogance. The opinions of others do not matter, and nor does participating in events created by non-americans. The olympics are supposed to bring the world together in competitive friendship; for a superpower like the United States to think itself innately above such completion and that all others are automatically inferior is a very worrying state of affairs. I know it is rather odd that I keep returning to this subject, but this is a good example of how one can read a lot about geopolitics and national attitudes in things like olympic bids, which is why I currently find them so fascinating.