Mechanisms of policy failure: Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid

Abstract

Chinese

Planning for mega-events such as the Olympics is at a turning point. There has been a power shift in the relationship between cities and the International Olympic Committee towards the former. This shift is based on the emergence of anti-bid opposition movements; the increasing complexity of bidding; demands for locally relevant legacies; and a changing political economic relationship between citizens, city governments and sports federations. Our paper draws on a long-term study of Boston’s failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, based on an ethnography within the bidding corporation and interviews with pro- and anti-bid stakeholders. We lay out the reasons why the Boston bid failed, and conclude that bid failure involves factors that work against elitist powers and towards democratic beneficiaries.

Keywords

decision-making mega-event Olympic policy failure urban politics

Introduction

Planning for mega-events such as the Olympics is at a turning point, as new trends in urban politics are changing the dynamics of bidding to host. For decades, cities have linked these spectacles to promises of benefits such as world-city status, local economic growth and urban development. Consequently, local elites and boosters had grown accustomed to vying for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) attention with ever-more extravagant bid proposals (Horne and Whannel, 2012; Kassens-Noor, 2016). In contrast, a recent wave of bid cancellations because of urban political contestation – in cities such as Boston, Budapest, Davos, Hamburg, Krakow, Munich, Oslo, Rome and Stockholm – suggests that the current bidding model is being challenged at the local level. This raises questions over whether local urban politics is undermining long-dominant models of mega-event planning.

We focus on a failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Games in Boston (USA). This bid failure gained global attention because of the city’s reputation (it was widely recognised as a front running candidate in the beginning), the composition of the opposition (led by business and government insiders, and networking with anti-bid movements in other cities), and the dramatic demise of the bid (a public feud between the mayor and Olympic officials). Our study asks why the Boston bid failed. And more broadly, we ask why bid failure is occurring early in cities’ conceptual stages of Olympic planning: during local negotiations months before bids reach the final stage of IOC evaluation or even local maturity.

Though we acknowledge a long history of anti-Olympic protests (Boykoff, 2014; Cottrell and Nelson, 2011; Lenskyj, 2008), the Boston case signals major changes for mega-event urban politics. The wave of anti-bid opposition seen since 2014 raises debates over not only how mega-events should be planned but whether they should be pursued at all. We argue that the Boston bid failed as part of larger trends in mega-event planning: the emergence of anti-bid opposition movements; an increasing complexity in mega-event planning; a changing economic relationship between cities and the Olympic industry which emphasises locally relevant legacies; and a re-assertion of local concerns by bid city residents. While other case studies from the recent wave of bid cancellations could be employed (and we encourage other researchers to do so), our study offers empirical access into the inner workings of both the Boston bid corporation and its opposition movements, drawing on data that extend from the very beginning of the planning process in December 2013 until the bid’s cancellation in July 2015.

We detail the mechanisms of failure behind the Boston bid. The paper is based on a 20-month local study of the Boston Olympic bid, including interviews with key stakeholders and an ethnography inside the bid corporation. We analyse bidding circumstances such as a sceptical local public, an active press, the influence of social media on bidding politics and tensions over whether host governments should provide subsidies and guarantees to support the Games. By linking the Boston case to broader trends in anti-bid opposition, we are able to identify points of change in the urban politics of mega-event bidding and planning, in which opposition groups are increasingly effective, the planning process is increasingly complex, stakeholders are increasingly sceptical of the development promises made by Olympic boosters, and local residents are increasingly vocal about their desires to be informed citizens, participants and beneficiaries.

Bid failure

Mega-event planning has long been viewed as a ‘catalyst’ for urban development as the planning process builds coalitions, mobilises capital and attracts global media coverage (Andranovich and Burbank, 2011; Kassens-Noor, 2012). For several decades, cities have been willing to subsidise Olympic planning, often engaging in fierce bidding competitions with other cities to secure a hosting contract from the IOC. Olympic planning begins 8–10 years before the event itself. A bid committee, typically a public–private corporation, designs a master plan and business model, develops a bid proposal, constructs a local coalition of support, and acts as a liaison between local stakeholders and the IOC. At the time of bid submission, a city government must sign a financial guarantee ensuring the delivery of infrastructure. If the bid is successful, the bid corporation transitions into an ‘organising committee’ and the municipal government will take responsibility for the project as the signatory agent on the hosting contract.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the bidding process involved two stages: an initial ‘applicant’ phase in which bid cities develop a booklet responding to an IOC questionnaire, and a ‘candidature’ phase in which short-listed candidates develop a full bid file and lobby for support within the IOC and various international sports federations.¹ If there is more than one interested city within a country, national Olympic committees conduct an intra-national competition among potential cities before the IOC bid. This inter-urban competition has produced a distinctive relationship between host city governments, the private-sector firms involved in delivering the Games and the IOC. Host governments subsidise construction costs and guarantee risks such as construction delays or cost overruns, such that ‘when things go wrong the state – or, rather the taxpaying public – is usually left with the bill’ (Boykoff, 2014: 16). Thus there are multiple stages where policy failure might be driven by the IOC: by rejecting applicants from the shortlist, by rejecting candidates when choosing a finalist, and by invoking contracts to force municipal payouts if the project falls behind schedule or goes over budget.

However, the power relationship between cities and the Olympic industry is changing, spurred by a growing awareness of the problems host cities face and by anti-bid protest campaigns. Historically, anti-Olympic activists have mobilised later in the planning process, often taking the form of piecemeal protest campaigns (Burbank et al., 2000) or mobilising in a temporary ‘moment of movements’ (Boykoff, 2014: 25) to contest the impacts of the planning (Giulianotti et al., 2015) or to use the Games as a platform to protest non-Olympic issues (Cottrell and Nelson, 2011; Timms, 2012). In recent years, the question of whether to pursue a bid at all has taken centre stage in bidding politics. Over the last few bidding cycles (starting in earnest with the bids for the 2018 Winter Games) local governments have withdrawn their cities from consideration through referenda (Coates and Wicker, 2015; Könecke et al., 2016) or unilateral decisions to cancel the bid. While bidding politics has long been characterised by local boosterism (Hiller, 2000) and persistent over-bidding (Preuss, 2004: ch. 4), recent bid withdrawals suggest that cities are increasingly willing to demand a better deal from the Olympic industry.

There is a pressing need to understand the mechanisms that lead to bid failures, as there has been relatively little systematic research on the dynamics of bid failure. Failure is the most likely outcome of the bidding process given that mega-event planning is based on inter-urban competition. Between 1990 and 2016 there were 15 Olympic host cities, but 67 cities bid 99 times during the same time period. Unsuccessful bidding has several implications for urban policy. First, bidding is a costly endeavour – in the round of bidding to host the 2024 Games, for example, finalist cities Budapest, Los Angeles, Rome and Paris planned to spend a combined US$215.4 million on bid-stage planning alone.² There are pressing questions surrounding what, if any, returns on investment may be realised. Second, there is a growing recognition that these failed bidding projects have legacy effects: unsuccessful bids can help finance infrastructure upgrades (Alberts, 2009), catalyse land investment (Oliver, 2011), bolster the regional and national economic climate (Maennig and Richter, 2012; Rose and Spiegel, 2010), build institutional capacity in local government (Benneworth and Dauncey, 2010), or construct and maintain political coalitions (Bilsel and Zelef, 2011; Scharfenort, 2012). There is also a broad recognition that, for many types of urban policy initiatives, ‘failure’ and ‘success’ are moving targets that can be reframed over time to fit the agendas of local stakeholders (Lauermann, 2016).

A range of endogenous factors – happening inside the bid corporation or bid coalition – might contribute to bid failure. (1) Scandals are rare events, but they can be particularly damaging if for no other reason than that the IOC cautiously protects the ‘Olympic brand’ (Horne and Whannel, 2012: ch. 2). (2) Technical failures occur when a project does not deliver intended goals or is unable to pass pre-established evaluation criteria. A bid corporation may make mistakes in the design of their programmes and fail to deliver the legacy outcomes they initially promised (Smith, 2012; Tomlinson, 2014). For example, the presence of ‘white elephants’ – oversized or overly specialised facilities that will struggle to find post-Games uses – can weaken a bid proposal. The IOC strongly discourages white elephants and many bid planning experts stress the importance of post-Games usability as a necessary prerequisite for any successful bid (see review in Smith, 2012). But yet, many white elephants are still planned. Oliver (2014) argues, for example, that Olympic bid boosters in Toronto have repeatedly failed in part because they focus on elite sport and elite facilities which are at a higher risk of being underused. (3) Over-bidding is another endogenous factor leading to bid failure. Alberts (2009) suggests, for example, that Berlin’s failed bid for the 2000 Games was undermined by its own ambition to link the Olympic project to a large post-Cold War construction programme. Consequently, the risk of fiscal failure increases when a project does not produce a sufficient return on investment, mismanagement of the project or exogenous economic factors (such as economic crisis). Most Olympic projects have failed in this way since 1960 (Flyvbjerg et al., 2016), often because bid boosters overestimate future economic impacts or underestimate the costs of their projects (Baade and Matheson, 2016; Zimbalist, 2015). (4) Finally, infighting within a bid coalition might also undermine the bid, though relatively little research exists on the topic because these conflicts are usually waged internally. Lauermann (2016) documents one example from New York’s failed bid for the 2012 Games, arguing that political opponents of the mayor collaborated with a sub-group within the bid coalition to block the flagship stadium project.

There are also exogenous factors beyond a coalition that may cause a bid to fail. Competitive failures occur when a project is defeated by others through inter-urban competition. This is the most obvious form of bidding failure, since by definition there can be only one Olympic host city per Olympiad. Tourism and media market considerations also play a prominent role. Since the Olympics are primarily a televised event and the majority of Olympic revenue derives from the sale of broadcast rights, considerations such as broadcasting time zone and the size of local media markets can influence a bid’s competitiveness (Horne and Whannel, 2012; Müller, 2015). For example, Baade and Sanderson (2012) argue that Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Games was rooted in a dispute between the IOC and the US Olympic Committee (USOC) over television revenues. Finally, the ‘continental rotation’ (Feddersen et al., 2008) is often mentioned anecdotally as another possible cause of failure. The geopolitics of the Olympic movement lead the IOC to attempt to spread the Games globally, and thus it difficult to win a bid if the Games were recently hosted on the same continent.

In summary, policy failures such as a failed Olympic bid may be linked to endogenous factors (e.g. scandals, technical problems, over-bidding or infighting), to exogenous factors (e.g. competition from other cities, or tourism and media market considerations), or some combination of both. Collectively, these factors have been intensified by a growing public awareness of the risks of Olympic hosting, and by a growing public resistance to it through anti-bid protest campaigns. The result, as we discuss in the following study, is a power shift between cities and the Olympic industry as local governments continue to withdraw their Olympic bids.

Methodology

Our study examines the mechanisms of bid failure in detail. Using an in-depth, long-term study of Boston’s failed bid for the 2024 Summer Games, we tracked the bid project from the very first meeting of the commission conducting a feasibility study (in December 2013) to the last days of the bid corporation’s operations (in August 2015) with four methods. First, we draw on a three-month ethnography in the bidding committee during the June, July and August 2015 when the Boston 2024 Partnership Inc. ceased to exist. The ethnographer (one of the authors) was a staff member of the Boston bidding committee tasked as the university liaison, legacy and transport planner. The research question that guided the ethnography was ‘How do bid committee members plan the Olympic Games?’. She collected data every time she was interacting with other staff members, city liaisons and other stakeholders. Throughout the meetings, she took handwritten notes. Twice per day, she summarised the notes and added personal impressions. At the end of the 12-hour workday, she reflected on the various interactions. Finally, she summarised her findings and impressions in weekly reports and a final report after the three-month ethnography.

Second, we used direct observation of the political process through attendance at 15 stakeholder meetings hosted by the Commonwealth Feasibility Study Commission, Boston 2024, City of Boston, No Boston Olympics and No Boston 2024 between December 2013 and July 2015. One of the authors attended these hearings, audio recording and transcribing the proceedings. He collected print materials distributed at the events, noted which political players were in attendance, and documented informal conversations with speakers and audience members.

Third, we conducted 31 interviews with Boston 2024 (21 staff members agreed to be interviewed), anti-Olympic groups (seven interviews), governmental (one interview) and IOC representatives (two interviews). The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed within a week of the recording. The interviews were content-analysed and conflicting information between authors was resolved by using secondary evidence and other primary data from our study.

Fourth, we draw on a content analysis of local print and social media. Print media was drawn from local newspapers including the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Magazine, Boston.com and neighborhood newspapers (e.g. the Dorchester Reporter, Jamaica Plain Gazette). We also analysed the Twitter and Facebook accounts of pro- and anti-bid organisations, and the individual accounts of anti-bid activists. Social media was particularly useful for monitoring conversations occurring during and immediately after the abovementioned public meetings.

Factors in Boston’s bid failure

The Boston bid emerged in 2013 when elected officials and grassroots campaigners received state funding for a feasibility study. That commission did not reach definitive conclusions about the costs and benefits of hosting but recommended further bid development. Boston 2024 Partnership (Boston 2024), the non-profit organisation that developed the bid over the next two years, released a preliminary bid (locally known as ‘Bid 1.0’) that secured a spot as the official American bid city from the US Olympic Committee (USOC) in January 2015. Thereafter, the committee launched a campaign to promote the plan in Boston. However, local opposition groups (No Boston Olympics, No Boston 2024) formed to protest issues of transparency and participation in the bid planning, eventually building an ideologically diverse coalition of bid sceptics including issue-specific advocacy organisations (e.g. those working on themes such as gentrification and homelessness), conservative and liberal politicians, neighbourhood associations and local environmental groups. Boston 2024 attempted to address these criticisms with a revised ‘Bid 2.0’ plan, but struggled to gain a majority of support in public opinion polls. Sensing weak local political support, USOC officials gave the mayor an ultimatum to either sign a contract guaranteeing municipal financial support for the bid plan or to withdraw. In July 2015 the mayor declined to sign, effectively forcing a bid failure.

Boston’s bid failure illustrates four mechanisms of policy failure, which we detail in the following analysis and summarise in Table 1. Organisational mechanisms refer to the challenges of building and maintaining a stable coalition of support for the bid. Boston’s coalition-building was hampered by anti-bid protest movements and contentious relations between city and Olympic officials. Technical mechanisms refer to problems with mismanagement or flawed plans. Boston’s bid failure must be interpreted against the increasing institutional complexity of mega-event planning. Fiscal mechanisms involve failure linked to debates over funding. Boston’s bid struggled to justify its budget given opportunity costs and the risk of cost overruns. Finally, political mechanisms surround the local political campaigns that bidders must wage.

Table 1.

Mechanisms of bid failures.

Mechanisms	Endogenous dimensions	Exogenous dimensions	Four changes in the Olympic industry
Organizational	Scandal ( Horne and Whannel, 2012 ) Overbidding (Alberts 2009) Infighting (Lauermann, 2016) Anti-bid movements after winning bid (Lenskyj, 2008)	Out-bid by competitors Anti-bid protests Fractured relationships between city and Olympic institutions	Sophisticated, robust, bi-partisan anti-bid coalitions
Technical	Steep learning curve History of operational mis-management (transport)	Continental rotation ( Feddersen et al., 2008 ) Negative press and social media	Complexity of bidding
Fiscal	Planned white elephants (Oliver 2014)* Running over budget (Flyvbjerg et al., 2016) Failure to extend legacy benefits to broader populace Local history of failed mega-projects	Television revenue disputes ( Baade and Sanderson, 2012 ) Financial crisis (Flyvbjerg et al., 2016)	Demand for cost-benefit analysis to evaluate local legacy benefits
Political	Composition of bid committee Transparency Participation of populace in bidding process (polling)	Unfavourable referendums ( Könecke et al, 2016 ) Public scepticism of municipal priorities Changes in political leadership	Democratic bidding: meaningful involvement of the local populace

Note: We colour-code our contribution to scholarship in roman font, while existing scholarship on bid failure is in italic. An asterisk (*) indicates that the italic conditions were also present in Boston’s case.

Organisational mechanisms: Limits to coalition building

Even though there is a history of globally visible protests against the Games, opposition groups such as those in Boston signal a new type of anti-Olympic activism and act as an exogenous factor in bid failure. The key opponents were self-identified ‘establishment’ figures with experience in government and the private sector (Vaccaro, 2015a). This meant that the anti-bid message was shaped by ideologically diverse coalitions, rather than by the leftist coalitions that typically mobilise to use an Olympics as a ‘platform for protest’ (Timms, 2012). No Boston Olympics was founded by members with senior-level experience in government, business and established political parties. No Boston 2024 was a wider coalition of activists from the city’s progressive movement, and adopted a more horizontal organisation and a more confrontational style. While these groups diverged in tactics, they coordinated on themes including the opportunity costs of hosting, a lack of transparency in the planning process, and the inconveniences the Games would bring to the populace.

At the national scale, the Boston bid faced treacherous coalition building prospects as well. Usually, once a national Olympic committee announces the national candidate city, it provides full support for that bid. However, the USOC continued to evaluate candidates. Since winning the intra-national US bid in January 2015, a lingering suspicion plagued Boston staff members: the runner up (Los Angeles) continued its bid effort and held closed-door meetings with the USOC. One staff member described his sentiment: ‘The USOC was never on our team. Never once on our team’. Though the USOC issued continued reassurances that Boston was their city of choice, news sources confirmed Boston 2024 suspicions in March 2015 by reporting that the USOC was prepared to pull the bid from Boston and give it to Los Angeles (Futterman, 2015). Simultaneously, Anita DeFrantz, a long time IOC member, continued to advocate with the IOC for the Los Angeles bid. IOC and USOC member Angela Ruggiero likewise contributed to this narrative during a city hearing in which she implied that Boston’s bid was not guaranteed (Ryan and Arsenault, 2015). Many Boston 2024 interviewees blamed the USOC for Boston’s bid failure, arguing that USOC members had remained unsupportive despite Boston’s win and consequently remained uncooperative throughout the bidding process.

Technical mechanisms: Mismanagement of the bid’s increasing complexity

Boston’s bid planners struggled with local media narratives, with institutional learning and with developing a response to local mismanagement problems outside their control. First, the rise of social media presented challenges for bid promoters. Though Boston 2024 had a social media presence, anti-bid groups had a much larger presence (comparison of Twitter and Facebook accounts). While the mayor dismissed these opposition groups as ‘ten people on Twitter’, they played a significant role in shaping local media narratives by launching a satirical #10peopleontwitter campaign with thousands of tweets per day (Ramos, 2015). One anti-bid activist argued that live-feeds on social media were particularly helpful for shaping media narratives:

[It] was one thing we could use a lot and advantageously … you know, because Boston 2024 was really bad at it! At meetings in other parts of the state [where activists often could not attend], there would be no presence from them … the trending would always be from us. We would have messages as the number one thing trending for hours.

Anti-bid groups were savvy in cultivating relationships with media outlets (e.g. forwarding public records requests directly to venues such as the Boston Herald or Boston.com). This strategy relied on social media, especially live coverage of planning events.

In contrast, the bid committee primarily focused on more traditional media for communication on the backdrop of accelerating media attention. In comparison with past Olympic bid winners (London, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo), Boston’s media coverage exceeded those by at least 50% ten years before the Games (Boston 2024, internal communication). Print media thus also played an important role in Boston’s Olympic bid failure by mainstreaming critiques about economic risks, transportation challenges, and flaws in bid transparency and leadership. Many Boston 2024 staff members felt that the media, while a necessary tool, was too critical of the bid, and did not give Boston 2024 a chance to provide the necessary information. One Boston 2024 staff member described the media narrative: ‘there was a lot of yellow journalism honestly. The media used the Olympics as a way to have a big story everyday by highlighting the negatives’. Media coverage in turn affected day-to-day decisions, and many actions that Boston 2024 took were in response to common themes in the media. One bid committee staffer described the response as ‘scandal-driven’: responding to critiques (e.g. on employee salaries) rather than framing the more finalised details of the bid and envisioning the future of the city.

A second technical mechanism of failure was the bid corporation’s inability to quickly develop expertise through institutional learning. As a first time bidder, Boston 2024 had a steep learning curve to master as technical knowledge requirements for Olympic bidding grow increasingly complex. Many other Olympic hosts needed multiple bid attempts to win the bid including expertise. In comparison, many Boston 2024 staff had little to no experience with the Olympics. To offset the lack of experience Boston 2024 hired international experts, though only after the publication of its first draft of the bid. One consultant who had worked on previous Olympic Games and other similar international sporting events argued that ‘no one on the bid committee has a solid understanding of the Olympics, and neither does the vast majority of people in Boston’. Ultimately, Boston 2024 was unable to master the steep learning curve and Bid 2.0 (released on 29 June 2015) was perceived to have little to offer in response to voters’ concerns, because many details regarding venues and the insurance programme had not been finalised (Wilbur, 2015). With no more than ten people on staff in the initial bidding phase, Boston 2024 struggled to fund, design, and run an Olympic campaign given USOC deadlines and demands had to be met for the bid submission.

A third technical mechanism of bid failure was an ineffective response to local problems in urban management. For example, the worst winter in recent history and its associated transport crisis contributed to bid failure. The winter of 2015 broke the record for the most snowfall in Boston with over 9 feet of snow (Erdman, 2015). This snowfall led to a breakdown of local transport services, and to millions of frustrated commuters becoming aware of an unreliable public transportation system (Dungca, 2015). This in turn highlighted deficiencies within the transit authority, which had experienced budgetary concerns and other long-standing management issues (Lepiarz, 2015). Despite bidding for a Summer Olympics, citizens across the state began to question whether the system could handle the increased load that the Olympics would bring if it struggled with daily commuter traffic in winter (Khalid, 2015). Boston 2024, which included former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Rich Davey, assured citizens that the Olympics would bring about much needed improvements to the MBTA that were only possible in conjunction with the bid. Nonetheless, opposition groups maintained that Boston 2024 had no basis for this assertion, and put the bid in the context of opportunity costs: spending on the Games would mean less public funds available for improving the transit network (No Boston Olympics, 2015).

Fiscal mechanisms: Struggling to justify Olympic expenses locally

The Boston bidders struggled to develop persuasive budgets and plans for event legacies that would solve local urban problems. Bids have to demonstrate that the Olympics will bring a positive legacy that will remedy current urban problems. Boston’s bidders struggled to justify how their budget would do so. Boston 2024 was unable to present a legacy justification with easily understood benefits for the populace at large. For example, at a fundraising event of top donors in Boston’s 2024 headquarters, the query ‘why do we need this bid?’ echoed loud and clear in the questions that were asked that night. At this event, Boston 2024 leadership had no satisfactory response to that question.

The Olympic funding debate took place on the backdrop of other troubled mega-projects in the city. One 2024 staff member concluded that the Boston bid ultimately failed because ‘we wore a lot of the IOC’s history, the USOC’s history, the city’s history’, setting unrealistic expectations for what the bid could accomplish. Boston had made headlines for its political corruption and poor public works management over the past decade. In particular, there were comparisons to the ‘Big Dig’, an underground highway construction project that took years longer than expected to finish, and went billions of dollars over budget. In local media and at public meetings, the bid was frequently compared to the Big Dig because of the scale of the Games and because of the numerous projects proposed by the bid committee that had no secured funding source (Chieppo, 2015). Because cost overruns of many Olympic Games are well documented (Preuss, 2004; Zimbalist, 2015), taxpayers expected that budgetary deficits would be passed along (No Boston Olympics, 2015).

Political mechanisms: Participation and transparency demands

Winning the Boston bid required a complex calculation of the city’s history, culture, society and environment. Coupled with high levels of civic participation, the local desire to have a say in the bid was enacted by regular polling. Polls showed a persistent concern that the Olympics would divert resources away from other civic priorities and would not contribute to the improvement of the city as a whole (WBUR, 2015). A bid requires multi-party support across a city-region. For Boston, that was particularly challenging because of the political cycle. On 8 January 2015, the same day that Boston was chosen as the US bid for the 2024 Summer Games, Charlie Baker was inaugurated as governor of Massachusetts, following two-term Governor Deval Patrick. Similarly, Mayor Walsh was beginning the second year of his first term, succeeding Boston’s longest serving Mayor Menino. The Olympics were seen as a way for these first-term politicians to create a legacy for themselves, or alternatively, as a potential catastrophic blow to their political careers (Ryan and O’Sullivan, 2015). To the detriment of the Boston bid, its staff had been built on an existing administration, in which the political focus lay on former governor Deval Patrick. In particular, the former Governor had several former colleagues working with the bid, and he himself became involved, drawing criticism with his initial US$7500/day salary (Boston Business Journal, 2015). Many 2024 interview respondents were uncomfortable with the political focus of the bid. While the bid’s Community Engagement Team viewed their work as more of an educational movement and less of a political one, their work was widely considered to be part of a political campaign fraught with propaganda (Seelye, 2015; Vaccaro 2015b). One 2024 staffer summarised: ‘We handled it like a political campaign, and it’s not that by any means… we lost the magic of the Olympics right from the very beginning, and we never got it back’.

These political concerns were compounded by critiques over transparency in the bid process. Boston 2024 promoted itself as the most transparent bid in Olympic history despite the first version of the bid (Bid 1.0) coming out of a closed leadership circuit populated by ‘old Boston’ elites in city government and the real estate industry. This transparency problem was augmented when only days after Boston was designated as the US bid, the mayor signed a gag- order forbidding city employees from publicly criticising the bid (Valdmanis, 2015). This continued as the Boston 2024 organisation originally refused to take a stance on holding a referendum (Levenson, 2015) and again when staff salaries were released. However, the biggest hit to Boston 2024’s reputation occurred in April 2015, when opposition activists and the press discovered that the ‘most transparent bid of all time’ had redacted parts of the publicly released Bid 1.0 (Enwemeka, 2015). Many interviewees in Boston 2024 agreed to transparency problems with the bid. Some said that the committee did not have enough time to fully develop the bid, or that USOC constrained the release of bid information, while others said that locals simply did not understand or believe Boston 2024.

There were also challenges with public participation in the bid planning process. Boston 2024 only started a public engagement strategy after becoming the American bid. This consisted of the ‘20-in-20’ meetings, 20 meetings in 20 weeks across the state of Massachusetts, in addition to a series of nine public meetings throughout Boston sponsored by the Mayor’s office. The goal of these meetings was to provide information and receive feedback and suggestions about the bid (Boston 2024, 2015). The format of these meetings exacerbated public discontent with the bid: led by bid officials rather than public employees, they typically included the same powerpoint presentation and a highly circumscribed format for public input. No Boston 2024 activists adopted a strategy of asking particularly embarrassing questions during these meetings, tailored to the concerns of local audiences (e.g. questions about the impact of the Games on local traffic patterns, or the role of specific local officials in what was becoming an increasingly unpopular project).

In summary, our analysis shows four mechanisms that bid boosters could not sufficiently manage. First, the rise of ideologically diverse anti-bid coalitions using social media as a means to organise protests and mainstream critiques. Second, the increasing institutional complexity of bidding and the requirement for a diverse bidding committee with international multi-year expertise to stage a bid. Third, the need to articulate local legacy benefits rooted in the city’s history instead of boosting generic legacy promises. Fourth, the need to efficiently address demands for transparent and meaningful public participation in the bid.

A discussion of the implications of bid failures in and beyond Boston

The Boston bid provides an opportunity to explore broader changes to the Olympic planning industry. Boston is not an isolated case, but rather an example of changing dynamics in the urban politics of bidding. It is one of nine cities that cancelled bids between 2013 and 2017 (Table 2). Fundamental shifts in the Olympic planning industry have happened before,³ and the recent wave of bid withdrawals signals another shift in the relationship between city governments and the Olympic industry, in favour of the former.

Table 2.

Characteristics of recent Olympic bid cancellations.

Bid project	Anti-bid opposition	Critiques faced by bid planners	Governmental support
Munich 2018	NOlympia Munich	Environmental concerns (water, snow, climate change, nature, space), financing difficulties, traffic problems	Referendum results against the bid
Davos/St Moritz 2022	Kommittee Olympiakritisches Graubünden	Too big for city, unrealistic financial promises, too expensive, not sustainable	Referendum results against the bid
Stockholm 2022	No formal anti-bid opposition, local community resistance, moderate party withdrew support	Debate over use of public funds	City council withdrew support; Swedish Olympic Committee later expressed renewed interest in a 2026 bid
Oslo 2022	Minority coalition in parliament	Debate over government assumption of planning risk	Norwegian government voted against guaranteeing the bid proposal
Boston 2024	No Boston Olympics, No Boston 2024	Transparency; debate over use of public funds; debate over government assumption of planning risk; concerns with cost overrun in other mega-projects (e.g. the ‘Big Dig’)	Mayor withdrew support; Investigation by governor’s office criticised bid
Budapest 2024	‘Momentum’ campaign, Együtt (Together) party	Calls to hold a referendum on the bid; Concerns with the opportunity costs of hosting	National and municipal governments withdrew support
Hamburg 2024	NOlympia Hamburg, Right to the City alliance, Green Party	Debate over use of public funds; concerns with cost overrun in other mega-projects (e.g. Elbphilharmonie)	Local audit court raised warnings about financial risk; Referendum results against the bid
Krakow 2022	Krakow Against the Games	Calls to hold a referendum on the bid; budget that favoured sports venues over other infrastructure; press-bribing scandal	Referendum results against the bid
Rome 2024	Five Star Movement; Radicali Italiani party; Virginia Raggi mayoral campaign	Debate over use of public funds	2020 bid cancelled for lack of financial backing; New mayor cancelled 2024 bid after campaigning to do so

Note: Lviv’s 2022 bid cancellation is excluded because it was not caused by anti-bid activism, but as a result of a civil war.

Sources: Newspapers; mega-event industry trade journals; press releases from cities, bid corporations, and activist groups.

These bid cancellations have diverse and locally specific causes, but they also share some common characteristics. First, they faced a particular type of protest movement, one which protested at the early stages of mega-event planning as a way to oppose projects in a vulnerable state. The Boston case illustrates that while anti-bid campaigns may be numerically small (the core group of activists in No Boston Olympics and No Boston 2024 numbered only in the dozens), they can have significant impacts on mega-events when they intervene at the most vulnerable stage of the project, the bid stage. Anti-bid protests (Figure 1) stand out as ideologically diverse campaigns (e.g. as seen in the Hamburg 2024 bid when a mainstream institution such as the municipal auditor released a report parallelling activist critiques). Unlike conventional urban social movements grounded in leftist politics, these campaigns draw on themes of interest to liberal and conservative parties, special interest advocacy groups, neighbourhood associations and environmental groups.

Figure 1.

Anti-bid protests.

Second, bid planning has become increasingly complex. A contemporary bid needs to come to terms with a new set of priorities/debates: the need to incorporate international expertise, louder demands for transparency, an increasingly organised international network of anti-Olympic movements, and a need for new bid promotion strategies. The Boston case shows a bidding committee struggling to adapt to the new circumstances after the win of the national nomination, particularly the speed of local media cycles, social media debates and hiring international experts quickly enough to develop a technically sound bid. Bid coalitions need a more nimble and responsive structure to avoid scandals or flaws that can become a rallying cry against the bid (e.g. as seen in a bribery scandal surrounding the Krakow 2024 bid).

Third, these bid withdrawals saw bid promoters struggle with similar types of local debates over public finance. Many of these bids faced criticism on questions of transparency in budgeting, the opportunity costs of using public funds to subsidise the Games instead of other municipal priorities, and the distribution of risk between the host governments and the IOC. Governments are increasingly uncomfortable signing hosting contracts because of tensions around public funding, cost overruns and public-sector risk taking. Similar debates occured in other contemporary bid cities (e.g. cities that cancelled their 2022 and 2024 bids) and have prompted institutional adaptation (e.g. these debates helped motivate the IOC’s Agenda 2020 reforms). Consequently, bids have to appeal to the populace at large with tangible benefits that justify the costs, risks and inconveniences a successful bid would ensue. The Boston case demonstrates the need for the clear and detailed articulation of legacy benefits rooted in the city’s history, environment and culture.

Fourth, bidding is characterised by citizens’ increasingly high expectations to hold decision-making power in their cities. The Boston case illustrates the different characteristics and types of actions to voice these demands, which were rooted in scepticism based on a local history of problematic mega-projects and a call for transparency and participation in the planning of future mega-projects. These local factors may not be replicated in other cities, but it is important to consider that every city has unexpected or idiosyncratic factors such as these, and stakeholders need to develop mechanisms for flexibility and resilience.

Conclusion

Bid failure involves organisational, technical, fiscal and political factors that tentatively work against local elites and towards democratic participation. Our in-depth study of an individual bid failure allows new insights into the evolving urban politics of mega-events. We have argued that Olympic bids increasingly fail in response to shifting political conditions, and the Boston case demonstrates one case for that fundamental shift. This evolving bidding system is characterised by increasingly sophisticated local opposition groups, increasingly complex requirements for communication and institutional learning in bid planning, a changing political economic relationship between local officials and the IOC, and local residents who are increasingly vocal about their desires to participate in the process. These four changes have tipped the relationship between cities and the IOC toward the former, a point we have demonstrated through fiscal, technical, competitive and political mechanisms. The Boston bid failed because it was designed in a bidding system that ignored recent changes in the Olympic industry.

The recent changes in the dynamics of inter-urban competition open new questions for urban studies research on mega-events. (1) Time and additional research are needed to assess the extent of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic industry. While recent bidding cycles (for the 2022 and 2024 Games) have included many high-profile conflicts, the long-term impacts on city decision-making are less clear. (2) Bid proponents face an increasingly complex political environment, and more research is needed to assess how bid institutions might respond. In particular, bid corporations need new policy and management models for ensuring transparency, securing expertise and managing public funding relationships. Simultaneously, anti-bid movements have to focus on local circumstances of the bid to ensure local voices have the influence as in the Boston case to decide whether a bid shall fail or succeed. (3) The new political challenges may not be manageable within the present system of bidding for these events, even if bid corporations implement new policies. Mega-event owners such as the International and national Olympic committees should fundamentally rethink their involvement in bidding. Future research could identify how Olympic committees can act as more responsible stakeholders in their own Olympic brand; stakeholders that fund local legacy developments in conjunction with Olympic projects and share financial risks. (4) The IOC Agenda 2020 reform agenda (IOC, 2014) to remedy bid cancellations seems insufficient, because it has been repeatedly mocked and undermined by anti-bid groups, especially in light of the Boston bid failure. Future research should explore how the bid process can be reformed in response to shifting urban political conditions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank our research participants for their willingness to share their experiences about the bidding process with us. In particular, we extend a special thanks to former Boston 2024 staff without whom this manuscript would not have been possible. Their openness allowed us a unique view into the inner working of a bidding process that will help ultimately help future bidders and Olympic committees to improve their bidding process. We also thank our colleagues who have reviewed and considerably improved our manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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