Jul 28, 2015 3 min read

Twenty-five years ago this September, Atlanta won the right to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, and the city celebrated like it was V-J Day, or, perhaps more precisely, partied like it was 1999.

It really was quite a stunner – Atlanta was an up-and-coming city in those days, but it hadn’t quite broken through yet. It wasn’t as cosmopolitan as other American cities, and still possessed a distinctly Southern flavor. Just 25 years before then, firehoses were turned on civil rights marchers not that many miles from Atlanta. And just a little more than 30 years before, a temple used by an Atlanta Reform Jewish congregation was bombed. Atlanta being “the city too busy to hate” was, at that point, a fairly recent development.

As much as winning the Olympics was considered a victory for Atlanta, many came to believe after it was over the price tag might have been too high. Sure, it put Atlanta on the world stage, but it went over budget projections by 147 percent. No, not 14.7 percent, but 147 percent. Two of the stadiums constructed for the event are, just 20 years later, due to face the wrecking ball, with the Atlanta Falcons getting a newfangled stadium with a retractable roof and the Atlanta Braves relocating to the suburbs. In retrospect, many Atlanta residents look back on the 1996 Summer Olympics with a mix of pride and cynicism.

In Boston Monday, many people were also celebrating. Not because Beantown won the Olympics, but because its bid to be the host city for the 2024 summer games was withdrawn.

Perhaps looking to Atlanta and the 2012 Olympics in London as examples, civic support in Boston was tepid and getting cooler by the day, and the local organizing committee was plagued by a lack of transparency and allegations salaries of some of its executives were inflated.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh released a statement Monday that said Boston would have reaped some benefits had it hosted the Olympics nine years hence, but “no benefit is so great that it is worth handing over the financial future of our city, and our citizens were rightly hesitant to be supportive as a result.”

Dan Shaughnessy, a columnist for The Boston Globe, was less measured. His verdict? The bid was “a clown show” and “our short regional nightmare is over.”

“Years from now, when we look back at the folly of Boston 2024, let’s remember that our rejection of the Games was never about three weeks of traffic and inconvenience,” Shaughnessy continued, “It was about taxpayers being on the hook for cost overruns, debt to our children, and another decade of cones and detours…”

Unless Los Angeles steps into the breach, the United States might not have a city in contention for 2024, leaving the field open for the likes of Toronto and Hamburg, Germany. It will be a victory for whoever does get the Summer Olympics, sure, but maybe a pyrrhic one.

“Any country that bids for the Games probably goes into it, though they wouldn’t admit it, knowing that there’s very little likelihood of it ultimately proving to be cost effective or value for money,” Alan Seymour, a professor of sports marketing at the University of Northampton in England told Bloomberg in 2012.

Athletes may pick up gold medals at the Olympics, but it’s becoming clear the cities that host these events are, in the best of circumstances, often left with only the bronze.