Well, We didn’t get the bid, Brazil did but just what do you think caused us to lose? see what the USATF’s Doug Logan had to say recently.
“What did you think about Chicago’s bid proposal?
I’ve seen a lot of Olympic bids and I’ve got to tell you from the technical side of things, as a technical proposal for the Olympic Games in the age that we live in, it was superior. It was a superbly-put-together proposal, and technically I detected no flaws in it. I thought it was a great bid.
Of course, there are two sides of it. There’s the technical side of it and the other one’s the political side of it. I think it’s with the political side of it that the bid was wanting.
When you look at how the voting played out, what is your opinion as to why Chicago got so few votes in the first round?
You read all of the post-mortems that have occurred in the last 72 hours and you can ride around in circles. My own perceptions are perhaps from a little-higher altitude than a lot of people are commenting on.
The perspective that I have is one that is based upon having been an individual that was, first of all, raised in a multicultural family. I was raised bilingual. Besides speaking English and Spanish, I also understand enough Italian and understand enough French to get the general gist of what people are saying to me. While I can’t converse in any of the two languages, I understand them a little bit. I also was a CEO of a Mexican-owned company based in Mexico City that did work in Mexico and Central and South America so I know what the business norms are in other countries and how people function and operate effectively there, the differences in customs and ways of doing business. In Mexico, I got a real sense of true feelings of people outside of this country. I’ve done business in Central and South America and Western Europe and I know what it is like to deal with people from other countries, at least in a private commercial sense. I think that gives me a platform from which I can make the following statements.
I think that as an institution, the United States Olympic movement in general, and the USOC specifically, does not have either the tools or the knowledge of what it takes to operate globally in today’s day and age. The lesson that was a hard lesson for U.S. corporations to learn once they started to operate on a global level, but apparently we didn’t learn it as the business of sports. We are still conducting business in a parochial, provincial way, and I think that when it comes time to compete politically on a global basis we are powerless. We don’t know what to do or how to do it. Read the rest of Mr.Logans comments here
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