Big cities need big ideas, both because they drive concrete improvement and progress, and because they create a sense of excitement and possibility about the future, which, in and of itself, helps attract and retain new generations of city-dwellers.
That was the thrust of an essay I wrote for the Daily News upon returning, in a state of exhilaration, from the 2024 Olympics in Paris. It was generally understood that Paris as a host city had hit it out of the park (to mix sports metaphors), using the games as a forcing mechanism to invest in and accomplish big things, like building a new Metro line and cleaning up the Seine, that would serve the city well long after the torch was passed on.
I wasn’t saying, necessarily, that New York should follow suit and take another crack at the Olympics (although that’s what I will be saying here), but that we were “sorely in need of a burst of Olympic-sized ambition,” in the form of big ideas for the city. (One of those ideas was housing at Sunnyside Yards, and it was great to see Mayor Mamdani reopen the possibility earlier this year; I encourage his team to keep pushing, pushing, pushing on it in the face of both genuinely significant obstacles and inevitable slow-walking and naysaying from the bureaucracy.)
This idea — the Olympics as a catalyst for urban progress — is, of course, not mine. It was popularized, if not created, by Dan Doctoroff, who championed New York as an Olympic city and quarterbacked our bid for the 2012 summer games. The effort is chronicled in Dan’s book, Greater Than Ever (which is a great read, generally, for anyone interested in city government and the recent history of New York).
Dan’s core insight is that it’s incredibly hard to get even a single big project done in a city like New York, and that to accomplish a suite of them — to generate the necessary political will, sense of urgency, and financial investment — you need a North Star that captures the public imagination, and a hard deadline. The Olympics fits the bill like nothing else — not to mention the lift it can provide for the morale and international reputation of a city. This is what we saw in Paris: a “what might’ve been” counterfactual for New York, although it’s remarkable just how many of the ambitious plans that were part of our 2012 bid did, in fact, come to fruition — the thesis of a report by Mitchell Moss at NYU’s Rudin Center, “How New York City Won the Olympics.”
I should say here that working for Dan was one of the great privileges and learning experiences of my life. He is one of the best and most brilliant people I know, and a force of nature. In a less cruel world, his capacity would remain boundless. But even now, in between his herculean efforts to fundamentally change the trajectory of ALS research, he’s still thinking about how to make his city greater than ever — and he has returned to the notion of New York as an Olympic host, with a big twist.
The new idea — which originated with my friend and Assembly colleague Bobby Carroll, who for years has been working to turn it from an opera-house-in-the-jungle passion project into a serious inter-governmental endeavor — is a bid for the Winter Olympics, split between New York City and Lake Placid.
Dan and Bobby are teaming up to build support for such a winter bid, on the heels of Governor Hochul’s formation of a committee to explore one. They’ve just published a piece in Crain’s making the case and painting a picture of what it might feel like in the event:
Imagine hockey players crashing into the boards at Madison Square Garden. A figure skater landing on the edge of a blade beneath the lights of Barclays Center. Freestyle skiers soaring from a big air jump at Citi Field. Bobsledders hurtling down the ice at Mount Van Hoevenberg. Alpine skiers carving down Whiteface, home to the greatest vertical drop in the East.
Picture medal ceremonies framed by Rockefeller Center. When it came time to open and close the games, few settings could rival the grandeur of Yankee Stadium, the spectacle of Times Square, or the enduring Olympic legacy of Lake Placid.
The recent winter games, split between Milan and Cortina — established a precedent for a multi-location Olympics, and showed that it can work, with the distances involved not dissimilar from the span between New York City and Lake Placid. The 2030 winter games, planned for multiple regions across the French Alps, will be even more dispersed.
Strategically, there is a lot of wisdom behind the pivot from summer to winter, and in the idea of a joint upstate/downstate bid. It would be more winnable, because there are fewer competitive locales; more manageable, because it draws a smaller crowd; and more executable, because — between the city and the Adirondacks — we have most of what we need in terms of event venues. But that would not preclude the games from playing the role of catalyst for new initiatives, improvements, and ideas that would breathe new life into our city and state.
On top of all of the other potential benefits, from the perspective of this New York patriot, the idea of uniting the city with upstate in this undertaking — first, in the competitive process of winning a bid, and then, with the eyes of the world on us, in mounting the games themselves — is enormously exciting. I can thing of little else that might so change the way that the residents — and the politicians — of our vast and varied state relate to one another. As Dan and Bobby write:
The Olympic torch would not simply travel to an opening ceremony. It would pass through farms, villages, suburbs, cities and mountain towns before arriving in both the birthplace of winter sports in America and the world’s greatest city, a city that has somehow never hosted the world’s greatest sporting event.
It would tell the story of one state, many communities and a shared future. A child growing up in Brooklyn and another growing up in Saranac Lake would know that they are equal heirs to New York’s remarkable story.
Whether or not New York ultimately hosts another Olympic Games, the work of reconnecting our state belongs to us.
Amen. Let’s get going.