Posted on 09/18/2017 9:32:54 AM PDT by EveningStar
I assume the author is too young to remember the 1984 Olympics. In any case the guy has no clue.
No, it won’t.
I remember. I expected a traffic and parking nightmare, but traffic was not at all bad, and there were plenty of unoccupied metered parking spaces in downtown Westwood. There was even some free unmetered street parking. Easy mid-day street parking in Westwood! Unbelievable! So many people stayed away to avoid the crowd that the crowding never happened.
that’s what happened in ‘84
my point
One of my warmest memories of the couple years after I graduated college was waiting with a couple hundred people outside the entrance to Mission Santa Clara (northern California)in the middle of the night waiting for the torch to pass. The runner wasn’t expecting a crowd, and when he saw them, he thrust the torch into the air and the crowd went nuts. Truly an electric moment. I don’t watch the Olympics much any more, and frankly I’m not a big fan of southern California, but LA did it right, made a couple bucks, and I wish them well to pull it off again.
I stood on Whittier Boulevard as the Olympic torch passed through Whittier, Calif., my home town. Many onlookers were waving American flags.
A great example of ‘losing’ on the host-job...would be the 2004 Greece Olympics.
If you go into Athens, the airport was built in the 2001 to 2004 period. While two-billion Euro was spent on the airport...you have to figure that roughly a quarter of that went to corruption or fake work.
The ultra-modern subway from the airport into the city? Same deal.
Probably two-thirds of the venues built for the Athens Olympics lay there today....with no real use.
Traffic was not as bad as predicted; the 405 was not a parking lot.
All in all a win for the city.
According to one of his family, Peter is enjoying his retirement.
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