Rethinking Olympic Legacy

I’m going to spend much of this month trying to re-engineer your thinking about Brazil; the rule of law story is way cooler than most of us appreciate. Among all else going on there, Brazil is hosting the upcoming Summer Olympics, and there will be much talk in the coming months of the Olympic “legacy.”  What do we mean by legacy? Generally we define it in economic terms: we calculate the cost of preparing for and hosting the games, then weigh it against the perceived long-term benefit, principally measured in terms of tourism revenue and the economic return infrastructure investment. It has become quite common of late for candidate cities to withdraw their bids, often in response to public referenda, on the grounds that the benefits won’t justify the costs. Oslo, Stockholm, Vienna, Hamburg, even our own Boston, and many other cities have withdrawn based largely on economic concerns. Notably, the only two competitors for the most recent awarding of the 2022 Winter Games were authoritarian regimes – Beijing, China, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. (Finalists for 2024 include Rome, Budapest, Los Angeles, and apparent frontrunner Paris).

But Brazil is showing us something different. It has built for itself what we might call a governance legacy: a series of laws passed in substantial part to prepare for the Olympic Games, that have an application well beyond the sporting event itself, and that will likely remain in place after the Games are gone. And as I will explain in subsequent posts, that governance legacy is overwhelmingly positive. In the areas of criminal enforcement, substantive anti-corruption law, procurement, and freedom of information, Brazil passed laws that tend to promote transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. More remarkable yet, Brazil’s Congress passed these laws largely in response to the much-publicized democratic protests concerning the government’s spending of public money. And as if that weren’t enough, certain of these laws are the very reason that systemic corruption is now being effectively prosecuted and folks are actually going to jail.

So I’m going to try to convince you that a measure of Olympic idealism is still in order, unfashionable though it may be. Cue the Olympic theme song.