See? We have tall buildings. JAMES GIBBARD/Tulsa World
Unassuming.
Not exactly first-class.
The butt of jokes.
Those are some of the ways national reporters have described Tulsa in the months since the City Council heard an update on the city’s chances to host the 2024 Olympic summer games.
Tulsa? Really? Are these small-town heartlanders hallucinating?
“You won’t believe which American city is fighting for the 2024 Olympics,” reads the headline of
a story that goes on to say that calling Tulsa a midsized city “may be generous.”
“Sydney. Athens. Beijing. London. Rio. Tulsa. Wait. What?” begins
an ESPN blog that compares Tulsa to a town dreaming of hosting Olympic events in its local YMCA and jokes that Tulsa’s mayor “probably has a name like Dewey Bartlett. Oh. His name really is Dewey Bartlett.”
A February
USA Today list of Olympic hopefuls says of Tulsa, simply, “Scoff if you want. We did.”
A Monday New York Times story is the latest and probably kindest bit of national attention, calling Tulsa unassuming but rightfully dubbing Oklahoma’s “reputation as a Dust Bowl flyover state choked with tumbleweed” outdated.
No argument that Oklahoma’s second-largest city pretty much has no chance in Jim Thorpe’s decathlon of hosting the Olympic Games, but we certainly aren’t Wagoner or Okmulgee - no offense to Wagoner and Okmulgee.
Tulsa (population 396,466 in 2011) is larger than Minneapolis, (392,880), St. Louis, (318,172) and Cleveland (390,928).
And it wouldn’t be the smallest American city to host the Olympics. That honor belongs to Park City, Utah, which hosted the winter games in 2002 and has a population in 2011 of barely 7,000.
I asked Bartlett, the butt of at least one joke in the national media, if he has any ill-will about the recent coverage.
“At the end of the day, getting on the front page of the New York Times is not such a bad exercise,” he said.
If nothing else, he added, it may make Tulsa a more serious candidate for other large events.
Can’t argue with that.
Maybe it’s like a yard sale negotiation – you ask for more knowing you’ll get less.
Now that the world has seen Tulsa’s name mixed in with other Olympic cities, can we be taken seriously for something just slightly less grandiose?
A higher round of the NCAA college basketball tournament, perhaps?
So kudos to the Tulsa Olympic Committee. Your dream may be slipping, but you’ve propelled us nonetheless.
We can handle a black eye in the process.
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