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Imrem: Olympic postcards not always worthy of gold medal

Imagine for a moment that Chicago was playing host to the Olympics currently being staged in Rio de Janeiro.

No, stop, don't bother.

Too scary.

You'd have to envision the cost overruns, the inconveniences to local residents and all those International Olympic Committee creeps picking pockets on crowded streets.

But more than anything there would be the selling of Chicago gone awry.

The second Mayor Daley surely had a marketing bonanza in mind when he bid to stage the Summer Games here.

The naive hope was that global correspondents would dispatch glowing postcards back to their home offices.

NBC-TV's family of channels would beam appealing shots of the city's lakefront, the museum campus, Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, Millennium Park and Boul Mich.

Well, theory doesn't always translate into reality, as Rio is discovering.

Take this headline from The Associated Press: "In Rio's Slums, Gangs, Drugs, Murders Carry the Day."

Just think of what journalists would discover about Chicago if they ventured into Englewood and Woodlawn to gauge the pulse of residents.

I learned the drill while covering 20 Super Bowls.

Football stories were for the real sports reporters, who would look for anything they could find about the no-huddle offense.

Columnists and feature writers looked for the offbeat, which isn't always pretty.

Detroit: The story was the boarded-up stores in the depressed downtown.

Miami: Rampant crime associated with drug trafficking (lowlight was I spelled Uzi as Oozi).

New Orleans: The city being the murder capital of the United States.

Minneapolis: Brrrr, it's cold here in January.

Los Angeles: Homeless shelters not benefiting from the NFL strutting its stuff in town.

Super Bowl XXIII in Miami provided the most compelling storyline when hotel-room TVs aired civil unrest evolving into a raging riot nearby.

Riots are good for a few days of columns/postcards that city officials wished you wouldn't send.

None of it even gets into examining the town's - any town's - strip joints, ladies of the night and other, uh, entertainment opportunities for high rollers flooding into town on private jets.

Now consider what the non-sports storylines might be if these Olympic Games were in this town.

Outsiders would point out that Chicago's poor neighborhoods could use the billions of dollars invested in the Olympics.

Nearly every morning, visiting journalists would find it hard to ignore the body counts on Chicago streets and that gangs reportedly declared war on the police.

Then there are Chicago Public Schools students being used as political pawns as the city's financial problems are rivaled only by the state's.

Consider how negative so many of the stories coming out of Rio have been, from polluted water to high crime to the Zika virus.

Satirical publication The Onion offered "its definitive guide to Rio de Janeiro, where doping, disease, contamination, violence and corruption will compete on the global stage to determine which will dominate this year's Olympic Games."

Substitute Chicago for Rio and you'll get an idea of how wrong the selling of this city could go.

No thanks, we don't need postcards like that distributed around the world.

mimrem@dailyherald.com

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