Olympic bid threatened by 'Beirut by the lake' label?

This is not a good time to be murdered in Chicago. Or even shot and wounded.

Unless of course you desire to have your legacy forever linked to the Chicago's campaign to land the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

With every passing bullet, a version of this question seems to follow: "How is this (shootout, gang attack, slaughter, multiple homicide, etc.) going to affect the city's Olympic hopes?"

It happened again over the weekend.

After gunfire mowed down a few people leaving Taste of Chicago and dramatic video of people diving for cover was shown around the world, city officials did what has become expected of them. They held a news conference intended to dispel scurrilous implications that visitors are unsafe now and that they will be unsafe each of the next eight years until the closing ceremonies of the Chicago Olympics.

"I assure you we will do everything we can to keep this place safe for our visitors and our friends," is what Police Superintendent Jody Weis said after one person was shot in the chest and three people were wounded in the South Loop. "The safety at the Taste is undisputed."

The victims' loved ones might dispute it, but Superintendent Weis' rationale is that the shootings occurred a few blocks away from Grant Park and not within the actual Taste of Chicago crowd.

No matter, the numbers don't lie. After Chicago's murder count fell last year to its lowest number in four decades, there is currently a slight trend this year in the other direction. A few terribly bloody weekends with dozens of shootings have left the impression that gangland Chicago is back in all its rat-a-tat-tat glory.

That isn't necessarily the case... yet. But the tendency to link everything that goes wrong in Chicago to the city's Olympic bid isn't about statistics.

Just as Chicago's Olympic Committee took advantage of a captive audience in Grant Park before the July 3 fireworks to create an air of excitement and support for the city's bid, perception is more important than reality.

The fact that there have been more murders in Chicago so far this year than American soldiers killed in Iraq, doesn't mean that our town is more dangerous than Baghdad, does it?

Gun violence isn't the only wild card being played in what has become a game of Olympic Hold 'em.

We are supposed to believe that Chicago's official response to fires, traffic accidents, chemical spills and derailments are all being studied and evaluated by Olympic Committee members and that our bid might be jettisoned by too many missteps.

The best reason to back off this chronic oversimplification is what happened three years ago this morning in the UK.

A series of terrorist bomb attacks on London's transit system killed nearly 40 and injured about 700.

The coordinated explosions came less than 24 hours after London had won the Olympic Committee vote to host the 2012 Games. If anything might have caused a quick (and understandable) reversal of fortune, that terrorist attack would have qualified.

London prevailed though, with an Olympic Committee spokeswoman saying, "Security is one of the 17 themes of evaluating the Olympics and we have full confidence in the London authorities for a secure Olympic Games."

So based on the London scale, a few extra gangbanger shootings and killings in Chicago shouldn't undermine the city's Olympic goals.

With each of these violent scrapes in downtown Chicago, I keep thinking about the city's nickname from a few decades ago, "Beirut by the Lake." Maybe it is just me or the passage of time, but I remember the Beirut label was slapped on Chicago in honor of the city's crime, violence and mayhem - especially the near-1,000 murder mark reached in 1974.

So I looked it up for this column.

The comparison to well-ravaged Beirut, Lebanon, had nothing to do with gunfire or violence.

Chicago was branded as "Beirut by the Lake" because of its racially divisive city council wars during the administration of the late Mayor Harold Washington.

And that is exactly my point.

If Chicago's Olympic bid depends on reality, then the city is a shoe-in.

If the 2016 games rest on perception, Beirut might have a better shot.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.