Yes, Cincinnati once tried to host the Olympics. This is how it didn't happen

For most of the late 1990s, Nick Vehr saw the same thing every time he stepped up to a podium and began to speak to a crowd of his fellow Cincinnatians.

Crossed arms. Furrowed brows. The kind of wry, skeptical smiles a hiker might get after claiming he spotted Bigfoot in the woods. It didn’t matter where Vehr went. From American Legion halls to community council meetings, the reception always was the same.

“The meetings would start with everyone basically saying I’m nuts,” he recalled.

But Vehr persisted. He was a dreamer, he told the crowds, and he wanted them to see their city as he did. He wanted them to believe his hometown could do something big and wonderful and, yes, maybe a little crazy.

He wanted them to believe Cincinnati could host the 2012 Olympic Games.

Vehr made this pitch again and again, to anyone who would listen, because he was the leader of Cincinnati 2012, the group that 25 years ago put together a formal bid to bring one of the largest sporting events in the world to the Queen City.

Spoiler alert: Cincinnati didn’t get the Olympics. Not in 2012 or any other year. But the effort to host the summer games in Cincinnati was more than a modern version of Don Quixote, with Vehr playing the part of a solitary, possibly delusional knight. He had plenty of company on this quest.

Some of the city’s most successful business leaders, including future Reds owner Bob Castellini, helped raise millions of dollars for the cause from wealthy donors. Politicians embraced the idea and kicked in hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. And major consulting firms produced financial statements, maps, artist renderings and hundreds of pages of material to support the city’s bid.

Was it worth it? Critics of the effort remain skeptical, but Vehr, Castellini and others who backed the bid believe it was. They say Cincinnati 2012 made people more ambitious about the city’s future and more serious about hard-to-do projects that would later remake Cincinnati’s neighborhoods and riverfront.

“It made us think about what the city could be,” said Charlie Luken, Cincinnati’s mayor at the time.

From the beginning, though, everyone knew the odds were long. Previous host cities for the summer games included Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, London and Rome. Even the city’s biggest fans struggled to see Cincinnati’s name on that list as anything other than an answer to the question, which of these does not belong?

This was Vehr’s challenge. He needed to convince Cincinnatians they lived in a world in which Queensgate could host the Olympic opening ceremonies, triathletes could swim in the Ohio River and cyclists could zip around a velodrome at Princeton High School.

It was a lot to ask.

“It made people’s heads hurt,” Vehr said.

If Atlanta can do it, why not Cincinnati?

The way Vehr remembers it, the idea came to him while campaigning door-to-door somewhere in Price Hill in 1995. He was running to keep his seat on City Council and had some time to think between door knocks and handshakes.

Vehr, who grew up in a family of athletes in Westwood, had always loved the Olympics. He was a football guy, playing first at St. Xavier High School and then at Notre Dame, where he caught passes from a quarterback named Joe Montana. But to him, few things rivaled the spectacle of the Olympics.

“Nothing is like the Olympic Games,” Vehr said. “For the vast majority of the 30 or 40 sports in the Olympic Games, no athlete will ever compete in a bigger venue, with the same level of pomp and circumstance, with as much pressure and intensity.”

There was a lot of buzz at the time about the upcoming 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a city that seemed to Vehr not so different from his own. It had about 90,000 more residents than Cincinnati and, until winning its Olympic bid, was best known as the home of Coca-Cola and CNN.

So as he walked the streets of Price Hill, campaign flyers in hand, Vehr’s mind drifted. He found himself wondering, how does that happen? How does a city like Atlanta join the club of Olympic host cities?

And if it could happen there, he thought, could it happen here?

These were the dark ages, before Google and smart phones, so Vehr headed to the library to get some answers. He studied past Olympic Games, their venues and their budgets, and he soon concluded Cincinnati’s best shot would be to pitch a regional Olympics, one that could draw on existing arenas and facilities from Cleveland to Lexington.

When Vehr bounced the idea off some friends, the reaction wasn’t so different from the one he’d soon get from strangers at all those public meetings.

“He started talking about the Olympics,” said Joe Hale, who was then running the Cinergy Foundation, “and I thought he was nuts.”

Soon, though, Hale and some others started to come around. The more research Vehr did, the more realistic the Olympics seemed to him and the more his enthusiasm for the idea grew. Hale, who later joined Vehr at Cincinnati 2012, said it was contagious.

“Nick has this charismatic way of convincing you it’s doable,” he said. “I fell under his spell.”

But Vehr understood that dreams like this one don’t come true without money, so he started reaching out to people in town who had it or knew how to get it.

One of his first calls was to Castellini. The businessman agreed to a meeting and Vehr, who was in his mid-30s at the time, put together a 10-page business plan to show he was serious.

After hearing Vehr’s pitch, Castellini did not tell him he was crazy, which Vehr took as a good sign.

“That’s interesting,” Castellini said.

A costly plan that will bring prestige or 'bankrupt us'

Soon after that meeting, Vehr and others who were intrigued by his idea went to Atlanta to talk to the group behind that city’s bid, including Billy Payne, who led the effort. Vehr and Castellini attended the opening ceremonies in Atlanta and came away convinced Cincinnati could pull off a similar spectacle.

Payne told Vehr success would require total commitment. He said someone would have to rearrange their life around the city’s Olympic bid.

“I was young enough and cocky enough to think that maybe I was that person,” Vehr said.

He resigned from City Council in 1996 to lead the campaign.

The job, bankrolled by private donations, paid about $160,000 a year and allowed Vehr to travel the world to Olympic venues, but it also came with a steady stream of problems that needed to be solved to keep Cincinnati’s bid alive.

The first and biggest problem was money. The Olympics are staggeringly expensive and some past host cities had fallen deep into debt. If Cincinnati’s bid had been successful, the budget for hosting the games here would have been $2.6 billion, or about $4.8 billion in today’s dollars.

That would have required a massive investment of taxpayer money. “The price tag would’ve been challenging,” Luken said.

The bid process wasn’t cheap, either. To get through the first round, which would end with the selection of a U.S. city to compete with bid cities from around the world, Cincinnati 2012 would spend more than $5.5 million from private donors and another $450,000 from taxpayers in Ohio and Kentucky.

For some, the price and the risk were too high. While Vehr predicted the Olympics would bring in slightly more money than they cost, the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, or COAST, warned the games could cost as much as $5 billion.

To critics like those at COAST, Vehr sounded like a used car salesmen who was pushing the extended warranty a little too hard. They argued his sales pitch glossed over hidden costs and risks the city didn’t need to take on.

“The Olympics will bankrupt us,” Chris Finney, a COAST member, said at the time.

Finney still believes hosting the Olympics here would have been a costly mistake. He said it was one thing to talk about the Olympics theoretically, as Vehr and others had done early on, but once the cost estimates started coming out, the threat felt real.

“Most people’s reaction at the time was kind of like just ignoring your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, until he got really drunk and somebody had to finally say something,” Finney said. “They weren’t realistic about what was possible for Cincinnati.”

Looking back, though, Finney doesn’t judge Vehr and his team at Cincinnati 2012 as harshly as he once did. They overreached, he said, but cities like Cincinnati need people who don’t settle for the status quo, who push others to see their city in a different way.

“I’m a dreamer. I’m a believer,” Finney said. “I don’t want to be critical of people who reach for the stars, and that’s what they did.”

New challenges arise as deadline approaches

As opponents to the bid began to emerge in the late 1990s, so did other challenges.

It quickly became apparent to Vehr why cities with huge metropolitan areas traditionally hosted the Olympics: They had the reputation, infrastructure, mass transit, hotel rooms and physical space that smaller cities didn’t.

New York and Washington, D.C., had expansive subway and rail systems. San Francisco had its streetcars and iconic landmarks. Dallas had one of the largest airports in the world. All those cities were competing with Cincinnati to represent the United States in the final round of the Olympic bid process.

Everyone knew Cincinnati 2012 needed to find workarounds and temporary fixes to bridge the gap between it and the other cities. Hale said the logistics sometimes felt insurmountable, but Vehr kept everyone on track.

“He’d lay out the plan, the strategy,” Hale said. “Nick was usually the one who kind of pumped us up and kept us focused.”

To make up for the lack of hotel rooms, the group considered bringing in dozens of steamboats and turning them into riverfront hotels. To handle millions of visitors, a fleet of buses would be added and events would be staggered.

The Olympic stadium, which would have been a short walk from the then-new Paul Brown Stadium, would have included some 65,000 temporary seats. When the games were over, only a 15,000-seat stadium for high school sports would remain.

Vehr’s big idea was to regionalize the games by spreading events across multiple cities. Sailing would be on Lake Erie in Cleveland. Boxing would be in Muhammad Ali’s hometown of Louisville. Equestrian events would be in Lexington, the heart of horse country.

Today, no one questions the concept of a regionalized Olympics. The Paris Olympics this summer will include soccer games hundreds of miles beyond the city limits and a surfing competition in the French territory of Tahiti, about 10,000 miles away. But 25 years ago, Cincinnati's proposal to schedule roughly one-third of the events outside the city was unprecedented.

“We had a lot of work to do,” Vehr said.

Some problems, though, couldn’t be solved with creativity and finesse. Cincinnati’s international reputation took a hit in the early 1990s when voters passed a charter amendment, known as Article 12, that prompted criticism and boycotts. The amendment, which wasn’t repealed until 2004, barred the city from enacting any law that explicitly protected the rights of gay people.

Then, in April 2001, Cincinnati erupted in protests and violence after a police officer shot and killed an unarmed Black man. The unrest that followed lasted days and put a spotlight on race and racism in the city.

“Unfortunately, it probably wasn’t the time when Cincinnati was held in real high regard,” Luken said.

Cincinnati stayed in the race, though, and was one of five cities still bidding to become the U.S. representative in December 2001. More than a year after submitting Cincinnati’s formal bid, Vehr and Hale flew to Salt Lake City for the announcement.

Years after it began, a long-shot bid falls short

By then, the ground had shifted beneath everyone’s feet. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington put the nation on a war footing and made almost everything else, including the Olympics, seem, if not trivial, less important than before.

The attacks also made New York, one of the final U.S. bid cities, the sentimental favorite. “In December 2001, I might have voted for New York City,” Vehr said.

He said he remained hopeful until the end, but the decision wasn’t a shock. New York was the choice.

Vehr flew home and shut down the Cincinnati 2012 offices.

In the years that followed, Vehr kept an eye on the bid process until London finally won the 2012 games. Since then, he’s opened his own public relations firm and has helped organize major events here, including the 2012 World Choir Games.

He said the city’s Olympic bid, even though it failed, made a difference, inspiring a generation of leaders who built things like The Banks on Cincinnati’s riverfront and FC Cincinnati’s stadium in the West End.

“You never move forward unless you punch above your weight class,” Vehr said. “I am forever proud that so many people allowed themselves to kind of share the dream that this could happen.”

He’s not just talking about the true believers at Cincinnati 2012. He’s talking about the skeptics, too, about the folks at those American Legion and community council meetings 25 years ago.

By the end of those meetings, Vehr said, some attendees would uncross their arms and start asking questions. They’d suggest potential venues for Olympic sports or routes for the marathon or some other idea that might have seemed a little crazy to them just a few hours earlier.

They opened themselves to the possibility that Cincinnati could be something more.

It wasn’t as exciting as bringing the Olympics to Cincinnati would’ve been, but it was still something to see.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Yes, Cincinnati once tried to host the Olympics. This is how it didn't happen