Natascha Keller competing with South Korea at the 2012 Olympic Games in London
Photo: dpa/Marius Becker
According to opinion polls, two thirds of residents are against Berlin hosting the Olympic Games in 2036, 2040 or 2044. Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) and their Olympic representative Kaweh Niroomand are doing their best to turn the mood around.
How difficult this is is shown once again by the neighborhood tour of the “Berlin wins the Olympics” campaign that started on Saturday and stops on Schloßstrasse in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district on Wednesday. In the Boulevard Berlin shopping center on Schloßstrasse, customers show almost no interest in the discussion with Olympic champion Natascha Keller and sports councilor Malgorzata Sijbrandij (CDU). Very few people stop for a moment. Sijbrandij says she is “excited to hear feedback from the public.” The fact that almost no one is listening to her could be seen as feedback.
The opinion of a retired engineer is telling, who accuses politicians like the city’s mayor Wegner of just wanting to create a monument for themselves so that the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia would say that they brought the games to Berlin. The city should better set itself an achievable goal – becoming clean by 2030, for example. He always hears from tourists that they prefer to travel to Hamburg because it isn’t so dirty there. The engineer is convinced that each of the three other German applicants – Munich, Hamburg and the Rhine-Ruhr region – would do better. In Berlin, where the authorities failed with the power outage at the beginning of the year and currently with snow and ice, the games would just descend into chaos. It’s the almost everyday experience of Berliners, from buses and trains to appointments at the Citizens’ Office – nothing works as it should. Politicians should sort this out instead of dreaming about a major sporting event.
The supporters counter what Berlin could gain with the Olympics and that not everything would be equally good, but many things would be better. Delays and cancellations in local public transport – “that will change as a result of the Games,” promises the official information brochure for the Olympic bid. The Olympic Village will be a model for innovative living space and accelerate the construction of urgently needed neighborhoods.
Kai Wegner also hopes for more cohesion in a time when hatred and agitation are increasing threateningly. This thought seems desperate, but it is understandable – and there is actually a small glimmer of hope that just the anticipation of the games will carry people along and bring them together. But supporters of Wegner’s idea also heard during the neighborhood tour that Berlin would be the wrong place at least in 2036 because it would be exactly 100 years after the 1936 Summer Games. To then hold competitions in the stadium where Adolf Hitler once declared the games “open” would be instinctive. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier obviously sees it the same way. The news magazine “Der Spiegel” quotes its spokesman: “The Federal President hopes to host the games in Germany in 2040 or 2044.”
Employees from an agency or Grün Berlin GmbH involved in the neighborhood tour can understand such concerns. An employee tries to reassure people by pointing out that after the usual distribution across different continents, an award to Asia is likely in 2036. Europe and thus Berlin would possibly come into play in 2040. But this cannot be promised firmly. Unfortunately, the procurement process only excludes applications for 2040 and 2044.
Citizen participation on how instead of if
A participation process started almost simultaneously with the neighborhood tour. It should be made clear right away: the residents are not allowed to decide within this framework whether Berlin applies for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Senate has already approved the application and started a campaign. This will not be shaken. The only thing left to discuss is how everything should be designed so that it remains affordable and has the desired effects. In the shopping center on Schloßstrasse, ideas are collected on sticky notes, ideas like a 90-second cycle at the Olympic Stadium and that long-distance trains should stop there. At the moment it is only S-Bahn and U-Bahn.
Citizens’ initiative against the Olympics
Anyone who still wants to stop Berlin’s bid for the Olympics can support a referendum initiated by the NOlympia alliance. No official date has yet been set as to when the alliance will begin collecting signatures. For the time being, confidant Gabriele Hiller, who was a member of the left-wing faction in the House of Representatives from 2001 to 2016, only reveals that the collection should take place “during the good weather period”.
Hiller complains that the official cost estimate presented by the Senate claims that if the application were stopped, the state of Berlin would miss out on investments in the “high single-digit billions.” At the same time, however, the Senate admits that a reliable calculation is “currently not possible.” »The Senate is trying to make Berliners believe that it is more expensive not to host the games than to hold them. That’s a classic milkmaid’s calculation,” says Hiller. “The argument is based on fictitious income from the economy and the IOC, which is unsubstantiated, while the real cost increases that are the norm at the Olympic Games are completely ignored.”
Renovation backlog at sports facilities
Who is supposed to pay for all of this? What the Federal Ministry of Construction announced to the Sports Committee of the Bundestag a few days ago fits into this question: By the deadline on January 15th, more than 3,600 expressions of interest with a total amount of over 7.5 billion euros had been received for the federal program for the renovation of municipal sports facilities. However, the requested funds are offset by just 333 million euros in funding, reminds Bundestag member Christian Görke (Left). This is a lottery and not a reliable strategy given an investment backlog of more than 30 billion euros. “As long as the federal government does not consistently address this investment backlog, its Olympic euphoria will remain nothing but symbolic showcase politics – and simply hypocritical towards sports in Germany,” complains Görke.
“We need more sports fields,” says Natascha Keller, who won gold with the German women’s hockey team in Athens in 2004. There are many Olympic champions. But only a few athletes have been to five Olympic Games like Keller: the first time at the age of 19 in Atlanta in 1996, the last time in London in 2012, where she was the flag bearer of the German delegation. When asked in the shopping center about her most formative Olympic experience, Keller, who appears modest and down-to-earth, doesn’t talk about her successes first. The 48-year-old raves about suddenly sitting next to her tennis idol Roger Federer in the dining room of the Olympic Village in 2012.
Keller has remained loyal to her sport as a coach. She looks after the youngsters at the Berlin Hockey Club and says: “It’s nice to see the smile in the children’s eyes.” Although hockey players are much less in the spotlight than footballers, the name Natascha Keller is well known. After all, she comes from the most successful hockey family in Germany. Her father became an Olympic champion in 1972, one brother in 1992 and the other in 2008. Her grandfather won silver in 1936. An older couple is happy to see Keller here. The two have a date and have to move on quickly. The woman whispers: “It would be great if the Olympics were in Berlin.”
