46 | Could Milwaukee host the Olympics? Here's why they should consider it, with Jay Sorgi

With the 2024 Summer Olympic Games underway, we're here to talk about the Olympics – and Milwaukee. As in, could Milwaukee host an Olympic Games? Even if it could. why? What’s in it for the city and the greater region? Answers exist in a fascinating book called Greater Than The Games, Volume 1: MKE2028, created by broadcaster Jay Sorgi. He began researching the topic out of curiosity. Unearthing more information led to the belief that Milwaukee could not only host the Olympic Games, but the additional investments to fully prepare for such an endeavor - given the right planning and execution – could drive positive, transformative change for Milwaukee and the entire region. Far-fetched, you say? It’s not. In Greater Than The Games, Volume 1: MKE2028, Jay lays out how Olympic bids work; how some cities used it to propel themselves to the next level while others were left with debt and white elephants; the remarkable wealth of venues, facilities, and resources within reasonable distance of Milwaukee already, and how additional investments for venues, housing, transportation and more can be properly repurposed after the Games to bring the city and region to the next level for the future. Listen to this conversation, read the book, and watch the Olympics; you might find inspiration not just for Milwaukee, but for yourself.
You can find the book on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Greater-Than-Games-Vol-MKE2028/dp/B0C9SBVLL9

Episode Transcript

(00:13):
Welcome back to the Era. Castback from hiatus for starting a new season
here with episode forty six. Youknow, the twenty twenty four Summer Olympic
Games get underway in Paris later thisweek as we speak, and we're here
to talk about the Olympics and Milwaukeeas in, could Milwaukee host an Olympic
Games? Even if it could?Why, what's in it for the city

(00:34):
in the greater region. Answers existin a fascinating book called Greater Than the
Games Volume one MKE twenty twenty eight. It's created by broadcaster Jay Sorgie,
familiar to many in Milwaukee from hisyears in broadcasting at WTMJ Radio, especially
with sports. Jay began researching thetopic out of curiosity. The intrigued grew

(00:54):
as the unearthed more info that ledto the belief that Milwaukee could not only
host a Summer Olympic Games, butthe additional investments to fully prepare for such
an endeavor, given the right planningand execution, could drive positive transformative change
for Milwaukee and the region as awhole. Far fetched, you say,
it's not? And Greater Than theGame's Volume one MKE twenty twenty eight,

(01:15):
Yes, A long title, Jlay'sout how Olympic bids work, how some
cities used it to propel themselves tothe next level, while others were left
with debt and white elephants. Theremarkable wealth of venues, facilities and resources
with injustable the remarkable wealth of venues, facilities and resources already within a reasonable
driving distance of Milwaukee, plus howadditional investments for venues, housing, transportation,

(01:38):
and more can be properly repurposed afterthe games to bring the city and
region to the next level for thefuture. He interviewed others who brought games
to their cities, some input fromlocal leaders, and essentially lays out of
blueprint that can inspire you to considerall the possibilities with yet a practical approach.
We actually had this discussion last yearwhen the book first came out.

(02:00):
I made some updates now when we'rere releasing it just ahead of those twenty
twenty four Summer Games in Paris.Check out this conversation, read his book,
and watch the Olympics. You mightfind inspiration not just for Milwaukee,
but for yourself. So in theair cast, here's our Olympian conversation with
Jay Sorgie. So I'm happy tobring in Jay Sorgie, who's a long

(02:20):
time now former Milwaukee radio broadcast personality, newsman, digital editor, Extraordinary Award
winning Pulitzer. Am I reading thisright, Jay Pilitzer? I've got a
murroaw in there, a couple ofMoros, but a few other Wisconsin awards
as well. Okay, out ofthe Philadelphia area as we speak now,

(02:43):
fewer brought some more cheese steaks.Yeah, my heart and brain still travel
to Milwaukee and cheese kurds. Imean, the cheese is great on the
cheese steaks here, but Wisconsin cheeseI would bring it for the standard cheese
steak in Philly as cheese whiz,is it not? You could do that
American or prov a loane So,I mean, any of those are darn
good. But you give me someWisconsin cheese sauce over Wuiz Meltz Mitz cheese

(03:07):
spread or something like that, it'dbe good. Yes, So we're talking
today. You've heard Jay many atime on six to twenty WTMJ through the
years, but he is also anauthor, rapidly becoming an esteemed author.
This thing's really taken off. Thisbook is called Greater Than the Games,
Volume one, MK twenty twenty eight. Yes, that's a long title,

(03:30):
but Greater than the Games is reallythe main title of the book. He's
been working on it for years.And I know because I'm actually in the
book a little bit, because Iwas talking with you when you were thinking
about this concept, and it involvesdiving into the world of the Olympics and
the Olympic Games, and cities andthe bids and how they put bids together,
and should they put a bid together? And would Milwaukee or southeastern Wisconsin

(03:54):
be or have been a good placeto host an Olympic Games. So it
became kind of a it was acurious thought that became a much more deeper
analysis of like cities and economies andgames and really life in general. I
would say, whole boatload of subjectsall combined under one powerful, moving umbrella

(04:17):
that was spawned from a dream thatwhen you first think about it, and
this is the beginning phrase of thesecond vignette of the first chapter of the
book, and it's got five words, Milwaukee Olympics. Are you crazy?
But the fact was, if youlook at the details of what we were

(04:41):
able to put together in terms ofa potential plan that we were discerning about
maybe making a bid for a summerOlympics in Milwaukee what we would call the
Lake Michigan Triangle area. That itwasn't as far fetched as it might seem,
even though a lot of dominoes wouldhave to fall right. Yeah,

(05:04):
it was an interesting timing on thattoo, because you started thinking about this
it fell like around twenty fifteen orsixteen as that actor. No, actually
earlier than that. Well, Imean initially I thought about it as one
of those kid childhood projects that allof us kids dream of the ridiculous at

(05:25):
some point and doing something ridiculous asan adult with our lives, And during
the LA eighty four games, Idreamed of the possibility of our hometown possibly
putting this on, and so Istuck that dream in my mental file.
Cabinet pulled out one time for acollege project at Marquette University for a for

(05:48):
sort of a presentation type of project, got an A on it, and
it was all based on what wasgoing on with Atlanta in nineteen ninety six,
the games that were just held thereat that time. So put the
thing away and never go to pullout again. Then in twenty twelve,
during the London Olympic Games, SarahGermono a reporter and writer with a Wall

(06:12):
Street Journal who covered sports. She'snow at the Financial Times, but she
was with the Wall Street Journal atthe time. She came out with an
article blog piece that had some whimsyto it, but had a bit of
some validity to it, saying thatMilwaukee should be the next American city that
should host the Summer Games. Now, most of us were like, of

(06:35):
course, that's a ridiculous idea,but we're gonna have some fun with this.
Yeah. Like at the old station, one of our talk show hosts
posed a question, if Milwaukee everdid it, who should lightly the flame
that most people said, Bob YakerI would agree, yes, yeah,
but I pulled out the old project. Look at what twenty twelve needed with

(06:58):
London to be able to pull itoff compared to the resources in Milwaukee,
Madison, Green Bay with a littlebit of help from Chicago. And wait
a minute, this isn't ridiculously impossible. There are some things we need to
take care of. There are twovenues we'd have to build with permanent seats,
and we'd have to put in acivic transportation systems such as light rail

(07:24):
and regional rail. But this isn'tout of the question, and not only
can we do it, but theoreticallywe could do it in a way that's
fiscally responsible, ethically responsible, sociallyresponsible, where we're not destroying city budgets
to do this. Do we havesomething here? And so the first person

(07:48):
who I thought of to actually giveall this too and say is this ridiculous?
Was you? I remember well becauseyou in addition to working at Wtmjay,
you love sports, and you wereworking at Merle Harmon's Fanfare, the
extra second job making ends meat whiletrying to take how radio tends to work.

(08:11):
And I was working at the timefor communications as communications director with the
Greater Milwaukee Committee, and the officeswere in the same large building complex as
Fanfare. So yeah, I'd comedown and say hi, and you had
told me about this idea that youhad. And I love big ideas,
having lived in Chicago and Texas,where they love everything big, they think

(08:33):
big, they make things happen.One of my beefs with Milwaukee, which
is my birth town, my hometown, my favorite town is Milwaukee always kind
of felt like it was in everyoneelse's shadow and kind of curled up.
So, no, we're just Milwaukeesometimes. So I like big, bold
ideas, And if you think back, like the Milwaukee Art Museum with the
Brissolet, which is an internationally famousarchitectural design. Now, there was a

(08:56):
lot of resistance when they wanted tobuild that because oh, it's too big,
that doesn't fit for Milwaukee. They'llsuck up all the money in the
arts and the performing arts budget,and blah blah, blah blah. There's
a lot of nimmering nannies that justdon't want to think big and make big
things happen in Milwaukee, and theyhad too much voice in my opinion.
So I liked the think big.So when you're standing there telling me about

(09:18):
this idea that Milwaukee could host anOlympics, I said, crazy idea,
but let's think about it, let'stalk about it. And then you pull
out this book of work and researchand then showed me a word document that
just had so much meticulous detail aboutpotential venues and potential transportation options and potential

(09:43):
ways to develop an Olympic village inplaces that were ripe for redevelopment. But
you also had thought through ways oftaking the Olympic investment. And this has
been an up and down thing fora lot of cities, taking that Olympic
investment and turning it into long termthings that could be used for residential and

(10:03):
commercial industrial transportation, and more so, the Olympic Games and the investments in
it could really be a springboard tobecoming a next level city and having that
be a long term effect. AndI was so impressed with that, just
how much you thought that through.Thank you. I mean to do an
Olympics right. You can't just saylet's host the games for hosting the game's

(10:30):
sake. It needs to be partof a greater effort and in many cases
a longer term effort to turn yourcity into something that launches it but also
helps it, especially where it comesto its greatest needs. Barcelona was fantastic
with that. With nineteen ninety two, most of us has ever heard of

(10:50):
Barcelona as like a major world citty. It is now Atlanta nineteen ninety six
was one of the rare exceptions wherea dude comes up with an idea.
Three years later they win the bidto get the Olympic Games, and then
six years after that they hosted andit works long term for the city.
I mean, it launched that city, but after that, and I mean,

(11:15):
we can go down the list.It's long of the number of cities
that didn't treat the Olympics the rightway or weren't allowed to use the Olympics
to make it a financial and ethicaland social gain for your city because the
IOC want things the way that theywanted it. So what we did with

(11:41):
a lot of these ideas that youand I and a whole lot of other
young Milwaukee business leaders discerned, was, Okay, how do we not just
go for the bid just to gofor the bid, but how do we
use it to innovate a city,How do we use it to fix our
city's issues. How do we useit to launch our city into a worldwide

(12:05):
plane the right way. A lotof it was involving redevelopment and long term
thinking, which was great, andthe concerns would be raised, obviously,
and you know about this, andyou write about this. People who are
the naysayers who look for the reasonsnot to do things right. In many
cases, there are very good reasonsnot to do things. I mean,
in the case of the Olympic Games. You have a lot of anti Olympic

(12:28):
activists who talk about well, withthe Olympics, there's displacement. That's correct
based on the plan. I mean, Beijing displaced one point five million people,
that's like three quarters of the metroarea of Milwaukee. They displaced that
many to build their Olympic village intheir Olympic complex. Rio displaced about seventy

(12:52):
seven thousand people, a big chunkof it to build a golf course.
Yeah, there was only like oneof the golf course in Rio de Janeiro
and it wasn't much better than DretskaPark. So you're not gonna hold Olympic
golf there. You need something alittle bit more worse than straight to light.
Now, they're right in terms ofthe NA saying when it comes to

(13:15):
that, in terms of how youget a lot of gentrification in certain areas,
and about too often Olympics bus budgets, We ain't doing a fifty one
billion dollar Sohi Russia Winter Olympic Gamesbudget. Yeah, some of those budgets
are just mind boggling now, andit's got to be done in a way
where you can have private dollars payingfor whatever construction you need, including the

(13:41):
big behemoth track and field stadium thatgets potentially used by the Packers part time
back in Milwaukee, could restart Marquetteneed to do in football, MLS and
NWSL soccer, and the US OlympicCommittee making it a home stadium for Team
USA events. But with the residentialreal estate and the commercial real estate that

(14:01):
you're putting in that same area,that's prime invest investor in territory where you
can make profit off that that canpay for the stadium. Yeah, it
requires some special arrangements with those investorsand with the municipalities and things like that,
but it can be done in away where it becomes mutually beneficial precisely.

(14:22):
And that's where we were coming upwith ideas that were solving a lot
of these problems that so many Olympiccities had seen. And it's like,
we aren't just going to do abid to do a bid, because you
can get so caught in the mistakesthat happened with that happened with other Olympic
Games. And we were able tofix a lot of those problems, at

(14:45):
least theoretically with o Ietyaya. Oneof the things that was interesting about This
is as you were telling me aboutthese things. This was I think right
after we had had extensive conversations withsome representatives from Chicago who are trying to
put in a bid for the twentysixteen Summer Olympics. And the guy who
was leading that charge, his namewas pat and I'm blanking on his last
name, but he was originally fromWawatosa, Wisconsin. Pat Ryan. Yep,

(15:09):
Pat Ryan, that's right, Andso he was. And they were
talking a little bit about what roleMilwaukee might play in helping Chicago with their
games. And here you are saying, we could host the games, Chicago,
maybe you can help if we needyou. Otherwise, we have everything
we need in Wisconsin between Milwaukee,Madison, Green Bay and areas in between.
You mentioned something like Whistling Straits,I mean Olympic level golf in Sheboygan

(15:33):
County for example. I mean,that's a no brainer, boom, perfect
locale, perfect locale. We wewould have needed Chicago to do it,
but only like five venues and forsome preliminary events. And the beauty for
Chicago is, hey, you couldprobably could get a whole lot of visitors
coming to you because you're gonna needto have a lot of people stay down

(15:56):
there, you make a whole lotof sales tax base, and you don't
have to do anything in terms ofinfrastructure to do it. Hey, yeah,
let's use let us use your city. Okay, I think that would
have worked. I think that thatwould have been a bit of an ego
crush for Chicago because they can't theycan't imagine Milwaukee taking a lead in something.

(16:19):
That's where we could have said,for example, with corporate sponsorship McDonald's
Proud Chicago sponsor of the twenty twentyeight Milwaukee Summer Olympic Games, something like
that, and having one of theOlympic opening ceremony sites be Soldier Field.
The new Bear Stadium would not havebeen ready in times right, but they

(16:41):
would have played a part in theopening and closing ceremonies. So you would
have had a presence that Chicago wouldn'thave been ignored. But it's sort of
like, even though they're not anywherenear close to each other, nobody had,
especially here in America, ever heardassociate until the twenty fourteen winning with

(17:02):
the Games, we get the bigprize. But I think it also gives
Chicago a little idea you know what, You're still the city with the big
bron shoulders. We can do morepartnerships here, and good partnerships are a
nice idea between the two cities becausetogether Chicago and Milwaukee is a un megacity
region. But Chicago can't be onewithout Milwaukee, you know, combining we

(17:26):
have over ten million people between thetwo. That's crazy as well. And
some of the debates going on,including about transportation, could have tied nicely
into the Olympic plan. They've talkedabout there's a very popular Amtrak line between
Milwaukee and Chicago. There's seven Ithink round trips a day, and they've
been talking about upgrading that to ahigh speed rail, and they talked about

(17:47):
high speed rail to Madison and maybeeven up to Green Bay. That could
have been a little more fast tracked. No pun intended had this Olympic Games
thing really taken off, because thatcould have part of the transportation plan.
All of these developments really do tiein with this nicely, and you do
detail a lot of it in thebook. Yeah, it's precisely what you

(18:08):
would have needed to make it happen, because I don't think you would have
been extremely happy with the idea ofmajor corporate sponsors having to sit on I
forty three or US forty one nowI forty one obviously heading up to lambeau
Field and sitting in all that traffic, the capability to go back and forth

(18:32):
quickly between these cities and having awhole bunch of trains back and forth,
and you can sell the excess traincars to other cities who are developing various
train systems, And I think thatwould have been such a long term advantage,
not just in terms of regionalism forour populace to be able to travel

(18:52):
back and forth for work and otherthings, but also would have made a
little bit of a dent in thedrug driving issues that we happen to have
here in Wisconsin. On Packers andBadger's game exists. Think of the drunk
Think of the drunk trains that peoplewould have would have used where there would
be no risk of drugs. Beenon some of those drunk trains between Chicago

(19:12):
and Milwaukee on Amtrak. That enoughis crazy, Yep, party time,
folks, bar car. So youhad to do a heck of a lot
of research when you decided to turnthis into a more serious endeavor and eventually
a book. You had to talkwith a lot of people to get a
lot of perspectives, and I'd liketo go into some details on who you

(19:36):
reached out to and the conversations youhad, and we'll talk about that in
just a second. We'll be rightback here on the aeric Cast. Back
with you on the air cast.I'm Eric Pulson talking with my friend Jay
Sergeie broadcaster and now author of GreaterThan the Game's Volume one MK twenty twenty
eight, very recently released out onAmazon's self published. There's a kindle edition

(20:00):
everything. It's on sale now.And we'll talk about the process of getting
a book together in a little bit, Jay, But we want to first
of all, see how you wereable to talk with so many people When
you and I discussed this concept andyou were talking about your research, you
were reaching out to people who hadbeen actively working on Olympic game bids.
You were actively talking with Olympians themselves, including some locals, and one of

(20:22):
whom wrote your forward. So howdid you what was your process and how
did you reach out to all thesepeople? It was just very frankly cold
call. It's kind of crazy tothink that you're going to make a cold
call to the real estate office that'sowned by Billy Payne, the nineteen ninety
six Olympic Games chairman and CEO,And to think that he's going to be

(20:48):
willing to grant you an audience toas sort of like you're going to talk
to the Wizard of I mean,this man under stands what it takes to
put a game's on as well asanybody in the United States of America.
He did it. He was theguy who in nineteen eighty seven sat at

(21:10):
his kitchen table after doing a bigproject for his church, and he even
wrote about this himself. He satdown and it's like, Okay, what's
the next thing that I'm called todo with my life? And this guy
who played defensive end at the Universityof Georgia back in the sixties, sat
with the legal pad and all ofa sudden, this brainstorm game to him,
and he is like, Okay,we could do this sport at this

(21:33):
location, this sport at this place, this sport at this place. And
he goes down the whole list ofall the things you need, and he
goes to his wife and he's like, honey, we're gonna bring the Olympic
Games to Atlanta. That's my nextthing, and the most ridiculous nine year
ride began. Three years later,they got the Games. It was the

(21:56):
first time ever in modern Olympic historythat a city that made a first time
bid for the Olympics got it.That's a lot of cities have to go
through this several times before they canland the games. They got lucky,
they got massively lucky, and theypulled it off and did a fantastic job.
It was in most areas a plusfor their city. And so I

(22:19):
went down to visit him. Iwent to his office and he was willing
to grant me an hour, andwe sat down and I showed him what
I showed you, and what wehad developed since that time in a whole
bunch of different listening sessions and brainstormingsessions and just focus groups within our private

(22:42):
discernment team of what it was goingto take to do it. And we
showed him this. And I didn'twant to say too much about what was
discussed in the meeting, but Idid, but I revealed in the book.
He point blank said, y'all gotthe venues, You've got what it
takes to do this and whether ornot what comes from it, is it

(23:07):
Olympic Games or not. You needto continue this process because the fruit that
you're going to find within the cityof Milwaukee is going to help your city
in some fashion, because if nothingelse, it can show you what resources
you really have and really open youreyes. We can do big things here.

(23:29):
And you did a very exhaustive studyof those resources. It's one of
the things that impressed me most iswe talked about American Family Field as a
venue for things. We talked aboutthe Arenas Peiser Forum was not quite there
yet. It was Bradley Center atthe time, but then you started looking
out at other venues, even upto lambou over to Camp Randall and then
just all of the other things thatwe have. We have an Olympic facility

(23:53):
in Milwaukee all year round in theform of the Petit Center. We know
what's going on with Olympic things.But you discussed all of the existing venues
and then some with minor modifications tomake them grow in others that could be
developed from scratch, and you werefinding areas like what is now called the
Harbor District that was ripe for redevelopmentat the time. Now it is redeveloping
a little differently, But there wereplaces where you could PLoP down major venues,

(24:18):
first of all, without as muchrelocation as some of these other cities
had, and just thinking it outin a way where you could really have
all of those games activities hosted ina fairly tight area in the city of
Milwaukee, and just a little bitmore reaching out to other places. It's
about a one thousand acre area southof downtown, south of the third Ward

(24:40):
and north of Bayview. The HarborDistrict now is doing a fantastic job of
redeveloping this area that was mostly open, and what you have to do,
what would have had to have done, would be to help relocate these businesses
to other locations in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. For example, the Adera factory right

(25:02):
there probably would have had to havefound another port within the state to help
locate it there. So you havethat free space, But that's a thousand
acres enough space to put a majorOlympic stadium, a swimming complex that could
have turned into an NHL arena afterwards, a cycling complex that trek Bigs could
have taken over and used it asa production and testing facility, and tennis

(25:26):
courts that would have been converted forcommunities. You take down the stands after
the game, a lot of demountablevenues around the city as well. But
beyond those stadiums, what helps payfor them is the twenty nine thousand bedrooms
of condo and apartment space and themedia center that you're building that could turn

(25:49):
into high technology business space. Thatwould be incredibly, incredibly lucrative real estate
for private investors. They would havehad to have agreed to help pay for
the stadium and they could reap thebenefits off of the stadium use, but

(26:10):
also the profits from all this realestate. I mean that's Lakeside View,
that's with Downtown Views. You're creatinga whole high technology neighborhood in one thousand
acres. I mean, that wouldhave re engineered so much of our s.
Yeah, there were a few challengeswith some of that space because some
of it was like where we Energystored their coal. Some of them were

(26:33):
brownfields basically, But the process andthe timing was such where you could have
worked all of that out, andin some cases that's being done right now.
Komatsu put their headquarters in the areanow. The UWM School of Freshwater
Sciences is down there now, soyou're starting to see on a smaller scale
that kind of development happening in thatarea. The other thing, as you

(26:56):
were alluding to, is the OlympicVillage precisely that level of real estate investment
that essentially pops into an entirely newpart of the city. And the other
advantage to that area is that ithas rail right there. The freight rail
you could have theoretically built and maybethis could be something to discuss down the

(27:18):
road, some sort of a lightrail system or some other civic rail using
those tracks. You make the agreementswith the freight rail companies in terms of
when you can run commuter rail atvarious times, and it probably you could
have figured out a way to workit out. They do it with Antrak,
and it could have served so muchin that neighborhood and out to other

(27:44):
parts of the city. And touse rail to help get employees to companies
that are looking for people, toget potential employees to get to companies that
are struggling to find workers. It'slike the fixing of the final mile problem
that you so often see where youhave people in inner cities who can't get

(28:04):
out to suburbs to work jobs.This could have been a major piece of
a solution for that that not justaffects thousands of laws positively, but it
fixes your city's eccoonomy. Well,definitely, there's a ROI with that and
the existing right of way of thosefreight tracks. That's one of three major
trans continental train lines that goes fromVancouver to Virginia Beach. In the larger

(28:29):
term, that's where Amtrak has itsSilver Eagle that takes people out to the
Pacific Northwest. So it's a verythrough track. You can get supplies in
and out pretty easily on those trackswith all of those connections it has,
so and you're not only you're bydowntown, you're right by the lake with
the lake views. You're also minutesfrom the airport. The Olympic Games love
to have short spans of time fortransportation between the airport and the athletes and

(28:56):
media and dignitary village, and betweenthat village and where your competition sites are
going to be in perfect LA trafficfor twenty twenty eight, where the Games
are going to be held in La. The distance between LAX and UCLA where
they're going to have the athletes stayis about twelve minutes. When is it

(29:19):
ever perfect traffic in LA. It'sreally ever the case. Maybe at three
am on an idol Tuesday, that'sabout it. I seven ninety four could
get you there in six minutes.That has never been an Olympic Games in
modern history where you have that distance. Then you look at fanning out between

(29:41):
the village and so many of thevenues within Milwaukee County. Number One,
you have I want to say twentyfive venues within Milwaukee County that would have
hosted events. You could get toall of them save one, I think
in less than a half hour ofdrive time. You'd have twenty four venues

(30:08):
within a half hour. Except forLA's volleyball venue, poly Pavilion on the
UCLA campus, those venues are almostall gonna be at least twenty minutes away.
That's big time advantage Milwaukee. It'smassive advantage with that venue. Add
the fact that you could have theairport right there to send on using smaller

(30:34):
planes between Milwaukee and Madison, Milwaukeeand Green Bay, Milwaukee and Midway Airport
in Chicago, so you don't tieup O'Hare. You can get from venue
to venue, from door to doorto any Olympic venue at worst within an

(30:56):
hour and a half, probably less. And actually for the small planes in
the private jets, there were optionsin the area like Timmerman Field on the
northwest side of Milwaukee and Baton theycall themselves Baton International Airport, but that's
in serving Racine, which is twentyminutes south of Milwaukee County, fifteen to
twenty minutes. So yeah, theydidn't all have to fly into Mitchell International

(31:18):
either. All these different options thatyou could use to shrink the footprints of
the games, and even if you'regoing to drive it from the athlete's village
to the farthest venue, it wouldhave been the first summer game since nineteen
thirty two where every single venue wouldhave been less than two hours away from

(31:41):
an athlete's village. And that includesLambeau because you had Lambeau in some of
your plan. Yep, Lambo andCamp Randall both those would have been partially
renovated because they don't fit a soccerfield. It's twenty two yards wider than
a regular football field, so youwould have had to have taken seats out
of like maybe the first seven rowsof seats in each stadium, but you

(32:04):
put them back high quality temporary seatsduring the football season so those fans can
use it. And then as partof a legacy, especially with Milwaukee MLS
or NWSL soccer, part of theirseasons get played in Madison and in Green
Bay in the spring to give themevents money making events on a permanent basis

(32:28):
to help pay for that renovation.And that becomes another set of revenue streams
for the Packers and for the Universityof Wisconsin. That takes meetings and convincing
and things like that, but thereare ways to do it. And what's
interesting Milwaukee is getting a new prosoccer team. Now. Yeah, it's
a much smaller venue than say Venueor even MLS, and I don't think

(32:51):
they have the capability of expan expansionto MLS size on that footprint, but
at least they're doing something with thesport. And the venue looks tottic.
It really does right now. It'scalled like Iron District Stadium. I don't
think they've found a full sponsor forit. They're still a name the Team
campaign going on. In fact,at Summerfest this past year, they had
a stand for Milwaukee Pro Soccer andthey're just selling T shirts that say that

(33:14):
Like that sounds like Washington Football teamto me a little bit. But they'll
get a name and a sponsor andeverything. But yeah, some of these
venue developments are happening now anyway,just because of the sheer demand for certain
sports and World Cup soccer I thinkrubs off on a lot of people that
I think that gin's up a lotmore excitement for soccer in general. So
we're seeing the expansion of these sportshere in the US and including in Milwaukee.

(33:38):
Twenty twenty six, the Men's WorldCup is going to be in America,
Canada and Mexico. In fact,about fifteen minutes from where we're sitting,
there'll be some matches here in Philadelphia. Now, I believe Green Bay
was approached as a potential training site. I'm not sure if that's going to

(33:58):
happen or not. It much well, they just they hosted a professional soccer
match between two teams in Britain.Yeah, it was very well received.
Exactly Again, you would have hadto have renovated the field for actual high
level competition at at Lamba, butyou could do the exhibition matches, which
they did, But I mean thatsport would have had a permanent foothold in

(34:21):
Milwaukee within Olympic Stadium. I'm constructed. I think it's interesting because a lot
of people are thinking, Okay,American Family Field, Okay Lambeau, Okay
Camp Randall. What were some ofthe other venues that you had in your
book. I'm going to just haveyou name maybe four or five things that
people might not think of or realizethat we have as assets in the area

(34:42):
that could have played a role inall of the games. Because the number
of games, there's so many differentcompetitions, and you came up with so
many interesting ways to use venues thatwe have already to host those. By
using a creative schedule with ways ofthe IFC now cities use multiple venues for
the same sport at different times duringthe games, we would have cut down

(35:07):
on the number of venues we actuallywould have had to have built. Imagine
downtown Milwaukee where the only thing youwould have necessarily have had to have constructed
would have been what was originally plannedto be the Marquette Athletic Performance Research Center
in the space that is now beingtaken up by the Milwaukee Iron District soccer

(35:29):
team. That would have been likea football field sized indoor track and field,
soccer, lacrosse practice facility where youcould have held various indoor sports.
Imagine the space between there the AlMcGuire Center and the Marquette Campus fi ser
Forum, the Milwaukee Arena and nowthe expanded Wisconsin Center now called the Bairt

(35:53):
Center. Along with construction of aroof but out door temporary six thousand seats
mini arena, you could have heldfifteen sports in seven venues within a square
mile in the West Town and MarquetteUniversity portion of downtown Milwaukee. That's about,

(36:19):
I want to say, about thirtyfive percent of all the Olympic sports
in an incredibly small space, inincredibly tight space, without having to build
any new permanent venues that weren't alreadyin And that's a lot of walkability right
there too, which although you needa lot of transportation in and out of
the area, it lessens the needfor how much exactly Think about for example,

(36:45):
the area of state Fair Park,the State Fair Park Racetrack, historic
race. The racing community loves it. At the time, there were very
few, if any races going onthere. You take the track out,
you make it grass for most ofit, you take parts of it and

(37:10):
use for your action sports like yourBMX, cycling, like sport climb,
sport climbing, skateboarding, and therest as your equestrian venue. You've got
the there. But that's the pointI'm making about how much you were thinking

(37:30):
all of that through. I mean, anybody you brought this to had to
have been impressed by the level ofdetail. The angel was in the details.
You usually hear the phrase the beltsof the details, because so often
in life, but also in OlympicGames, it's the little things that people

(37:51):
forget that become the problem. Inour case, we had to make the
little things a solution, like,well, what are you going to do
about creating a whitewater slalom canoe site, because it has to we are officially
created. There's a lagoon in WashingtonPark that isn't being used much except for
fishing. Convert that and after thegames handed off to the Urban Ecology Center.

(38:17):
When it comes to softball, we'renot going to have a bunch of
independent minor league baseball teams in thearea. One of those, the Rock
now called Franklin Field Perfect Softball Menu. Well, and now you also have
a Wisconsin Brewing Company stadium in Oconomwalkwhich has the Lake Country Dot Counds also
in the American Association, that couldhave been an option as well. I

(38:42):
mean, all these different things thatyou don't think could be used for major
competition. There are options. Youjust have to understand what you have at
your disposal. Really, the keyis we had more at our disposal than
we thought. And I think foryou, essentially, the more you did
research, the more excited you gotabout it because you realized how much more

(39:04):
there was exactly. And the thingthat we were trying to do within our
group, especially what you took afantastic part in, and I'll always be
thankful for that, is that wedidn't want to just jump in and bid
for a games. Because in twentytwelve, when we came up with this,
they were starting to take bids forthe United States bid for a twenty

(39:30):
twenty four Summer Olympic Games. Bostonwas going all in quickly for twenty twenty
four, and I was just realizing, when we need to watch what they're
doing, watch what issues they're comingup with, because if you're going to
present an Olympic Games plan and you'regonna be serious about it, you better

(39:52):
know what you're doing. You betterhave all those I dotted te's crossed so
that the IOC can come in andscrew things up with your plan and try
and over formulate it to what theywant when it's not good for your city.
And that was happening all over theplace with Boston, and that is
that is a larger question too.You did a lot of research and I

(40:14):
know we talked about Billy Payne,You've talked to a lot of other people
that we haven't gotten into it yet. But you did do a lot of
research with the IOC and how theyinterpret all of these bids and what they
want, and that causes some issues. But how was it, because I
know you talked with them, howwas there, how was the reception to

(40:35):
it and what made you excited andor concerned? You want to see what
it takes to build an Olympic Games. I could email you right now,
Eric, They probably have emailed itto you, the twenty twenty four IOC
post bid city contract. The detailsthey put in there are incredible. Oh

(40:58):
it's a big yes. Yeah,it's mongo size, so you better understand
and know how to dot all thosewhen you first present the plan, because
you've got stakeholders that are incredibly differentin what they're looking for. You've got

(41:19):
the ISIC and their stakeholders, andthey want to be able to hold the
party the way that they want tohold it. But then you've got your
citizens of your city, and you'vegot various beliefs among politicians, which we
all know about in the state ofWisconsin, let alone across the entire United
States. You better make sure thatyour plan can meet all those constituencies' needs,

(41:44):
or yet don't bid. That's whyI always thought that our plan was
a discernment, not an automatic let'sjump in. And as it happened,
La was given the twenty twenty eightGames, four years earlier than any city
had ever been granted at Games,simply because the IOC was running out of

(42:07):
cities. That's what they were startingto run into. Yeah, they've made
it very complicated and very difficult,and yeah, fewer and fewer cities would
be viable candidates, and even fewerof those were like, well is this
even worth it, which is whyyou need to have solid rock solid cost
control, and I think the IOFChas sort of begun to see the market

(42:30):
forces are catching up with them,basically exactly. And that's why they went
with Los Angeles for twenty twenty eight, because they had a bid where like
Milwaukee and maybe even slightly better thanMilwaukee in terms of construction needs. It's
there. They almost literally could rollout the balls right now and hold the

(42:53):
Olympic Games if they had to.But I still think that if that had
not been given to LA for twentytwenty eight that early, and if we
would have come to the realization dotin the eyes crossing the t's getting support
from the business community, the politicalcommunity, the community at large, particularly

(43:15):
civic leaders with whom they could beginto understand very quickly this would not be
a games with highly negative social ramifications, that it would be done as a
positive for the city. I thinkwe could have put up a very surprisingly
good bid that would have at leastthere's no doubt that would have been a

(43:37):
strong bid that would have been afinalist, if not a winner, against
LA. And what's interesting is thinkingabout the politics at the time, Tom
Barrett was the mayor of Milwaukee,then Chevy Johnson Kevalier. Johnson technically is
the mayor now, and he expresseda desire to get Milwaukee to grow again,

(43:59):
to be a city of one millionpeople. Right now it's about five
hundred and eighty thousand. So helikes to think big. He mayor.
I don't know if he has allof the right plans in place to make
things like that happen, but Ilike that he thinks big. Had he
been mayor when this had been broughtup, I think he would have really
been very excited about it. Ithink he would have been jumping up and

(44:22):
down the possibility and at least beenwilling to go through the discernment process like
what we were doing. I thinkit was right for us to pull back,
watch see how it needs to bedone, get things done properly,
and write, because then we knewwe could have had a bid that would

(44:45):
have been relatively fool proof, onethat the community could have really gotten underneath.
And that's an issue the IOC alsoreally has, which is getting city
support. Because people are much morewise to the problems of the Olympic Games
than they every year. I don'tbelieve there's ever been a referendum about in
Olympic Games that has ever passed.Some are binding, some are non binding.

(45:12):
But I think this could have passedthat test. And if you pass
that public test and you can stillmeet the needs of the IFC, you're
doing something. And it would begreat to have something like that that the
city of Milwaukee can rally around.There are huge areas of the city that
are in need of redevelopment and someinvestment injection, if you will, and

(45:36):
this could have been, and itstill could be someday, a great way
to kind of become the catalyst forthat kind of development and certainly creates a
lot of jobs, albeit many temporary, but still that's the boost deal you
need half the time. And wealso would have had plans in place to
do incredible recruiting of the unemployed andunderemployed within the area. Because you're talking

(45:59):
to six year building boom that ittakes to make an Olympic Games happen and
then the seventh year the Games happen. In that space where you normally have
a seven year space between when youwin the bid when you host the games,
that's enough time to not just getthe construction done, but to go

(46:20):
after a degree, everything from theGV to a master's degree, depending upon
what you need to be able tomake yourself more marketable. Yeah, the
construction jobs would have been temporary,but you could have with grant money that
I think we could have gone andgone after and received, we could have
really made our workforce much more educatedin areas that businesses are looking for,

(46:49):
not just educated in certain theories andthings like that, but skilled workers in
trades, which is a huge need. There's a huge gap between the need
and the people that are able tofulfill them. Welders, that's a popular
one to talk about because without adegree, you learned a weld, well,
you've immediately got an eighty thousand dollarsa year or better job with full

(47:10):
benefits. Things like that. Hfact, all of those things they have
traditionally kind of been I shouldn't saytraditionally maybe in the last thirty forty years,
been shunned a little bit as careerideas. Now that's becoming a very
hot and very reasonable thing to pursue. And I think for a lot of
people growing up in areas where theschool systems have been underserving them a little

(47:32):
bit. The economy's been underserving thema little bit. The infrastructure has been
underserving them a little bit. Thereis opportunity with something like this to get
everybody lifted and then they have opportunitiespersonally to move themselves to the next level
with this as the base, andour plan would have taken those individuals who

(47:53):
would participate in such a program bringingbusiness is who are going to use that
high technology space in what we wouldhave called Olympic Harbor. They need workers.
These workers need jobs, meet themup with those workers finding with job

(48:13):
placement assistance, new family sustaining careers. We would have had something in place
with the grant money. There,you're taking all that extra sweat equity that
you've put in. That is sweatequity that becomes a down payment on a
house, a condo that was builtfor the Olympic Games. One of those

(48:35):
is now yours. That re engineersan entire city, both in terms of
its economy and even in terms ofthe issues of segregation, Milwaukee being one
of the most segregated cities in America. You have just helped create a middle
class, integrated neighborhood in a newpart of the city that is incredibly easy

(49:02):
in terms of be able to goto work and create a life surrounding that
in a totally new part of thecity. You've just re engineered the city
in a whole bunch of words.The urban planning ideas with this and the
social engineering of this is it's veryfascinating to imagine what all the possibilities are,
and parts of Milwaukee are very ripefor that. It's needed. I

(49:25):
think you need to be careful whenit comes to potential displacement because we've seen
how problematic that is, both withthe Olympic Games and if you're going to
use a neighborhood that already exists.We've saw that, say with the construction
of the freeways back in the nineteenfifties and sixties in our city, and

(49:46):
that's where with what we would havedone, especially with an area where you
didn't have much residential population at all, you don't displace without an improved replacement.
We could have afforded to do thatwith what we would have done with
the games. You just have tobe cognizant of it enough with a plan

(50:08):
when it comes to all the differentfactors to make sure that doesn't happen.
There's a way to do it.You just have to be in the right
mindset to do that. And youwere talking about kind of that Olympic I
don't want to say Olympic Village,you call it Olympic Park, Olympic Harbor,
Olympic Harbor, so that area,but those venues could really some of

(50:31):
the new development ones and the improvementones. They could be out in other
parts of the city as well.We talked about Century City, that area
where Aosmith used to be in thearound the thirtieth and Capital and up and
down that area. That area couldbe right for some sort of development that
could have been related to the OlympicGames, immediately improving the neighborhoods right around

(50:52):
it. We were talking about movingsome of the companies that were in the
Harbor district at the time into CenturyCity. That would have been amazing,
it would have. And they're alreadyworking on building train cars because rail is
well served there. It's a couplemiles away from any of the freeways,
but they're well served by rail andthat could have been a good commuter hub
too. Exactly, all these differentthings are how you need to approach in

(51:15):
Olympic Games, Baby, because it'snot just Okay, let's put up stadiums
and roll out the balls, andwe'll bring the world in and the city
gets improved. So often that's notwhat happens. You have to really be
completely integrated with your thinking in allthis re engineering of your city and making

(51:36):
sure it's done positively. In termsof visitors from around the world. Part
of the reason to host the OlympicGames is to lift your profile and you
have opportunities for redevelopment, but there'salso supposed to be a massive influx of
revenue from visitors. What were someof the latest numbers that you had computed

(51:57):
where there could be an ROI scenein the Olympic Games. There were days
when you literally could double the populationof the city that big, so over
half a million people. You're talkingfive six hundred thousand people attending events in
the city of Milwaukee in one eightsummer fests exactly. Now, we would

(52:21):
have had Summerfest going, I meanan Olympic length length Summerfest. We would
have had State Fair going, anOlympic length state Fair. Now that we
would not have been able to usenecessarily all of the State Fair proper because
you couldn't park inside the track.You got a questioning going on there,
and there would not have been allthe vendors inside the Wisconsin Exposition Park.

(52:44):
You take out the columns inside there, redo the roof and hold boone.
That would have been a replacement forsurfing. I mean Paris twenty twenty four
has surfing in Tahiti. That's abit of a hike exactly. We could
put a wave machine in Lake Michigan. Boy, you ain't going to create
the kind of waves you need forfor Olympic. But you know what,
they have a head start on Milwaukee, those sandbars. I mean, they're

(53:07):
the freshwater surfing capital of the world. Wouldn't take a lot to just improve
that a little bit artificially for awhile. Maybe maybe, But our thought
was instead, because that's a sportthat you sort of can choose to have
or not as a local sport,we would have replaced it with bowling.
I mean, how more Milwaukee getstrue. I'm still sorry about the American

(53:29):
Bowling Congress moving to Dallas Fort Worth. But I know bowlling is huge here
in this city. It's so quintessentially Milwaukee, and it's the world's biggest
participation sport. But I mean youwould have had all that going on places
where people could go when there isn'tan event happening. Airbnb would have probably

(53:53):
been a choice of a huge amountof homeowners in metropolitan Milwaukee wall they were
skiping to other parts of Wisconsin orother parts of the country to escape.
But it's still would have been anet benefit in so many fashions in terms
of just this huge infusion into theeconomy. You're talking billions. Especially.

(54:21):
That overcomes the theory that when youhold an Olympic Games, you don't get
the net benefit because so many peopledon't want to visit that area and so
many people who are residents want toleave the area. In cities like London
or Rio de jan Niro, Icould see that being a negative because it's
such a huge tourist city in boththose cases. Anyway, Milwaukee is the

(54:45):
best summer city in America in myopinion, but not many people know it.
I call it the San Diego ofthe Midwest. In the summer.
It is, but it's a hiddenjewel. You're not gonna have that effect.
It's gonna be be a net positiveon your economy, and you're going
to have people from hundreds of countriesaround the world come into the city.

(55:07):
I mean, we have scenes inthe book, or you've got soccer fans
from around the world all congregating onKinnick Kinnick Avenue a few blocks away from
Olympic Stadium, clinking beers, clickingspotted cows. I mean, how much
more quintessential welcome the world to thecity known as the gathering Place, can

(55:30):
you get? Yeah, when youthink about the density of this city too,
because Milwaukee had about seven hundred andsixty thousand people back around nineteen sixty
or so, and a lot ofthose old neighborhoods were built for that level
of density. They can absorb morepeople. They could absorb more people,
but you would need to have bettertransportation, sure, and that's why we

(55:51):
would have built the civic rail system. I mean you would have had I
think we had like five lines plannedin the city, fanning out to various
suburbs, and you would have hadto have used it big time. Plus
using like bus rapid transit, whichis already nown development. You've got that
now, Yeah, they just recentlyopened that up and down. And I

(56:12):
had always rail transit, I like, but you know, the hop I
thought was kind of a waste andit's very inflexible. I thought the bus
rapid transit, where you paint thelane, you know where it's going and
it's very efficient, has been agreat way of getting people around. And
by expanding the Intermobile station to beable to serve this commuter rail throughout the
city. And because there really isn'ta lot of option to have those train

(56:37):
lines go through downtown, that wouldbe a massive infusion for the HOP.
Because it stops at the Intermobile station, people could have fanned out throughout the
downtown area to get to work.It would have really re engineered what the
HOP would be useful. And theHOP is proposed to extend north into Feisser

(56:57):
Form in the Deer District and ofJuly, I believe, up into what
we call Bronzeville. This would haveexpedited that plan, I'm sure, oh
easily easily. So you had talkedabout this for twenty twenty eight in the
book Greater Than the Games. Twentytwenty eight was kind of the specific year
named, But that doesn't mean thiscan't be the blueprint. I've heavily done

(57:22):
blueprint already for perhaps a bid inthe next time a US city would be
eligible to host, at minimum,you're gonna have to wait till twenty forty
because the shortest span of time that'sever happened where the same country hosted a
Summer Olympic Games was between LA andAtlanta nineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety six,

(57:44):
and it's been a thirty two yearwait between Atlanta and now LA again
with twenty twenty eight. Mm hm. So you're gonna have a space in
time where you're gonna have to lookat what the city looks like at a
certain time if you want to reconsiderit. Bid I got the perfect possibility
for Milwaukee. Twenty forty eight,the two hundredth birthday of the state of

(58:06):
Wisconsin. Yes, the bi centennial, the perfect opportunity to invite the world
to your party. Roll out thecheese, kurds, roll off the spot
a cow. Actually, Miller probablywould have been your beer sponsor. I
would think you would. You neverknow, Yeah, And I meant to
get into that too. The corporatesponsorship. Milwaukee outpunches its weight when it

(58:30):
comes to things like large corporations andvenues and things like that. On a
per capita basis, We're pretty blessed. And you think about that with the
beer. Molsen cor is technically nowheadquartered in Chicago, but Miller, the
largest brewery, is still there.But we also have Harley Davidson, we
have ge Healthcare, we have JohnsonControls. I know part of they're taken

(58:52):
over by Tycho and some of thatheadquarters is in Ireland. So all this
has been changed around a little.But there are still a lot of major
corporate sponsors. North Western Mutual certainlyone of them that could be big supporters
and host a lot of great thingsand really raise their profiles too. Not
just that, but two hours awayis that big beheam of Chicago. Yes,

(59:14):
it would not have been in thecity except for a few events,
but you know, you had gottena lot of support from them too.
You're talking thirty seven fortune five hundredcompanies at the time that we were discerning
it. Within two hours of downtownMilwaukee. There would have been a lot
of corporate support for these games.Far punching your weight. That's when Chicago

(59:37):
becomes an advantage for it. Well, and you could kind of frame that
as part of the un mega cityof Chicago and Milwaukee or Milwaukee, Chicago
together and there, and there areother large corporations around the state that could
be part of it. I meanMercury Marine, there's some water sports involved
in the Summer Olympics there in Fonede Lac. You have Kohler in Sheboygan
and some other major corporations there Madison's, so there are there were other additional

(01:00:01):
opportunities for corporations to get involved thatcould be directly beneficial to the games just
even building them, and directly beneficialto these companies getting worldwide exposure. I
mean the idea, for example ofKohler, we talked about them being the
company running the hotel that would havebeen an at Olympic stadium. A nice

(01:00:22):
fifty story tower on the east sideof the stadium would have been a perfect
tie in. And you don't thinkthey would They wouldn't love to put in
the fixtures for twenty nine thousand bedroomsworth of commons that far. Yeah,
that's a big business opportunity exactly,and that's the way to overcome the amount
of hotel rooms that Milwaukee doesn't haveat the moment. They've got enough for

(01:00:46):
the Democratic and Republican conventions. That'swhy the cities garnered both of them.
They can't host a Super Bowl,obviously, they can't host an Olympic Games,
at least with the current hotel capacity. But you do that building.
You've got some possibilities there. Andthat's where you've thought out so much in
every detail, and it was taken. I don't know anybody who really after

(01:01:10):
talking with you about it in detail, still had a couple of people who
were unwilling to look at the detailsbecause so many thoughts were present in their
mind about what an Olympic Games means. It takes rethinking, innovating, re
understanding what an Olympics involves in orderto make it work. That's what you,

(01:01:36):
I and all the people who wereinvolved within our discernment group had a
chance to deeply look at. Andyou did a fantastic job of all of
this as well. Don't knock yourselfand give yourself some credit with this.
Well, thank you, Jay.And you did talk with Bonnie Blair.
Bonnie Blair Crookshank Now she wrote theforward in your book. What was her

(01:01:57):
impression? Well, we had achance talk. For a few years after
the Olympic Games, idea finally wanedand I interviewed her for a story for
WTMJ, and after I sat thetape, I told her about this Olympic
idea and it felt hair brained,at least in her mind. I'm taking

(01:02:19):
a guess I'm not gonna put wordsin her mind, but I think a
lot of other people would have thatidea unless she showed the detail. So
then finally I shared it with hera few years later, she opened it
up and like you, her mindwas bottled. It's like, oh my
gosh, there's a there there.A lot of dominos would have to fall,

(01:02:43):
but there's a there there. Mh. And she saw it and
we talked about it later and shewas willing to write the forward, from
which I'm so thankful. Part ofthat forward included the quote Jay's approach takes
the intricate nuts and bolts of anOlympic plan, brings them to life in
the story, and knows how itmakes sense while solving a lot of the
issues within the Olympic Games. That'spart of the forward that she wrote for

(01:03:05):
you, And it's coming from theperspective of someone who's been to a whole
bunch of them. And she competedin four of them. She's been to
almost everyone since on the winter sideand a couple on the summer side as
well. She knows as well asanybody what it takes to pull this off
from the athlete's perspective, and shewas really excited about even a lot of

(01:03:28):
improvements we made for the athletes themselves. Number one, like the distance between
competition venues. She loved that idea. She saw the regionalism that we had
that is much more often used inthe Winter Olympic Games, because you have
to have a mountain locale and acity locale to do it, and often

(01:03:50):
they're nowhere near each other. Soast like in Denver are two examples.
So that's not Calgary too, butyeah, most of the time the mountains
are far away from the whole city. So she gets the idea of a
regional concept and even innovations we cameup with about what to do with an
opening ceremony because so often it's heldon a Friday night and they schedule competitions

(01:04:12):
for Saturday. Well, number one, you can't have most of your athletes
or some of your athletes are gonnahave to miss it. They're gonna have
to miss the biggest night of theirathletic life before their competition. Because they
have a competition the next day,they get to miss the party. They
get to miss one hundred thousand peoplescreaming for him, cheering for them in

(01:04:34):
such a special moment. And there'salso the fact that, well, on
a Friday night, are you watchingTV? Are you going to the bars,
are you going out party? Areyou gonna go catch a concert or
a game or something. You're mostlikely not gonna be in front of a
television set Thursday night, you are. And the Olympic Games actually begin on

(01:05:00):
the Wednesday before the opening ceremonies becauseyou've got soccer competitions going on. So
there's no reason why you can't movethe opening ceremony to a Thursday night must
see TV when more people are goingto be home, better television revenue.
The ISIC loves that. And thenstart your competition on Friday later in the

(01:05:23):
day when athletes have had a chanceto rest. You just guarantee every athlete
gets to participate in the opening ceremonyand then can start their competition with what
we came up with, which wecall with a five o'clock start happy hour.
How more, Milwaukee can he getyep on the athletes have a few

(01:05:45):
beers and then there set new records. We never know of that. But
well, you already had written essentiallya book about the games when I was
reviewing, you know what you hadput down with all the research. What
made you decide to write Greater thanthe Games Volume one as an actual book
and what process did you go through? It was really the idea of this

(01:06:08):
needs to be shared. We hadso much about the Olympic Games, about
the city Milwaukee, about Wisconsin,so much data and philosophy and innovation that
we could share with this. Sowhat we decided to do was, I
mean, let's put all this togetherand let's do it in the format of

(01:06:30):
the first ten days of a nineteenday Olympic Games. That's why there's going
to be a volume two coming.But Volume one is the first ten days
of the Olympic Games. Let's givea narrative description in some of the vignettes
of what our ideas, our innovationswould have been for the games, as

(01:06:51):
well as just what it would havelooked like. What would have looked like
like, for example, the firstday, the idea of an Olympic volunteer
who had been part of the constructionprocess beforehand and who had gained a better
education over that time. He's takingthe train in the new Civic train system

(01:07:15):
from the north side of Milwaukee upto our one of our two Milwaukee soccer
venues, which would have been anexpanded E Line Soccer Park, which is
in northwest Milwaukee, Round seventy secondand Good Hope and it's about thirty thousand
people, and then take down theseats and sell them after the Olympic Games.
Just like the idea of picturing himworking as a volunteer selling souvenirs,

(01:07:43):
viewing the competition, going on thevery first event of the Games, and
hearing like Australian and Swedish fans onthe train right next to him, and
the idea of oh my gosh,we're holding tailcit parties at six o'clock in
the morning with bloody is right onGood Hope Road to start an Olympics.

(01:08:03):
What well, it is inspirational andfor someone And that's kind of a good
example of a case study that youhave in there, like how it affects
individuals precisely because a games is amacro changer of your cities. But those

(01:08:24):
macro changes happen and affect individual lives. So let's look at it from individual
people's perspective, sort of third person, individually and see how our ideas would
have impacted people. Make it approachableinstead of just a whole bunch of stats
and ideas. That's what we weretrying to do with the book. And

(01:08:46):
so you're saying, there is avolume two coming out that dives further into
the actual Olympic Games themselves and aswell as more analysis of post Olympic Games,
post Olympic Games, other issues thatwe didn't even even have a chance
to touch on when it comes toinnovations that are needed within the Olympic Games
themselves. I mean, there's somuch more for us to say about budgeting.

(01:09:10):
We talked a lot about it withour idea for Olympic Stadium. If
you got the Packers coming back andplaying, you can make this stadium as
big as you want and sell itout because the season ticket waiting list is
so long. Let's build it onehundred and twenty thousand seats. Let's go

(01:09:30):
big. Let's make it the biggestfootball style stadium in the world. Why
not, because then you can haveas many events as you possibly can inside
that stadium. You're selling three pointsix million tickets worth of events. You're
expanding your overall ticket sales, forexample, to sixteen million available. That's

(01:09:51):
like six million more than any gameshas ever had. You want to make
a profit when you're hosting the OlympicGames, that's a perfect way to do.
Clearly thought this through on the financialside as well. That's an excellent
point trying. I'm no economists,but why not. Well, it does
go back to thinking big for Milwaukeeand how the Olympic Games can be leveraged

(01:10:15):
into making the city rise to thenext level and think down long term,
which we rarely see anymore. Precisely, Milwaukee a city that I loved so
much. We had to move awaybecause of family reasons, especially for my
wife's family, But we love Milwaukeeso much that city needs a jumpstart.

(01:10:40):
It is a world class city thathas its issues. You need something that
is not just going to launch acity, but that you can use as
a way to heal it. Thatwas our intent with our Olympic idea.
I'm not saying Milwaukee should go afterthe Olympic Games. Need to discern if

(01:11:00):
it's right at the time of theopportunities available. But look outside the box
for solutions, not only when itcomes to what your city can do that's
big, but how you can makebig changes positively for the city with it.
And Milwaukee has a history of doingthings. It's people doing things that

(01:11:23):
have had dramatic impacts on the world. Everything from the motorcycle as we know
it to the computer keyboard, thetypewriter was invented in Milwaukee. So many
other innovations, not just in thecity but in the region too. Everything
from malted milk to the outboard motorwas invented in this region. The more
innovative the area can be, thebetter it can grow. And you've put

(01:11:45):
a lot of innovative ideas into theOlympic bid considerations you've done, and therefore
into this book, which is whyit's called Greater than the Games. I
imagine precisely. It's about recognizing thatyou don't just do an Olympic Games for
an Olympic game's sake, you doit for a greater purpose, and that
was our I think some other citiesmight read this book and adapt the principles

(01:12:08):
to their own bids. I'd loveto see it. If it makes the
games better, if it makes citiesbetter, then it would have been without
it. Absolutely well, Milwaukee bettertake notice. Then. Have you sent
a copy to the mayor? Ishould? I absolutely could. I'm still
waiting for my own personal shipment inI'm having some issues with the US postal

(01:12:31):
service, but no I get pastthat, I may say. I'm probably
gonna send one up to the mayor. All right, Well, you can
get greater than the Games Volume one, MK twenty twenty eight. There will
be a volume two, possibly avolume three. You never know. It
is on Amazon available right now.It just got released well as we speak,
a couple of weeks ago, andit was number one, and I

(01:12:51):
think still is number one for newreleases in its category. Yes, it
is in Olympics and Paralympics category asI look at my screen right now,
number one new release. So congratulationson that. That's already a heck of
a feat. Thank you so much. All right. J Sorgie broadcaster extraordinaire,

(01:13:12):
Olympic planner, extraordinaire city champion,even though he's not living in the
city right now. You never know, you might come back, Jay,
I'd love it and next time Isee you, man, we gotta get
some happy tap, you gotta getsome pizza. Deer read in my mind.
I love it all right, Jay, thanks so much for being on
the air cast today, and yesyou should go read Greater Than the Games.
Order it on Amazon right now,right, Jay, you got it.

(01:13:34):
Thank you so much, Matt.See we went all kinds of places
with that. Jay Sorgie, authorof Greater Than the Games Volume one MKE
twenty twenty eight, getting you tosee and believe how Milwaukee could host an
Olympics, or how things just couldbe done, how you can take a
major event and use it to launcha city or even yourself into the next
level. The book is available onAmazon and anywhere you might find books,

(01:13:56):
but I do have the Amazon linkposted on our show notes here on the
ARA Cast, so check it outwhen you get a chance. Hope you
enjoyed the conversation and we'll look forwardto talking with you in the next episode
of the air Cast.