44 | Olympics: Could Milwaukee host and make the most of it? Yes, according to Jay Sorgi

With the 2024 Summer Olympic Games underway, we're here to talk about the Olympics – and Milwaukee and Wisconsin. 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!

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
And welcome back to the State TrunkTour podcast. I'm head tour guide Eric
Paulson for State Trunk Tour, thesite that shows you around Wisconsin road by
road, city by city, placeby place, quirky place by quirky place,
and usually on the State Trunk Tourpodcast, we focus on a destination
or something unique or a road thatyou should take to find all kinds of

(00:21):
great things along. Today we're doingsomething a little different because we're focused on
as the Olympics is ready to startin Paris here in twenty twenty four,
we're having a conversation about the Olympicsand Milwaukee. Could the city and the
region at large handle an Olympics?The answer it seems to be yes,
and why would it want to?What's in it for the city in the

(00:43):
greater region. Answers exist in afascinating book called Greater Than the Games,
Volume one, MKE twenty twenty eight. It was written by broadcaster Jay Sorgie,
who's familiar to many in Milwaukee andWisconsin from his years broadcasting at WTMJ
Radio, particularly with sports. JabganReese searching the topic out of curiosity,
the intrigue grew as the unearthed moreinfo that led to the belief that Milwaukee

(01:04):
could not only host to summer OlympicGames, but the additional investments required for
such a games fully prepares the place, given the right planning and execution,
to drive positive transformative change for Milwaukeeand the whole region. And we're talking
up to Green Bay, over toMadison, even down into our friends in
Illinois. Far fetched, you say, it's not, and greater than the

(01:26):
game's volume one MKE twenty twenty eight, a long title for sure, jaylays
out how Olympic bids work, howsome cities used it to propel themselves to
the next level, while others wereleft with dead and white elephants. Talks
about how to avoid that. Alsoexamines the remarkable wealth of venues, facilities,
and resources already within a reasonable distanceof Milwaukee, and how additional investments

(01:46):
for venues, housing, transportation,and more can be properly repurposed after the
games to bring the area to thenext level for the future. He interviewed
people who brought games to their owncities, sought input from local leaders,
and essentially lays out of blue thatcan inspire you to consider all of the
possibilities with a practical approach. Now, we had this discussion initially when the

(02:07):
book first came out last year andI had it on my aircast podcast,
and as I updated for that podcast, I thought i'd share it over here
on the State Trunk Tour podcast becauseit's a fascinating topic. It shows what
Milwaukee and Wisconsin has and what itcould be and what the possibilities are.
Check out this conversation, read hisbook, and watch the Olympics. You

(02:27):
might find inspiration not just for Milwaukeebut for yourself. And frankly, if
the area hosted the Olympics, there'dbe a lot of road tripping around here.
So here's our Olympian conversation with JaySorgie. So I'm happy to bring
in Jay Sorgie, who's a longtime now former Milwaukee radio broadcast personality,
newsman, digital editor, extraordinary awardwinning Pulitzer. Am I reading this right?

(02:52):
Jay Pulitzer? I've a Murrow inthere, a couple of Morrows,
but a few other awards as well. Okay, out of the Philadelphia area
as we speak now, if youwerbrought some more cheese steaks, Yeah,
my heart and brain still travel toMilwaukee and cheese kurds. I mean,
the cheese is great on the cheesesteaks here, but Wisconsin cheese would bring

(03:15):
it for the standard cheese steak inPhilly as cheese Whiz isn't not. You
could do that American or pro aloan. So I mean, any of
those are darn good. But yougive me some Wisconsin cheese sauce over Whiz
cheese spread or something like that,it'd be good. Yes, So we're
talking today. You've heard Jay manya time on six twenty WTMJ through the

(03:38):
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 eight. Yes, that's a long title, but Greater
Than the Games is really the maintitle of the book. He's been working
on it for years. And Iknow because I'm actually in the book a

(03:59):
little bit, because I was talkingwith you when you were thinking about this
concept. And it involves diving intothe world of the Olympics and the Olympic
Games and cities and the bids andhow they put bids together and should they
put a bid together, and wouldMilwaukee or southeastern Wisconsin be or have been
a good place to host an OlympicGames. So it became kind of a

(04:21):
It was a curious thought that becamea much more deeper analysis of like cities
and economies and games and really lifein general. I would say, whole
boatload of subjects all combined under onepowerful moving umbrella that was spawned from a
dream that when you first think aboutit, and this is the beginning phrase

(04:46):
of the second vignette of the firstchapter of the book, and it's got
five words, Milwaukee Olympics, areyou crazy? But the fact was,
if you look at the details ofwhat we were able to put together in
terms of a potential plan that wewere discerning about maybe making a bid for

(05:13):
a summer Olympics in Milwaukee what wewould call the Lake Michigan Triangle area,
that it wasn't as far fetched asit might seem, even though a lot
of dominoes would have to fall right. Yeah, it was an interesting timing
on that too, because you startedthinking about this it fell like around twenty

(05:33):
fifteen or sixteen as that actor.No, actually earlier than that, well,
I mean, initially I thought aboutit as one of those kid childhood
projects that all of us kids dreamof the ridiculous at some point and doing
something ridiculous as an adult with ourlives. And during the LA eighty four
Games, I dreamed of the possibilityof our hometown possibly ooting this on,

(06:00):
and so I stuck that dreaming mymental file. Cabinet. Pulled out one
time for a college project at MarquetteUniversity for a plat for sort of a
presentation type of project, got anA on it, and it was all
based on what was going on withAtlanta in nineteen ninety six, the games
that were just held there at thattime. So put the thing away,

(06:23):
never did to pull out again.Then in twenty twelve, during the London
Olympic Games, Sarah Germonto, areporter and writer with a Wall Street Journal
who covered sports. She's now atthe Financial Times, but she was with
the Wall Street Journal at the time. She came out with an article blog
piece that had some whimsy to itbut had a bit of some validity to

(06:48):
it, saying that Milwaukee should bethe next American city that should host the
Summer Games. Now, most ofus were like, of course, it's
a ridiculous idea. But we're gonnahave some fun with this. Yeah.
Like at the old station, oneof our talk show hosts posed a question,
if Milwaukee ever did it, whoshould light via the flame that most

(07:10):
people said, Bob Yunker, Iwould agree, yes, yeah, but
I pulled out the old project.Look at what twenty twelve needed with London
to be able to pull it off. Compare it to the resources in Milwaukee,
Madison, Green Bay with a littlebit of help from Chicago. And
wait a minute, this isn't ridiculouslyimpossible. There are some things we need

(07:35):
to take care of. There aretwo venues we'd have to build with permanent
seats, and we'd have to putin a civic transportation system such as light
rail and regional rail. But thisisn't out of the question. And not
only could we do it, buttheoretically we could do it in a way

(07:57):
that's fiscally responsible, thickly responsible,socially responsible, where we're not destroying city
budgets to do this. Do wehave something here? And so the first
person who I thought of to actuallygive all this too and say is this
ridiculous? Was you? I rememberwell, because you, in addition to

(08:22):
working at WTMJ. You love sports, and you were working at Merle Harmon's
Fanfare. The extra second job makingends meet while trying to take radio tends
to work. And I was workingat the time for communications as communications director
with the Greater Milwaukee Committee, andthe offices were in the same large building
complex as Fanfare. So yeah,I'd come down and say hi, And

(08:46):
you had told me about this ideathat you had. And I love big
ideas, having lived in Chicago andTexas, where they love everything big,
they think big, they make thingshappen. One of my beefs with Milwaukee,
which is my town, my hometown, my favorite town is Milwaukee always
kind of felt like it was ineveryone else's shadow and kind of curled up.

(09:07):
So no, we're just Milwaukee sometimes. 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
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

(09:28):
lot of nimmering nannies that just don'twant to think big and make big things
happen in Milwaukee, and they hadn'ttoo much voice in my opinion, So
I liked the think big. Sowhen you're standing there telling me about this
idea that Milwaukee could host an Olympics, I said, crazy idea, but
let's think about it. Let's talkabout it. And then you pull out

(09:50):
this book of work and research andthen showed me a word document that just
had so much meticulous detail about potentialvenues and potential transportation options and potential ways
to develop an Olympic village in placesthat were ripe for redevelopment. But you

(10:11):
also had thought through ways of takingthe Olympic investment. And this has been
an up and down thing for alot of cities, taking that Olympic investment
and turning it into long term thingsthat could be used for residential and commercial
industrial transportation, and more so,the Olympic Games and the investments in it

(10:31):
could really be a springboard to becominga next level city and having that be
a long term effect. And Iwas so impressed with that, just how
much you thought that through. Thankyou. I mean, to do an
Olympics right, you can't just saylet's host the games for hosting the game's

(10:52):
sake. It needs to be partof a greater effort, and in many
cases a longer term effort to turnyour city into something that launches it but
also helps it, especially where itcomes to its greatest needs. Barcelona was
fantastic with that with nineteen ninety two, most of us had never heard of
Barcelona as like a major world cityit is now. Atlanta nineteen ninety six

(11:20):
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, we
can go down the list. It'slong of the number of cities that didn't

(11:43):
treat the Olympics the right way orweren't allowed to use the Olympics to make
it a financial and ethical and socialgain for your city because the IOC want
things the way that they wanted it. So what we did with a lot

(12:03):
of these ideas that you and Iand a whole lot of other young Milwaukee
business leaders discerned was, okay,how do we not just go for the
bid just to go for the bid, but how do we use it to
innovate a city, How do weuse it to fix our city's issues.

(12:24):
How do we use it to launchour city into a worldwide plane the right
way. A lot of it wasinvolving redevelopment and long term thinking, which
was great. And the concerns wouldbe raised, obviously, and you know
about this, and you write aboutthis. People who are the naysayers who
look for the reasons not to dothings right. In many cases, there
are very good reasons not to dothings. I mean, in the case

(12:48):
of the Olympic Games, you havea lot of anti Olympic activists who talk
about, well, with the Olympics, there's displacement, that's correct based on
the plan. I mean, Beijingdisplaced one point five million people. That's
like three quarters of the metro areaof Milwaukee. They displaced that many to

(13:09):
build their Olympic village in their Olympiccomplex. Rio displaced about seventy seven thousand
people, a big chunk of itto build a golf course. Yeah,
there was only like one of thegolf course in Rio de Janeiro, and
it wasn't much better than than DretskaPark. So you're not gonna hold Olympic
golf there. You need something alittle bit more worse than straight to light.

(13:31):
Now, they're right in terms ofthe NA saying when it comes to
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 Soshi Russia Winter Olympic Gamesbudget. Yeah, some of those budgets

(13:52):
are just mind boggling now. Andit's got to be done in a way
where you can have private dogs payingfor whatever construction you need, including the
big behemoth track and field stadium thatgets potentially used by the Packers part time
back in Milwaukee, could restart Marquetteneed to be in football MLS and NWSL

(14:13):
soccer, and the US Olympic Committeemaking it a home stadium for Team USA
events. But with the residential realestate and the commercial real estate that you're
putting in that same area, that'sprime investor in territory where you can make
profit off that that can pay forthe stadium. Yeah, it requires some

(14:35):
special arrangements with those investors and withthe municipalities and things like that, but
it can be done in a waywhere it becomes mutually beneficial precisely. And
that's where we were coming up withideas that were solving a lot of these
problems that so many Olympic cities hadseen. And it's like, we aren't

(14:56):
just going to do a bid todo a bid, because you can get
so caught in the mistakes that happenedwith that happened with other Olympic games.
And we were able to fix alot of those problems, at least theoretically
with Ryde. Yeah. One ofthe things that was interesting about this is
as you were telling me about thesethings. This was I think right after
we had had extensive conversations with somerepresentatives from Chicago who are trying to put

(15:20):
in a bid for the twenty sixteenSummer Olympics. And the guy who was
leading that charge his name was patand I'm blanking on his last name,
but he was originally from Wahwatosa,Wisconsin. Pat Ryan. Yep, Pat
Ryan, that's right, And sohe was and they were talking a little
bit about what role Milwaukee might playin helping Chicago with their games, And
here you were saying, we couldhost the games Chicago, maybe you can

(15:43):
help if we need you. Otherwise, we have everything we need in Wisconsin
between Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bayand areas in between. You mentioned something
like Whistling Straits, I mean Olympiclevel golf in Sheboygan County for example.
I mean that's a no brainer,boom, perfect locale, perfect low count
We we would have needed Chicago todo it, but only like five venues

(16:06):
and for some preliminary events. Andthe beauty for Chicago is, hey,
you can probably can get a wholelot of visitors coming to you because you're
gonna need to have a lot ofpeople stay down there. You make a
whole lot of sales tax base,and you don't have to do anything in
terms of infrastructure to do it.Hey, yeah, use let's use your

(16:30):
city. Okay. I think thatwould have worked. I think that that
would have been a bit of anego crush for Chicago because they can't they
can't imagine Milwaukee taking a lead insomething. That's where we could have said,
for example, with corporate sponsorship McDonald'sProud Chicago sponsor of the twenty twenty
eight Milwaukee Summer Olympic Games, somethinglike that, and having one of the

(16:56):
Olympic opening ceremony sites be Soldier Fee. The new Bear Stadium would not have
been ready and till right, butthey would have played a part in the
opening and closing ceremonies, So youwould have had a presence that Chicago wouldn't
have been ignored. But it's sortof like, even though they're not anywhere
near close to each other, nobodyhad, especially here in America, ever

(17:19):
heard associate until the twenty fourteen winningOlympic Games. We get the big prize,
but I think it also gives Chicagoa little idea. You know what,
You're still the city with the bigbron shoulders. We can do more
partnerships here, and good partnerships area nice idea between the two cities,
because together Chicago and Milwaukee is aun mega city region. But Chicago can't

(17:45):
be one without Milwaukee, you know, combining we have over ten million people
between the two. That's crazy aswell. And some of the debates going
on, including about transportation, couldhave tied nicely into the Olympic plan they've
talked about out there's a very popularAmtrak line between Milwaukee and Chicago. There's
seven I think round trips a day, and they've been talking about upgrading that

(18:07):
to a high speed rail, andthey talked about high speed rail to Madison
and maybe even up to Green Bay. That could have been a little more
fast tracked. No pun intended hadthis Olympic Games thing really taken off,
because that could have been part ofthe transportation plan. All of these developments
really do tie in with this nicely, and you do detail a lot of

(18:27):
it in the book. Yeah,it's precisely what you would have needed to
make it happen, because I don'tthink you would have been extremely happy with
the idea of major corporate sponsors havingto sit on I forty three or US
forty one now I forty one obviouslyheading up to lambeau Field and sitting in

(18:49):
all that traffic. The capability togo back and forth quickly between these cities
and having a whole bunch of trainsback and forth, and you can sell
the excess train cars to other citieswho are developing various train systems, and
I think there would have been sucha long term advantage, not just in
terms of regionalism for our populace tobe able to travel back and forth for

(19:15):
work and other things, but alsowould have made a little bit of a
dent in the drunk driving issues thatwe happen to have here in Wisconsin.
On Packers and Badger's Game exists,Think of the drunk Think of the drunk
trains that people would have would haveused where there would be no risk of
driving. Been on some of thosedrunk trains between Chicago and Milwaukee on Amtrak.

(19:36):
That enough is crazy. Yep,party time, folks, bar car.
So you had to do a heckof a lot of research when you
decided to turn this into a moreserious endeavor and eventually a book. You
had to talk with a lot ofpeople to get a lot of perspectives.
And I'd like to go into somedetails on who you reached out to in

(19:59):
the conver stations you had, andwe'll talk about that in just a second.
We'll be right back back with youon the Aeric cast. I'm Eric
Paulson talking with my friend Jay sergeiebroadcaster and now author of Greater Than the
Game's Volume one MKE twenty twenty eight, very recently released out on Amazon's self
published. There's a kindle edition andeverything. It's on sale now. And

(20:23):
we'll talk about the process of gettinga book together in a little bit,
Jay, but we want to firstof all, see how you were able
to talk with so many people Whenyou and I discussed this concept and you
were talking about your research, youwere reaching out to people who had been
actively working on Olympic game bids.You were actively talking with Olympians themselves,

(20:44):
including some locals, and one ofwhom wrote your forward. So how did
you what was your process and howdid you reach out to all these people?
It was just very, frankly coldcall. It's kind of crazy to
think that you're going to make acold call to the real estate office that's
owned by Billy Payne, the nineteenninety six Olympic Games chairman and CEO,

(21:07):
and to think that he's going tobe willing to grant you an audience to
as sort of like you're going totalk to the Wizard of I mean,
this man understands what it takes toput a game's on as well as anybody
in the United States of America.He did it. He was the guy

(21:30):
who in nineteen eighty seven, satat his kitchen table after doing a big
project for his church, and heeven wrote about this himself. He sat
down and it's like, okay,what's the next thing that I'm called to
do with my life? And thisguy who played defensive end at the University
of Georgia back in the sixties,sat with the legal pad and all of
a sudden, this brainstorm game tohim and he is like, Okay,

(21:53):
we could do this sport at thislocation, this sport at this place,
this sport at this place. Andhe goes down the whole list of all
the things you need, and hegoes to his wife and he's like,
honey, we're gonna bring the OlympicGames to Atlanta. That's my next thing.
And the most ridiculous nine year ridebegan. Three years later, they

(22:17):
got the Games. It was thefirst time ever in modern Olympic history that
a city that made a first timebid for the Olympics got it. That's
a lot of cities have to gothrough this several times before they can land
the Games. They got lucky,They got massively lucky, and they pulled
it off. Intod a fantastic job. It was in most areas a plus

(22:40):
for their city, and so Iwent down to visit him. I went
to his office and he was willingto grant me an hour, and we
sat down and I showed him whatI showed you and what we had developed
since that time in a whole bunchof different listening sessions and brainstorming sessions and
just focus groups within our private discernmentteam of what it was going to take

(23:07):
to do it. And we showedthem this. And I didn't want to
say too much about what was discussedin the meeting, but I did,
but I revealed in the book.He point blank said, y'all got the
venues. You've got what it takesto do this, and whether or not
what comes from it, is itOlympic Games or not. You need to

(23:33):
continue this process because the fruit thatyou're going to find within the city of
Milwaukee is going to help your cityin some fashion, because if nothing else,
it can show you what resources youreally have and really open your eyes.
We can do big things here.And you did a very exhaustive study

(23:53):
of those resources. It's one ofthe things that impressed me most is,
you know, we talked about anAmerican family as a venue for things we
talked about the Arenas. Peisser Forumwas not quite there yet. It was
Bradley Center at the time. Butthen you started looking out at other venues,
even up to Lambeau, over toCamp Randall, and then just all
of the other things that we have. We have an Olympic facility in Milwaukee

(24:15):
all year round in the form ofthe Petit Center. We know what's going
on with Olympic things. But youdiscussed all of the existing venues and then
some with minor modifications to make themgrow in others that could be developed from
scratch, and you were finding areaslike what is now called the Harbor District
that was ripe for redevelopment at thetime. Now it is redeveloping a little
differently, but there were places whereyou could PLoP down major venues, first

(24:40):
of all without as much relocation assome of these other cities had, and
just thinking it out in a waywhere you could really have all of those
games activities hosted in a fairly tightarea in the city of Milwaukee, and
just a little bit more reaching outto other places. It's about a one
thousand acre area south of downtown onsouth of the third Ward and north of

(25:03):
Bayview. The Harbor District now isdoing a fantastic job of redeveloping this area
that was mostly open, and whatyou have to do, what you would
have had to have done, wouldbe to help relocate these businesses to other
locations in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. Forexample, the Nadera factory right there probably

(25:25):
would have had to have found anotherport within the state to help locate it
there. So you have that freespace, But that's a thousand acres enough
space to put a major Olympic stadium, a swimming complex that could have turned
into an NHL arena afterwards, acycling complex that Trek Bikes could have taken

(25:45):
over and used it as a productionand testing facility, and tennis courts that
would have been converted for communities youtake down the stands after the game,
a lot of demountable venues around thecity as well. But beyond those stadiums,
what helps pay for them is thetwenty nine thousand bedrooms of condo and

(26:07):
apartment space and the media center thatyou're building that could turn into high technology
business space that would be incredibly,incredibly lucrative real estate for private investors.
They would have had to have agreedto help pay for the stadium, and
they could reap the benefits off ofthe state eum use, but also the

(26:33):
profits from all this real estate.I mean, that's Lakeside View, that's
with downtown Views. You're creating awhole high technology neighborhood in one thousand acres.
I mean, that would have reengineered so much of ourself. Yeah,
there were a few challenges of someof that space because some of it
was like where we Energy stored theircoal. Some of them were brownfields basically,

(26:57):
But and the timing was such whereyou could have worked all of that
out, and in some cases that'sbeing done right now. Komatsu put their
headquarters in the area now, theUWM School of Freshwater Sciences is down there
now, so you're starting to seeon a smaller scale that kind of development
happening in that area. The otherthing, as you were alluding to,

(27:18):
is the Olympic Village precisely that levelof real estate investment that essentially pops into
an entirely new part of the city. And the other advantage to that area
is that it has rail right there. The freight rail you could have theoretically
built and maybe This could be somethingto discuss down the road, some sort

(27:41):
of a light rail system or someother civic rail using those tracks. You
make the agreements with the freight railcompanies in terms of when you could run
commuter rail at various times, andyou could have figured out a way to
work it out. They do itwith Antrak, and it could have served

(28:02):
so much in that neighborhood and outto other parts of the city, and
to use rail to help get employeesto companies that are looking for people,
to get potential employees to get tocompanies that are struggling to find workers.
It's like the fixing of the finalmile problem that you so often see where

(28:25):
you have people in inner cities whocan't get out to suburbs to work jobs.
This could have been a major pieceof a solution for that that not
just affects thousands of lives positively,but it fixes your city's accountomy well.
Definitely there's some ROI with that andthe existing right of way of those freight
tracks. That's one of three majortranscontinental train lines that goes from Vancouver to

(28:48):
Virginia Beach. In the larger term, that's where Amtrak has its Silver Eagle
that takes people out to the PacificNorthwest. So it's a very through track.
You can get supplies in and outpretty eason on those tracks with all
of those connections, it has soand you're not only you're by downtown,
you're right by the lake with thelake views. You're also minutes from the
airport. The Olympic Games love tohave short spans of time for transportation between

(29:15):
the airport and the athletes and mediaand dignitary village, and between that village
and where your competition sites are goingto be in perfect LA traffic. For
twenty twenty eight, where the gamesare going to be held in LA,
the distance between LAX and UCLA,where they're going to have the athletes stay

(29:40):
is about twelve minutes. When isit ever perfect traffic in LA? It's
really ever the case. Maybe atthree am on an idol Tuesday, that's
about it. I seven ninety fourto get you there in six minutes.
There's never been an Olympic Games inmodern history where you have that distance.
Then you look at fanning out betweenthe village and so many of the venues

(30:07):
within Milwaukee County. Number one,you have I want to say twenty five
venues within Milwaukee County that would havehosted events. You could get to all
of them save one, I think, in less than a half hour of

(30:27):
drive time. You'd have twenty fourvenues within a half hour. Except for
LA's volleyball venue poly Pavilion on theUCLA campus, those venues are almost all
gonna be at least twenty minutes away. That's big time advantage Milwaukee. It's

(30:48):
massive advantage with that. Then youadd the fact that you could have the
airport right there to send on usingsmaller planes between Milwaukee and Milwaukee, Green
Bay Milwaukee and Midway Airport in Chicago, so you don't tie up O'Hare.
You can get from venue to venue, from door to door to any Olympic

(31:15):
venue at worst within an hour anda half, probably less. And actually
for the smaller planes and the privatejets, there were options in the area
like Timmerman Field on the northwest sideof Milwaukee and Baton they call themselves Baton
International Airport, but that's in servingRacine, which is twenty minutes south of
Milwaukee County, fifteen to twenty minutes. So yeah, you didn't They didn't

(31:38):
all have to fly into Mitchell Internationaleither. All these different options that you
could use to shrink the footprints ofthe games, and even if you're going
to drive it from the athletes's villageto the farthest venue, it would have
been the first summer game since nineteenthirty two were every single venue would have

(32:00):
been less than two hours away froman athlete's village. And that includes Lambeau
because you had Lambeau in some ofyour plan. Yep, Lambo and Camp
Randall, both those would have beenpartially renovated because they don't fit a soccer
field. It's twenty two yards widerthan a regular football field, so you
would have had to have taken seatsout of like maybe the first seven rows

(32:23):
of seats in each stadium, butyou put them back high quality temporary seats
during the football season so those fanscan use it. And then as part
of a legacy, especially with MilwaukeeMLS or NWSL soccer, part of their
seasons get played in Madison and inGreen Bay in the spring to give them

(32:45):
events, money making events on apermanent basis to help pay for that renovation,
and that becomes another set of revenuestreams for the Packers and for the
University of Wisconsin. That takes meetingsand convincing and things like that, but
there are ways to do it.And what's interesting Milwaukee is getting a new

(33:06):
pro soccer team. Now, yeah, it's a much more venue than,
say, absolutely than your even MLS, and I don't think they have a
capability of expansion to MLS size onthat footprint, but at least they're doing
something with the sport, and thevenue looks fantastical. It really does.
Right now. It's called like IronDistrict Stadium. I don't think they've found
a full sponsor for it. They'restill in name the Team campaign going on.

(33:30):
In fact, at Summerfest this pastyear, they had a stand for
Milwaukee Pro Soccer and they're just sellingT shirts that say that, Like that
sounds like Washington Football team to mea little bit. But they'll get a
name and a sponsor and everything.But yeah, some of these venue developments
are happening now anyway, just becauseof the sheer demand for certain sports and

(33:50):
World Cup soccer, I think rubsoff on a lot of people that I
think that gin's up a lot moreexcitement for soccer in general. So we're
seeing the expansion of these sports herein the US and including in Milwaukee.
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

(34:14):
was approached as a potential training site. I'm not sure if that's going to
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 Atlamba, but youcould do the exhibition matches, which they

(34:36):
did. But I mean that sportwould have had a permanent foothold in Milwaukee
within Olympic Stadium they're constructed. Ithink it's interesting because a lot of people
are thinking, Okay, American FamilyField, Okay Lamba, okay camp Randall,
what were some of the other venuesthat you had in your book.

(34:57):
I'm want to just have you namemaybe four or five things. Is that
people might not think of or realizethat we have as assets in the area
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 scheduler with ways thatthe IOC now let cities use multiple venues

(35:23):
for the same sport at different timesduring the games, we would have cut
down on the number of venues weactually would have had to have built.
Imagine downtown Milwaukee where the only thingyou would have necessarily have had to have
constructed would have been what was originallyplanned to be the Marquette Athletic Performance Research

(35:45):
Center in the space that is nowbeing taken up by the Milwaukee Iron District
soccer team. That would have beenlike a football field sized indoor track and
field, soccer, lacrosse practice facilitywhere you could have held various indoor sports.
Imagine the space between there the AlmaguireCenter and the Marquette Campus five Serve

(36:09):
Forum, the Milwaukee Arena, andnow the expanded Wisconsin Center now called the
Barrett Center. Along with construction ofa roof but outdoor temporary six thousand seats
mini arena, you could have heldfifteen sports in seven venues within a square

(36:32):
mile in the West Town and MarquetteUniversity portion of downtown Milwaukee. That's about,
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

(36:55):
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, the area of State FairPark, the State Fair Park Racetrack,
historic race. The racing community lovesit. At the time, there were

(37:17):
very few if any race is goingon there. You take the track out,
you make it grass for most ofit, you take parts of it
and use for your action sports likeyour BMX, cycling, like sport climb,

(37:40):
sport climbing, skateboarding, and therest as your equestrian venue. You've
got there. But that's the pointI'm making about how much you were thinking
all of that through. I mean, every anybody you brought this to had
to have been impressed by the levelof detail. The angel was in the

(38:04):
details. You usually hear the phrasede belts some of the details, because
so often in life, but alsoin Olympic games, it's the little things
that people forget that become the problem. In our case, we had to
make the little things a solution,like, well, what are you going
to do about creating a Whitewater slalomnews site? Because it has we are

(38:28):
officially created. There's a lagoon inWashington Park that isn't being used much except
for fishing. Convert that and afterthe games handed off to the Urban Ecology
Center. When it comes to softball, we're not going to have a bunch
of independent minor league baseball teams inthe area. One of those the Rock

(38:49):
now called Franklin Field Perfect Softball menu. Well, and now you also have
a Wisconsin Brewing Company stadium in Oconomowalk, which has the Lake Country Dot Counds.
Also in the American Association, thatcould have been an option as well.
I mean, all these different thingsthat you don't think could be used
for major competition. There are options. You just have to understand what you

(39:15):
have at your disposal. Really,the key is we had more at our
disposal than we thought, and Ithink for you, essentially, the more
you did research the more excited yougot about it because you realized how much
more there was exactly. And thething that we were trying to do within
our group, especially what you tooka fantastic part in, and I'll always

(39:36):
be thankful for that, is thatwe didn't want to just jump in and
bid for a games. Because intwenty twelve, when we came up with
this, they were starting to takebids or the United States bid for a
twenty twenty four Summer Olympic Games.Boston was going all in quickly for four.

(40:00):
And I was just realizing, whenwe need this, 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
know what you're doing. You betterhave all those I dotted teach crossed so

(40:20):
that the IOC can't 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, uh,
And I know we talked about BillyPayne. You've talked to a lot
of other people that we haven't gotteninto it yet. But you did do

(40:42):
a lot of research with the IOCand how they interpret all of these bids
and what they want, and thatcauses some issues. But how was it,
because I know you talked with them, How was there, how was
the reception to it and what whatwhat made you accept and or concerned?
You want to see what it takesto build an Olympic Games. I can

(41:06):
email you right now, erict.They probably have emailed it to you,
the twenty twenty four IOC post bidcity contract. The details they put in
there are incredible. Oh, it'ssometimes Addictus. Yeah, it's mongo size.

(41:27):
So you better understand and know howto dot all those when you first
present the plan, because you've gotstakeholders that are incredibly different in what they're
looking for. You've got the IOCand their stakeholders, and they want to
be able to hold the party theway that they want to hold it.
But then you've got your citizens ofyour city, and you've got various beliefs

(41:52):
among politicians, which we all knowabout in the state of Wisconsin, let
alone across the entire United States.Make sure that your plan can meet all
those constituencies' needs, or you don'tbid. That's why I always thought that
our plan was a discernment, notan automatic let's jump in. And as

(42:15):
it happened, LA was given thetwenty twenty eight Games, four years earlier
than any city had ever been grantedat Games, simply because the IOC was
running out of cities. That's whatthey were starting to run into. Yeah,
they've they've made it very complicated andvery difficult, and yeah, fewer

(42:35):
and fewer cities would be viable candidates, and even fewer of those were like,
well is this even worth it?Which is why you need to have
solid rock, solid cost control.And I think the IOC has sort of
begun to see the market forces arecatching up with them, basically exactly.
And that's why they went with LosAngeles for twenty two eight, because they

(43:00):
had a bid where like Milwaukee andmaybe even slightly better than Milwaukee in terms
of construction needs. It's there.They almost literally could roll out the balls
right now and hold the Olympic Gamesif they had to. But I still

(43:20):
think that if that had not beengiven to LA for twenty twenty eight that
early, and if we would havecome to the realization dott in the eyes
crossing the t's getting support from thebusiness community, the political community, the
community at large, particularly civic leaderswith whom they could begin to understand very

(43:42):
quickly this would not be a gameswith highly negative social ramifications, that it
would be done as a positive forthe city. I think we could have
put up a very surprisingly good bidthat would have at least no doubt that
would have been a strong bid thatwould have been a finalist, if not

(44:02):
a winner, against La And what'sinteresting is thinking about the politics at the
time. Tom Barrett was the mayorof Milwaukee then Chevy Johnson Cavalier. Johnson
technically is the mayor now, andhe expressed a desire to get Milwaukee to
grow again, to be a cityof one million people. Right now it's

(44:23):
about five hundred and eighty thousand.So he likes to think big. He
mayor. I don't know if hehas all of the right plans in place
to make things like that happen,but I like that he thinks big.
Had he been mayor when this hadbeen brought up, I think he would
have really been very excited about it. I think he would have been jumping

(44:44):
up and down the possibility and atleast been willing to go through the discernment
process like what we were doing.I think it was right for us to
pull back, watch, see howit needs to be done, get things
done properly, and write, becausethen we knew we could have had a

(45:06):
bid that would have been relatively foolproof, one that the community could have
really gotten underneath. And that's anissue the IOC also really has, which
is getting city support, because peopleare much more wise to the problems of
the Olympic Games than they ever usedto be. I don't believe there's ever
been a referendum about an Olympic Gamesthat has ever passed. Some are binding,

(45:31):
some are non binding. But Ithink this could have passed that test.
And if you pass that public testand you can still meet the needs
of the IOC, you're doing something. And it would be great to have
something like that that the city ofMilwaukee can rally around. There are huge
areas of the city that are inneed of redevelopment and some investment injection,

(45:55):
if you will, and this couldhave been, and it's still could be
someday a great way to kind ofbecome the catalyst for that kind of development
and certainly creates a lot of jobs, albeit many temporary, but still that's
the boost deal you need half thetime. And we also would have had
plans in place to do incredible recruitingof the unemployed and underemployed within the area,

(46:20):
because you're talking a six year buildingboom that it takes to make an
Olympic Games happen, and then theseventh year the games happen. In that
space where you normally have a sevenyear space between when you win the bid
and when you host the games,that's enough time to not just get the
construction done, but to go aftera degree, everything from a GV to

(46:45):
a master's degree, depending upon whatyou need to be able to make yourself
more marketable. Yeah, the constructionjobs would have been temporary, but you
could have with grant money that Ithink we could have gone and gone after
and received, we could have reallymade our workforce much more educated in areas

(47:07):
that businesses are looking for, notjust educated in certain theories and things like
that, but skilled workers in trades, which is a huge need. There's
a huge gap between the need andthe people that are able to fulfill them.
Welders. That's a popular one totalk about because without a degree,

(47:28):
you learned a weld well, you'veimmediately got an eighty thousand dollars a year
or better job with full benefits.Things like that. H fact, all
of those things they have traditionally kindof been I shouldn't say traditionally maybe in
the last thirty forty years been shunneda little bit as career ideas. Now
that's becoming a very hot and veryreasonable thing to pursue. And I think

(47:50):
for a lot of people growing upin areas where the school systems have been
underserving them a little bit, theeconomy's been underserving them a little bit,
the infrastructure has been underserving them alittle bit, there is opportunity with something
like this to get everybody lifted andthen they have opportunities personally to move themselves
to the next level with this asthe base, and our plan would have

(48:15):
taken those individuals who would participate insuch a program, bringing businesses who are
going to use that high technology spacein what we would have called Olympic Harbor.
They need workers. These workers needjobs, meet them up with those
workers, finding with job placement assistance, new family sustaining careers. We would

(48:39):
have had something in place with thegrant money. There, you're taking all
that extra sweat equity that you've putin. That is sweat equity that becomes
a down payment on a house,a condo that was built for the Olympic
Games. One of those is nowyours. That re engineers an entire city,

(49:02):
both in terms of its economy andeven in terms of the issues of
segregation, Milwaukee being one of themost segregated cities in America. You have
just helped create a middle class,integrated neighborhood in a new part of the
city that is incredibly easy in termsof be able to go to work and

(49:28):
create a life surrounding that in atotally new part of the city. You've
just re engineered the city in awhole bunch of words. The urban planning
ideas with this and the social engineeringof this is it's very fascinating to imagine
what all the possibilities are, andparts of Milwaukee are very ripe for that.
It's needed. I think you needto be careful when it comes to

(49:51):
potential displacement, because we've seen howproblematic that is. Both with the Olympic
Games, and if you're going touse a neighborhood that already exists. We've
saw that, say with the constructionof the freeways back in the nineteen fifties
and sixties in our city. Andthat's where with what we would have done,
especially with an area where you didn'thave much residential population at all,

(50:15):
you don't displace without an improved replacement, we could have afforded to do that
with what we would have done withthe Games. You just have to be
cognizant of it enough, with aplan when it comes to all the different
factors to make sure that doesn't happen. There's a way to do it.

(50:38):
You just have to be in theright mindset to do that. And you
were talking about kind of that OlympicI don't want to say Olympic Village,
you call it Olympic Park, OlympicHarbor, Olympic Harbor. So that area,
but those venues could really some ofthe new development ones and the improvement
ones. They could be out inother parts of the city as well.

(50:58):
We talked about Century City, thatarea where Aosmith used to be in the
around the thirtieth and Capital and upand down that area. That area could
be right for some sort of developmentthat could have been related to the Olympic
Games, immediately improving the neighborhoods rightaround it. We were talking about moving
some of the companies that were inthe Harbor district at the time into Century

(51:21):
City. That would have been amazing, it would have. And they're already
working on building train cars because railis well served there. It's a couple
miles away from any of the freeways, but they're well served by rail,
and that could have been a goodcommuter hub too. Exactly. All these
different things are how you need toapproach in Olympic Games, baby, because
it's not just okay, let's putup stadiums and roll out the balls and

(51:44):
bring the world in and the citygets improved. So often that's not what
happens. You have to really becompletely integrated with your thinking in all this
re engineering of your city and makingsure it's done positively in terms of visitors
from around the world. Part ofthe reason to host the Olympic Games is

(52:05):
to lift your profile and you haveopportunities for redevelopment. But there's also supposed
to be a massive influx of revenuefrom visitors. What were some of the
latest numbers that you had computed wherethere could be an ROI scene on the
Olympic Games. There were days whenyou literally could double the population of the

(52:27):
city that bag, so over halfa million people. You're talking five six
hundred thousand people attending events in thecity of Milwaukee in like eight summer fests
exactly. Now we would have hadSummerfest going, I mean an Olympic length
length Summerfest. We would have hadState Fair going, an Olympic length State

(52:50):
Fair. Now that we would nothave been able to use necessarily all of
the State Fair proper because you couldn'tpark inside the track. You got a
questioning going on there, and therewould not have been all the vendors inside
the Wisconsin Exposition Park. You takeout the columns inside there, redo the
roof and hold bowling. That wouldhave been a replacement for surfing. I

(53:13):
mean Paris twenty twenty four has surfingin Tahiti. That's a bit of a
hike, exactly. We could puta wave machine in Lake Michigan and h
boy, you ain't going to createthe kind of waves you need for for
Olympic But you know what, theyhave a head start on Milwaukee, those
sandbars. I mean, they're thefreshwater surfing capital of the world. Wouldn't
take a lot to just improve thata little bit artificially for a while.

(53:35):
Maybe maybe that our thought was instead, because that's a sport that you sort
of can choose to have or notas a local sport, we would have
replaced it with bowling. I mean, how more Milwaukee. It's true,
I'm still sorry about the American BowlingCongress moving to Dallas Fort Worth, but
I know bowling is huge here inthis city. It's so quintessentially Milwaukee,

(53:59):
and it's the world's big participation sport. But I mean, you would have
had all that going on places wherepeople could go when there isn't an event
happening. Airbnb would have probably beena choice of a huge amount of homeowners

(54:20):
in metropolitan Milwaukee wall they're escaping toother parts of Wisconsin or other parts of
the country to escape. But itstill would have been a net benefit in
so many fashions in terms of justthis huge infusion into the economy. You're
talking billions. Especially that overcomes thetheory that when you hold the Olympic Games

(54:45):
you don't get the net benefit becauseso many people don't want to visit that
area, and so many people whoare residents want to leave the area.
In cities like London or Rio dejan Niro, I see that be a
negative because it's such a huge touristcity in both those cases. Anyway,

(55:07):
Milwaukee is the best summer city inAmerica in my opinion, but not many
people know it. I call itthe San Diego of the Midwest in the
summer. It is, but it'sa hidden jewel. You're not gonna have
that effect. It's gonna be anet positive on your economy, and you're
gonna have people from hundreds of countriesaround the world come into the city.

(55:30):
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, clicking beers, clickingspotted cows. I mean, how much
more quite essential, welcome the worldto the city known as the gathering Place?

(55:52):
Can you get Yeah? When youthink about the density of this city
too, because Milwaukee had about sevenhundred sixty 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

(56:13):
would have built the civic rail system. I mean, you would have had
I think we had like five linesplanned in the city, fanning out to
various suburbs, and you would havehad to have used at big time,
plus using like bus rapid transit,which is already nown development. You've got
that now, Yeah, they justrecently opened that up and down. And

(56:34):
I 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

(56:59):
lines go through downtown out 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 usedful. And thehop is proposed to extend north into Feisser

(57:19):
Form in the Deer District and eventually, i'd believe up into what we call
Bronzeville. This would have expedited thatplan, I'm sure, oh, easily
easily. So you had talked aboutthis for twenty twenty eight in the book
Greater Than the Games. Twenty twentyeight was kind of the specific year named.
But that doesn't mean this can't bethe blueprint. I've heavily done blueprint

(57:44):
already for perhaps a bid the nexttime a US city would be eligible to
host. At minimum, you're goingto have to wait till twenty forty because
the shortest span of time that's everhappened where the same country hosted a Summer
Olympic Games was between LA and Atlantanineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety six,

(58:06):
and it's been a thirty two yearwait between Atlanta and now LA again with
twenty twenty eight. So you're goingto have a space in time where you're
going to have to look at whatthe city looks like at a certain time,
if you want to reconsider it,bid I got the perfect possibility for
Milwaukee. Twenty forty eight, thetwo hundredth birthday of the state of Wisconsin.

(58:29):
Yes, the bi centennial, theperfect opportunity to invite the world to
your party. Roll out the cheese, kurds, roll off the spot a
cow. Actually, Miller probably wouldhave been your beer sponsor. I would
think you would. You never know. Yeah, And oh, I meant
to get into that too. Thecorporate sponsorship Milwaukee outpunches its weight when it

(58:52):
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. Molson Corp. Is technicallynow headquartered in Chicago, but Miller,
the largest brewery, is still there. But we also have Harley Davidson,
We have ge Healthcare, we haveJohnson Controls. I know part of the

(59:13):
they're taken over by Tycho and someof that headquarters is in Ireland. So
all this has been changed around alittle. But there are still a lot
of major corporate sponsors. Northwestern Mutualscertainly one of them that could be big
supporters and host a lot of greatthings and really raise their profiles too.
Not just that, but two hoursaway, is that big beheam of Chicago.

(59:35):
Yes, it would not have beenin the city except for a few
events, but you know you hadgotten a 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 ofdowntown Milwaukee. There would have been a
lot of corporate support for these games. Far punching your weight. That's when

(59:59):
Chicago be an advantage for it.Well, and you could kind of frame
that as part of the un megacity of 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 Fondde Lac. You have Cohler in Sheboygan
and some other major corporations there Madison. So there are there were other additional

(01:00:23):
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,of Cohler, we talked about them being
the company running the hotel that wouldhave been an at Olympic stadium. A

(01:00:45):
nice fifty story tower on the eastside of the stadium would have been a
perfect tie in. And you don'tthink they would have They wouldn't love to
put in the fixtures for twenty ninethousand bedrooms worth of Cotton's just going to
mention that far. Yeah, that'sa big business opportunity exactly. And that's
the way to overcome the amount ofhotel rooms that Milwaukee doesn't have at the

(01:01:07):
moment. They've got enough for theDemocratic and Republican conventions. That's why the
cities garnered both of them. Theycan'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'vegot some possibilities there. And that's where
you've thought out so much in everydetail, and it was taken. I

(01:01:30):
don't know anybody who really after talkingwith you about it in detail, still
had a couple of people who wereunwilling to look at the details because so
many thoughts were present in their mindabout what an Olympic Games means. It
takes rethinking, innovating, re understandingwhat an Olympics involves in order to make

(01:01:55):
it work. That's what you,I and all of people who were involved
within our discernment group had a chanceto deeply look at. And you did
a fantastic job of all this aswell. Don't knock yourself and give yourself
some credit with this. Well,thank you, Jay. And you did
talk with Bonnie Blair Bonnie Blair Crookshank. Now she wrote the forward in your

(01:02:17):
book. What was her impression.Well, we had a chance to talk
for a few years after the OlympicGames. Idea finally waned and I interviewed
her for a story for WTMJ,And after I stopped the tape, I
told her about this Olympic idea andit felt hair brained, at least in

(01:02:39):
her mind. I'm taking a guess, I'm not going to put words in
her mind, but I think alot of other people would have that idea
unless you showed the detail. Sothen finally I shared it with her.
A few years later, she openedit up and like you, her mind
was bottled. It's like, ohmy gosh, there's a there there.

(01:03:02):
A lot of dominos would have tofall, but there's a there there mm
hm. And she saw it andwe talked about it later, and she
was willing to write the forward,from which I'm so thankful. Part of
that forward included the quote Jay's approachtakes the intricate nuts and bolts of an
Olympic plan, brings them to lifein the story, and shows how it
makes sense while solving a lot ofthe issues within the Olympic Games. That's

(01:03:25):
part of the forward that she wrotefor you, And it's coming from the
perspective of someone who's been to awhole bunch of them, and she competed
in four of them. She's beento almost everyone since on the winter side
and a couple on the summer sideas well. She knows as well as
anybody what it takes to pull thisoff from the athlete's perspective, and she

(01:03:49):
was really excited about even a lotof improvements we made for the athletes themselves.
Number one, like the distance betweencompetition venues. She loved that idea.
She saw the regionalism that we hadthat is much more often used in
the Winter Olympic Games, because youhave to have a mountain locale and a

(01:04:10):
city locale to do it, andoften they're nowhere near each other, so
it's not like in Denver are twoexamples, so that's not Calgary two.
But yeah, most of the timethe mountains are far away from the whole
city. So she gets the ideaof a regional concept and even innovations we
came up with about what to dowith an opening ceremony because so often it's
held on a Friday night and theyschedule competitions for Saturday. Well, number

(01:04:35):
one, you can't have most ofyour athletes or some of your athletes are
gonna have to miss it. They'regonna have to miss the biggest night of
their athletic life before their competition becausethey have a competition the next day.
They get to miss the party,They get to miss one hundred thousand people
screaming for him, cheering for themin such a special moment. And there's

(01:05:01):
also the fact that, well,on a Friday night, are you watching
TV, are you going to thebars, are you going out party?
Are you gonna go catch a concertor a game or something. You're most
likely not gonna be in front ofa television set Thursday night, you are,
and the Olympic Games actually begin onthe Wednesday before the opening ceremonies because

(01:05:25):
you've got soccer competitions going on.So there's no reason why you can't move
the opening ceremony to a Thursday nightmust see TV when more people are gonna
be home, better television revenue orthe ISIC loves that. And then start
your competition on Friday later in theday when athletes have had a chance to

(01:05:47):
rest. You just guarantee every athletegets to participate in the opening ceremony and
then can start their competition with whatwe came up with, which we call
with a five o'clock start happy hour. How more Milwaukee can he get?
Yeah, on the athletes have afew beers and then there set new records

(01:06:10):
whatever. More of that. Butwell, you already had written essentially a
book about the Games when I wasreviewing you know what you had put down
with all the research. What madeyou decide to write Greater than the Games
Volume one as an actual book andwhat process did you go through? It
was really the idea of this needsto be shared. We had so much

(01:06:32):
about the Olympic Games, about thecity Milwaukee, about Wisconsin, so much
data and philosophy and innovation that wecould share with this. So what we
decided to do was, I mean, let's put all this together and let's
do it in the format of thefirst ten days of a nineteen day Olympic

(01:06:55):
Games. That's why there's going tobe a volume two coming. But Volume
one is the first ten days ofthe Olympic Games. Let's give a narrative
description in some of the vignettes ofwhat our ideas, our innovations would have
been for the games, as wellas just what it would have looked like.

(01:07:15):
What would have looked like like,for example, the first day,
the idea of an Olympic volunteer whohad been part of the construction process beforehand
and who had gained a better educationover that time. He's taking the train
in the new Civic train system fromthe north side of Milwaukee up to one

(01:07:42):
of our two Milwaukee soccer venues,which would have been an expanded E Line
Soccer Park, which is in northwestMilwaukee, Round seventy second and get Hope
and it's about thirty thousand people,and then take down the seats and sell
them that to the Olympic Games,just like the idea of picturing him working
as a volunteer selling souvenirs, viewingthe competition, going on the very first

(01:08:08):
event of the games, and hearinglike Australian and Swedish fans on the train
right next to him, and theidea of oh my gosh, we're holding
TAILCC parties at six o'clock in themorning with blooding there is right on good
Hope Road to start an Olympics.What well it is inspirational for someone,

(01:08:30):
And that's kind of a good exampleof a case study that you have in
there, like how it affects individualsprecisely because a games is a macro changer
of your cities, but those macrochanges happen and affect individual lives. So
let's look at it from individual people'sperspective, sort of third person, individually

(01:08:57):
and see how our ideas would haveimpacted people. Make it approachable instead of
just a whole bunch of stats andideas. That's what we were trying to
do with the book. And soyou're saying there is a volume two coming
out that dives further into the actualOlympic Games themselves and as well as more
analysis of post Olympic Games post OlympicGames, other issues that we didn't even

(01:09:21):
even have a chance to touch onwhen it comes to innovations that are needed
within the Olympic Games themselves. Imean, there's so much more for us
to say about budgeting. We talkeda lot about it with our idea for
Olympic Stadium. If you got thePackers coming back and playing, you can
make this stadium as big as youwant and sell it out because the season

(01:09:44):
ticket waiting list is so long.Let's build it one hundred and twenty thousand
seats. Let's go big, Let'smake it the biggest football style stadium in
the world. Why not, becausethen you can have as many events as
you possibly can, and inside thatstadium you're selling three point six million tickets
worth of events. You're expanding youroverall ticket sales, for example, to

(01:10:11):
sixteen million available. That's like sixmillion more than any games has ever had.
You want to make a profit whenyou're hosting the Olympic Games, that's
a perfect way to do it.Clearly thought this through on the financial side
as well. That's an excellent point. Try it. I'm no economist,
but why not well, it doesgo back to thinking big for Milwaukee and

(01:10:34):
how the Olympic Games can be leveragedinto making the city rise to the next
level and think down long term,which we rarely see anymore. Precisely,
Milwaukee a city that I loved somuch. We had to move away because
of family reasons, especially for mywife's family, But we love Milwaukee so

(01:10:58):
much that city needs a jumpstart.It is a world class city that has
its issues. You need something thatis not just going to launch a city,
but that you can use as away to heal it. That was
our intent with our Olympic idea.I'm not saying Milwaukee should go after the

(01:11:19):
Olympic Games. You need to discernif it's right at the time of the
opportunities available, but look outside thebox for solutions, not only when it
comes to what your city can dothat's big, but how you can make
big changes positively for the city withit. And Milwaukee has a history of

(01:11:42):
doing things. It's people doing thingsthat have had dramatic impacts on the world.
Everything from the motorcycle as we knowit to the computer keyboard. The
typewriter was invented in Milwaukee. Somany other innovations, and not just in
the city but in the region too. Everything from malted milk to the outboard
motor was invented in this region.The more innovative the area can be,

(01:12:04):
the better it can grow. Andyou put a lot of innovative ideas into
the Olympic bid considerations you've done,and therefore into this book, which is
why it's called Greater than the Games. I imagine precisely. It's about recognizing
that you don't just do an OlympicGames for an Olympic game's sake, you
do it for a greater purpose,and that was our I think some other

(01:12:28):
cities might read this book and adaptthe principles to their own bids. I'd
love to see it. If itmakes the games better, if it makes
cities better then it would have beenwithout it. Absolutely well, Milwaukee better
take notice. Then Have you senta copy to the mayor? I should,
I absolutely could. I'm still waitingfor my own personal shipment in.

(01:12:51):
I'm having some issues with it withthe US Postal Service, but no I
get past that, I may say, I'm probably send one to the mayor,
all right, so you can getGreater than the Games Volume one MK
twenty twenty eight, there will bea volume two, possibly a volume three.
You never know. It is onAmazon available right now. It just
got released well as we speak,a couple of weeks ago, and it

(01:13:13):
was number one, and I thinkstill is number one for new releases in
its category. Yes, it isin Olympics and Paralympics category, as I
look at my screen right now,number one new release. So congratulations on
that. That's already a heck ofa feat. Thank you so much,
all right, Jay Sergei broadcaster extraordinaire, Olympic planner, extraordinaire city champion even

(01:13:36):
though he's not living in the cityright now. You never know, you
might come back, Jay, I'dlove it. And next time I see
you, man, we gotta getsome happy tap. You gotta get some
pizza. Deer reading my mind.I love it, all right, Jay,
thanks so much for being on theair cast today. And yes you
should go read Greater Than the Games. Order it on Amazon right now,
right, Jay, you got it. Thank you so much, Matt.

(01:13:58):
Rather intriguing and inspiring, is it, Jay Sergeie right there, long time
Milwaukee broadcaster and now successful author ofGreater Than the Games Volume one, MKE
twenty twenty eight, and as youheard in our conversation now he thinks Milwaukee
could make a bid for twenty fortyif it were so inclined. He certainly
creates the blueprint for it. Soif you want to buy the book,
I have the link to the bookon Amazon on the State Trunk Tour podcast

(01:14:19):
notes in this episode, check itout. It actually really is a great
read, and while you're watching theOlympics you may be that much more inspired.
So we'll be back with another episodesoon on the State Trunk Tour podcast
talking about road trips and destinations andall kinds of fun you can have around
the State Olympics or not. Thanksfor listening, I'm Eric Paulson. We'll

(01:14:39):
talk with you again soon on theState Trunk Tour podcast, and make sure
you check out the latest at Statetrunk Tour dot com.