Well said.

Chicago Tribune editorial:

...
Olympiad or no, Chicago needs to become a perpetual mecca for small businesses in particular. Their energetic potential is explosive. Make it so easy and welcoming, Chicago, for them to start up here that they can't imagine going elsewhere. This means shifting a mind set that currently sees them as a source of fees, fines and other revenues, only secondly of growth and opportunity.

This city has reinvented itself before, without the provocation of an Olympiad.

Chicago was a "City on the brink" in 1981 when the Tribune series with that title looked at this metropolis and its bleak post-industrial prospects. The world was changing; grit and brawn didn't matter so much anymore. The harsh competition of globalization was dawning; structural decline was palpable in cities ill-equipped for this rigorous economic game. By the mid-'80s, Chicago's ugly racial politics and its City Council wars made the city a national embarrassment, famously jabbed by The Wall Street Journal as "Beirut on the lake." All arrows pointed south except the jobless rate. That soared.

Why didn't Chicago plummet like so many heartland cities in what the Tribune series called "an arc of economic crisis"? Partly because of an innate spirit that created a city out of a swampy onion patch--and then improbably promised to host the world at a glittering gala just 22 years after the Great Fire of 1871. Hence the wildly successful Columbian Exposition.

Partly, too, because of can-do hucksterism: See a problem. Solve a problem. Make a buck.

And partly because of leadership--political, civic, business, cultural. At critical moments, powerful Chicagoans have reached high. Why not? What did they have to lose?

Pinched vision isn't this city's civic heritage--from Montgomery Ward's sacred lakefront park to Daniel H. Burnham's "Make no little plans" to Mayor Daley's crowd-pleasing Millennium Park.

Chicagoans love their city but see its warts every day. We know its challenges and its weaknesses. And we can't forget how this steel and stone metropolis, rising like a castle from the flat expanse of the lake's broad basin, astonishes newcomers. Its architecture, museums, parks, flowers are always a revelation, as is the richness of its neighborhoods.

Chicago is a world-class city. The Olympics wouldn't have changed that. But the games would have showcased this city for the world in a way no other event could. Now it's up to Chicago, its leaders, citizens and businesses to achieve that at a time when competition for jobs, brains, talent and investment is as likely to come from New Delhi as New York.

Some Chicagoans are celebrating today because the XXXI Olympiad won't disrupt their summer of 2016; many others are disappointed. It would have been a grand party in our own front yard. But it wasn't to be.

It's time to get back to what we do best: See a problem. Solve a problem. Make a buck.

Be proud, Chicago. You went for gold.