In a half century as a sports journalist, I came across countless practitioners of performance dexterity. Jocks who could roll with the punches, professionals capable of conjuring last-minute heroics, coaches and trainers who could mold champions. Jay Kriegel was their equal, a bespectacled gent with an impressive gray mane who was the epitome of a shaker and mover.
When I got to know him a bit, Kriegel was in his mid-60s. I was reporting on New York City’s bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games and Kriegel was executive director of the group pursuing that event as part of what he called his “love affair” with the city of his birth.
It didn’t work out. For reasons forever obscure—political or financial or even pragmatic—those Games were awarded to London by the International Olympic Committee poohbahs. But not because Kriegel, who died in December at 79, had not been on top of his game.
The appropriate sports cliché for him would be The Go-To Guy. He seemed to know every person—and every building—in Big Town. His resume was all benign power in the worlds of politics, real estate, broadcasting. He had been a wunderkind assistant to John Lindsay, both during Lindsay’s time as a Congressman and later as mayor.
Under Lindsay, Kriegel helped draft sections of what became the voting rights act of 1965. He co-founded the American Lawyer magazine, was a CBS-TV vice president.
So when Dan Doctoroff, then an equity investment manager, got the notion in the late ‘90s that New York City embodied everything about the Olympics—skyscraper dreams, subway-sharpened elbows, United Nations diversity—he sought out Kriegel to head his NYC2012 team.
“I wanted somebody who was passionate about New York,” Doctoroff said then, “who knew more people in New York than I did, with government and media experience, and was indefatigable.”
One of Kriegel’s previous roles was as part of CBS’ proposal to air the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, so he knew that territory as well. Still, when Doctoroff contacted him about the Olympic vision, Kriegel’s first reaction was, “Crazy idea. Strange idea.”
“But I liked Dan,” Kriegel later related. “He was intelligent, thoughtful. The thing is, I had never thought of the city in that way. For a New Yorker, this got you to think about the city differently.”
Specifically, he considered “how the city had come through this astonishing renaissance in the ‘80s and ‘90s. You wouldn’t have thought the same way in the ‘80s. But there was this incredible vitality, the conviction that the city runs well and can run well. People have come to appreciate this as a great stage.
“And looking at the plan, there was this appreciation of what’s here that we all take for granted every day. This incredible infrastructure and capacity to absorb large events.”
Shortly after announcing his intention to seek the Olympics, Doctoroff was named deputy to mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, so he had government backing. He sought out former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke for his diplomatic connections; former U.S. Olympic Committee fund-raiser John Krimsky for his corporate relationships; former gymnast Wendy Hilliard for her deep ties to Olympic sports bodies; and urban planner Alex Garvin to design a Games blueprint.
It was Kriegel who employed the gears and levers of power to facilitate multiple development initiatives not only meant to execute the Olympics but also to improve the city. Sure enough, a study by New York University’s transportation policy center—completed six years after New York lost the vote to host the Games—concluded that “contrary to popular belief, the New York City Olympic Plan has largely been implemented even though the Games [were] held in London.”
The study cited the bid group’s initiative to re-zone the West Side Hudson Yards, extension of the No. 7 subway line, transformation of the High Line and Brooklyn Waterfront and realization of an expansive ferry service. Even the last-minute rejection of NYC2012’s proposed West Side Stadium, the NYU report said, had pushed the city toward quick agreements to construct new stadiums by both the Yankees and Mets.
“Right down that list, pretty damn good,” Kriegel said just days before the 2012 Olympics opened. In London. “The principle we stated was to have a bid to benefit the city, win or lose.”
Now, the only loss is Kriegel.