Tulsa Is Using The Trail Of Tears To Market Its Bid For The 2024 Olympics

The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma is preparing to bid on the 2024 Summer Olympic games, according to a report from the New York Times. Should the city actually submit a bid, it would be a wild longshot: as the Times explains, the Olympic workforce amounts to half of the city’s population, the city has a third of the hotel rooms required by the International Olympic Committee, and the estimated cost is equivalent to half of Oklahoma’s state budget. Plus, using the Olympics to market a city, as organizers hope to do, isn’t usually a good economic idea.

But the most absurd part of Tulsa’s Olympic bid amazingly isn’t the bid itself — it’s that organizers apparently think incorporating the Trail of Tears on the Olympic torch route as a “nod to the state’s American Indian history” is a good idea:

In a nod to the state’s American Indian history, the Olympic torch would be led along the solemn Trail of Tears, not far from where field hockey would be played in Tahlequah.