Rendering of someone’s idea (straight or mocking) of an Olympic village in Boston. (bostinno.streetwise.com)

Boston’s Olympic belly flop has sent crocodile tears gushing down this critic’s soaking, heaving cheeks. The city’s withdrawal of its bid to host the 2024 Summer Games leaves your vitriolic correspondent bereft. An endless parade of proposals for modernist Bird’s Nest wannabes and other sports ephemera – athlete villages, media centers, swimming quadrangles, bicyclotrons, fake volleyball beach-o-dromes and white elephants without surcease – has just marched off the cliff of Beantown inhospitability to the vicissitudes of the Olympic bottom line. My only consolation is a long vacation for the weary muscles that promised to roll my eyeballs in circumnavigation of the global folly of Olympic architecture.

You can tell how crushed I am by Boston’s abortive bid. A Summer Games 40 miles from Providence would have meant a bottomless pit of chortling from this corner. Visits from a battalion of designer-eyewear-bedecked starchitects to propose, perchance to build, the next blotch of God’s wrath on stadia would have meant excavating Kookhaasian turds embedded in scores of interviews in The Boston Globe. Well, there will still be a Summer Games somewhere, inflicted upon New Englanders by television, not the tax man.