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BEIJING — Whatever Patrick Seeb is smoking, he'd better start sharing it with the rest of us aging hippies.

MinnPost colleague Joe Kimball reported earlier this week that Seeb, president of St. Paul's Riverfront  Corp. and giddy with Republican Convention anticipation, suggested to his contacts in an email blast that, "Perhaps hosting the Olympics is in our future."

I hate to be one of those nattering nabobs of negativity, but the chance of St. Paul or the Twin Cities playing host to an Olympics in the next century — or millennium — are somewhat south of zero.

We've been down this road — 20 years ago now — when in 1988, with the vision of Gov. Rudy Perpich, the Twin Cities tried for the 1996 Summer Games. First, Minneapolis-St. Paul had to get the backing of the U.S. Olympic Committee. In a vote, Atlanta got the domestic bid, not the Twin Cities.

And Atlanta — with the corporate backing of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola — won the International Olympic Committee's nod, too. Atlanta went on to host one of the worst Olympics in history, turning an event that seeks sophistication and gravitas into a redneck flea market, with more junky souvenirs and ad signs than a bad State Fair.

The Twin Cities bid was solid then, but it was stealth — because we're pretty cheap — and didn't bring the sort of political energy that Atlanta did. The political will for such a huge project wasn't there. Not much has changed.

Mr. Seeb needs to take a look at the major differences between a political convention and an Olympics. Instead of influential Republicans and a couple of mayors luring a big convention, an Olympics requires national backing and a massive plan. It also requires a story to tell.

Beijing: opening China to the world.

Athens: returning the Games to their birthplace.

Even Atlanta had a story: America hosts Games in the New South.

An Olympics is not just a convention on steroids. Nor is it the sporting event it appears to be. An Olympics has become an exercise in infrastructure justification.

Beijing, of course, has now set the standard, with $40 billion of public transit, airport, road and construction costs in the run-up to these Games. London, which will play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics, is redoing an entire sector of the city as part of the Olympics plan; the Olympics provide political leverage for city fathers and mothers to generate support for such a bold plan.

Better yet, look at the current Olympic bid from Chicago, our neighbor to the East. Chicago is a finalist, along with Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, to be the 2016 Olympic city. That will be voted on by the IOC in the fall of 2009.

What's Chicago got in mind? A complete redevelopment of parts of the South and West sides of the city.

And the cost of simply bidding for the Games — not for stadiums — just the process of begging is budgeted at $50 million by the Chicago organizers, or about the total cost of staging the GOP convention. The city of Chicago had to guarantee a $500 million contribution to the Olympics project as part of the bid.

The operating budget for the Games will approach $3 billion. Who knows what the infrastructure improvements will cost?

That ain't no GOP shindig.

Besides scale, there's one other thing: political will. Building one baseball stadium took a decade. Even if it made financial sense, where does Minnesota have the leadership to envision a viable Olympic plan?

These Games are too big for our nice little town. Our mass transit is a set of model trains, compared with the subway system here. Would we be willing to pay to upgrade?

For the Beijing Games, there are 37 competition venues and 46 training sites. Could we provide those compactly? We have many small colleges and some have terrific facilities. But all would have to be retrofitted for Olympic acceptance.

The IOC requires 40,000 hotel rooms within 30 miles of the core of the Olympics. Chicago has 90,000 rooms in that zone. Twin Cities has 35,000 in the seven-county area. You need to go to St. Cloud or Rochester to get our region up to 40,000 rooms.

Consider the populations of the 2016 candidate cities: Tokyo, 28 million; Rio, 10.5 million; Chicago, 7 million; and Madrid 4.1 million.

Twin Cities metro area, 3.2 million.

Now, if we had a story to tell, if we decided that we would use an Olympic bid to turn the Twin Cities into a center for Green technology and all the facilities would run on wind and sun, or if the Olympic bid was about redeveloping North Minneapolis and St. Paul's East Side, or about a massive subway system from Shakopee to Woodbury and Eagan to Blaine ... then Mr. Seeb could, perhaps, trigger a conversation.

Then, as always, he'd have to find a way to pay for it and a way to get our sometimes shy and staid community to take a stand.

Fact is, as these Games have grown, there's nothing quaint about them. The IOC members and corporate sponsors don't want to invest in middle-size communities. They want iconic places, growing places, monied places. What's the payback to them if the Twin Cities hosts an Olympics?

We're not an Olympic city.

But we can be an Olympic satellite. Indeed, we will be a satellite, if Chicago wins the bid.

The University of Minnesota's new TCF Bank Stadium will probably be the site of preliminary soccer games. Perhaps four or eight men's and women's teams would be based in the Twin Cities before the Games and during the first couple of rounds of Games.

U associate athletics director Phil Esten told MinnPost in an email that the Gophers' athletic department and the Chicago organizers have a memo of understanding that if Chicago wins the bid, there will be further discussions. It would work out, to be sure.

Now, that would be a terrific thing for the Twin Cities, the U and that stadium.

That's more our size. That's more realistic.