USOC pulls Boston's bid for Olympics

Boston

DEEP scepticism here about whether taxpayers would be stuck footing the bill for the Olympics has doomed Boston's bid to host the 2024 Summer Games and raised questions about whether any other major American city might be willing to take on the risk.

The US Olympic Committee (USOC) said on Monday that it was withdrawing Boston as its proposed bid city because resistance among residents was too great to overcome in the short time that remained before the committee had to formally propose a bid city by Sept 15.

"We have not been able to get a majority of the citizens of Boston to support hosting the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games," USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said in a statement as he raised the white flag. "Therefore, the USOC does not think that the level of support enjoyed by Boston's bid would allow it to prevail over great bids from Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest or Toronto."

Mr Blackmun said the USOC intended to move quickly to prepare a bid from another city. While he did not mention Los Angeles by name, many people involved in the Olympics expect Los Angeles to enter the competition. It has successfully hosted the Olympics twice before and, perhaps most important, it already has the sports infrastructure, including an Olympic stadium, in place, unlike Boston, which would have had to build stadiums and most of that infrastructure from scratch.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti immediately expressed interest. "I continue to believe that Los Angeles is the ideal Olympic city, and we have always supported the USOC in their effort to return the games to the United States," he said in a statement. "I would be happy to engage in discussions with the USOC about how to present the strongest and most fiscally responsible bid on behalf of our city and nation."

Boston Mayor Martin J Walsh had taken a different stance. While he had become the cheerleader-in-chief for bringing the Games here, he was constantly having to prod Boston 2024, the tone-deaf, private local organising group, to be more transparent, release documents, scale back salaries and make other adjustments as the bid foundered.

But on Monday morning, Mr Walsh distanced himself from the bid completely. At a dramatic, hastily arranged news conference, he announced that if the USOC demanded that he sign a host city contract by the end of the day on Monday, he would not do so, acknowledging that this would kill Boston's bid for the Games.

In a statement after the USOC withdrew, the mayor said he believed that bringing the Games here would have brought long-term benefits, but added that "no benefit is so great that it is worth handing over the financial future of our city, and our citizens were rightly hesitant to be supportive as a result."

The desire by the mayor - and Governor Charlie Baker - for more time to review the financials ran headlong into the USOC's urgent need to present a winnable bid, and one backed by a majority of residents, by mid-September.

As spending by some Olympics host cities has soared in recent years - costs surrounding last year's Winter Games in Sochi surpassed US$50 billion - many countries have pulled themselves out of contention. Enthusiasm for hosting the 2020 Winter Games is so low that only two cities - Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan - have entered bids.

The Summer Games, however, still attract a healthy competition. But whether a US city enters that race remains to be seen.

"The IOC (International Olympic Committee) is about to choose a Winter host from two dictatorships," said David Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. "If the only way you can get a government guarantee of funds is to choose a dictatorship, well, that's not something the IOC is looking forward to."

In Boston, the Olympics never won a majority of support, but it did win a small plurality (46 per cent to 44 per cent) when the USOC picked it in January over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington. But as the winter wore on and Boston's mass transit system ground to a halt, support plunged to just 36 per cent. Support has slowly risen since, but only to the low 40s - nowhere near the 60-70 per cent that the IOC likes to see.

Voters told pollsters that they were most concerned about having to pay for cost overruns. But they were also dismayed by Boston 2024's lack of transparency and the sense that a small cabal of business leaders who stood to profit seemed to be running the show in secrecy. And they questioned whether much-needed improvements in transportation, housing and education would get done if the city were so focused on the Games. NYT