USOC NEEDS TO BAIL ON BOSTON BID
As opposition to ’24 Games grows, switch to L.A. would be prudent
The 2024 Summer Olympics aren’t going to be held tomorrow, but a big American decision about those Games is most definitely upon us.
If the USA wants to have even a sliver of a chance to host its first Summer Olympics since 1996, the U.S. Olympic Committee must dump Boston — the city it selected three months ago, but one whose candidacy has since tumbled into a political and strategic quagmire — and immediately turn to Los Angeles, one of the world’s most revered Olympic cities.
Boston is a great sports town and a wonderful city. That’s not the issue. The problem for Boston, and the USOC, is that polling consistently shows that more Bostonians are against the Olympics than for them. The pushback has been so strong that a statewide referendum has been scheduled for November 2016.
Why is this a big deal? The International Olympic Committee, the Eurocentric old boys club that decides who gets to host the Olympics, will be winnowing the field of international candidate cities to a short list of no more than five finalists in the spring of 2016. Normally, you’d say Boston (or any U.S. city) would have no trouble making that list.
But with the Massachusetts vote looming six months later, how can the IOC feel comfortable moving ahead with Boston? The IOC’s leaders, who are always in love with our corporate money but never particularly in love with us, would correctly view that vote as a referendum not just on Boston’s 2024 bid, but also on them.
I don’t see that turning out well for them, and we can be sure that neither do they. Thus, the predictable move by the IOC would be to pre-empt the referendum, to kill off Boston before the state can kill off the Olympics.
What’s more, even if the polling turns more positive in the months ahead, the USOC cannot afford to hand over the fate of its bid city to the vagaries of the ballot box. Add the political certainty that those who are more energized to show up and vote will be those who are against the bid (already a formidable group), and it’s a public relations nightmare for everyone in the Olympic world.
So the USOC has to undo what it did just a few months ago. If it can’t persuade Boston’s bid leaders to withdraw gracefully, it should do the job for them. After telling Boston “yes,” it must go back and tell Boston “no.”
The USOC should come clean and say it made a huge mistake, apologize for wasting everyone’s time in Boston and hightail it to Southern California. Before it selected Boston, the USOC knew there never was more than a lukewarm interest in the Games there, while polling in L.A. always showed people salivating for a third Olympics, following the distant success of the 1932 Summer Games and the smash hit of 1984.
Is L.A. ready? Let’s put it this way: The 2024 Games are more than nine years away, but L.A. could host them now. Dust off the Coliseum, put the Rose Bowl and all those other college venues on alert, throw in a new NFL stadium, order up the weather from the summer of 1984, and voila: an American Olympics.
This doesn’t mean L.A. will win the 2024 Summer Games. The field is stacked. Rome, site of the 1960 Games, is in. So is Hamburg, Germany. Paris, host of the 1900 and 1924 Games, is expected to jump in. So might Budapest, Istanbul and Doha, Qatar, among others.
To lose to competitors such as these would be no disgrace to L.A., or the USA. In fact, it’s likely L.A. would lose at this point because of its late start and whatever embarrassment will linger from dumping Boston.
So, USOC, you’re basically playing for 2028. Or, 2032, which, conveniently enough, would be the 100th anniversary of L.A.’s first Olympics. How’s that for a little symmetry?
In 1978, when the IOC was deciding on a host city for the ’84 Summer Games, the Olympics had reached their nadir. After 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by terrorists in Munich in 1972, Montreal plunged into terrible debt hosting the 1976 Games.
Not surprisingly, almost no one wanted to host the 1984 Olympics. There were two candidate cities: Los Angeles and Tehran, which pulled out. So it was L.A. or nothing. That the ’84 Summer Games were a huge success, financially and otherwise, serves as a vivid reminder that L.A. truly saved the Olympic movement from disappearing.
So here’s L.A. to the rescue again. This time, the task isn’t as Herculean as saving the Olympics. It’s as simple as helping the USOC save face.
The USOC should say it made a huge mistake, apologize for wasting everyone’s time in Boston and hightail it to Southern California.