The United States hasn’t hosted a Summer Olympics since the Games came to Atlanta in 1996. The hopes of that changing rest on the city of Boston, which was named the U.S. Olympic Committee’s bid city for the 2024 Summer Olympics on Thursday.
In the eyes of many, that’s not a good thing.
The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Plaschke voiced those concerns in a recent column, arguing that by picking Boston over Los Angeles — which, along with San Francisco and Washington, D.C., was a finalist for the U.S. bid — the USOC all but guaranteed the Olympics won’t be coming to America in 2024.
As Plaschke points out, Boston doesn’t even have vital competition sites such as an Olympic stadium, a swimming pool and a velodrome for cycling. If the Games actually do come to the city, planners would have a lot of work to do and very little space in which to operate.
“Boston’s Games can’t stretch anywhere,” he wrote. “They will wind and snake and curl around the city’s ancient streets, creating the sort of traffic jams that somehow never occurred during Los Angeles’ wildly successful 1984 Olympics.”
Los Angeles, meanwhile, already has much of the infrastructure in place from hosting the 1984 Summer Olympics and has exponentially more free space than Boston. By choosing Boston over better-equipped Los Angeles, Plaschke writes, the USOC “essentially raised the white flag, albeit one with a Dunkin’ Donuts logo.”
The International Olympic Committee has until 2017 to pick a host city for the 2024 Olympics, and its many competitors could include Rome, Berlin, and Johannesburg, South Africa. For those hoping the IOC will return the Games stateside, Plaschke has a rather painful metaphor: “The Olympics are a ground ball, and Boston is Bill Buckner.”
Thumbnail photo via Brian Fluharty/USA TODAY Sports Images
