Los Angeles is no panacea to the problems facing Boston’s planned bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun said.
As the Boston 2024 group continues to battle fierce political opposition, many Olympic experts have suggested that the USOC would be better off returning to two-time host Los Angeles, which lost out to Boston during the domestic selection phase in January.
But Blackmun said last week that would reset the process without any guarantee that Los Angeles wouldn’t encounter its own hurdles, just with that much less time to react and adjust. Preliminary applications must be submitted to the International Olympic Committee by Sept. 15.
“Think about it. Any city that we pick, there are going to be unknown challenges, and we don’t know what the challenges might have been in San Francisco, Washington or Los Angeles,” Blackmun said of the other U.S. finalists before Boston was selected. “So the idea that we could make the difficulties go away by going to another city is a false premise.”
Blackmun specifically mentioned California’s liberal ballot access laws for voter referenda, which have complicated sports-related economic development efforts across the state for years. He lived in Los Angeles while serving as chief operating officer of AEG in the 2000s.
“It’s part of democracy in America,” Blackmun said. “I don’t think there’s any way that no matter how well-crafted a bid is, if the voters want to vote on it, they’re going to find a way to do that.”
Should the public perception of Boston’s bid not improve soon, the USOC and Blackmun will be faced with a tough decision: Stick with Boston and hope to eventually turn public opinion around, take a known second choice like Los Angeles to the international stage, or abandon a bid altogether for 2024. The latter would be a setback for the U.S. Olympic movement, which hasn’t hosted a Summer Games since 1996.
Any major shift on Boston would need approval from the 16-member USOC board, which meets June 30. When asked directly about the board’s willingness to consider other options, Blackmun limited his comments to the present tense.
“For now, we’re not talking to or even thinking about talking to any other cities,” he said. Later, he added, “We haven’t talked about going to any other city as a board. We have a meeting on June 30. Boston’s going to give us an update at that point in time. There’s nothing on the agenda about should we go to another city, should we switch horses. It’s not in the realm of possibilities right now.”
Public opinion is far from the only consideration. The USOC doesn’t want residents of any city to shoulder extraordinary costs for the Olympics, Blackmun said.
“Plans will change, there will be better ideas that are surfaced, but the principles here are that this needs to make financial sense for the city of Boston,” he said, “and if it doesn’t, then neither the organizer of the bid committee nor the USOC would want to move forward.”
