It was a whirlwind 36-hour visit to Washington 2012 by the U.S. Olympic Committee site evaluation team Friday and Saturday, and the icing on the cake at the end of the visit was a news conference held on a rooftop observation deck with the Washington Monument, the Capitol and the Library of Congress for a backdrop.
Charles H. Moore, chairman of the evaluation team said, “we have seen some very special things. Washington enhanced its position from where it was…there are no shortfalls in this bid”.
On Saturday the USOC tour began with lunch at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington’s Shaw District, then a 20-minute Metro ride to the University of Maryland, then by bus to the Robert F. Kennedy site where the group got a tour of the area’s 90 acres and heard of plans for a slightly elevated Olympic Stadium that would include a view of the U.S. Capitol. The area would provide venues for boxing, archery, aquatics, track and field, beach volleyball and team handball. Organizers say that 85 per cent of the venues would be within a mile of a rail transit station and reduce travel time for athletes staying at the Olympic Village.
USOC spokesman Bob Condron, a non-voting member of the USOC, said this Olympic Village has the potential to be the best in recent memory because of its extraordinary amenities, including air-conditioned lodging, practice fields for 23 of the 28 Olympic sports, in-house entertainment and proximity to both the District and Baltimore.
Moore called the proposed Olympic Village “absolutely a dream”, but said the task force was most impressed with the plan to revitalize the Anacostia waterfront as part of the creation of a bustling Olympic park in the RFK Stadium area.
Task force member DeeDee Corradini lauded the moving of seven sports into the District from Virginia or Maryland, moving competition into just two primary zones in Baltimore and Washington.
Corradini said, “going from five clusters down to two made a huge difference. That’s a major improvement. The more compact the better”.
After Washington’s site visit last year, several USOC members said they were not sure whether the area’s network of roadways and public transportation could keep up with the burgeoning population. By shifting numerous events from areas such as Annapolis and Fairfax to within one mile of a Metro station, the coalition worked around the transportation questions.
Moore said, “they addressed our questions, no doubt. It’s hard to fault the transportation system here”.
Bid president Dan Knise said, “we think the changes we made represent a dramatic improvement to what already was a solid plan”.
Reports say the bid also scored with the USOC by having a conservative financial plan. A revision in April of the coalition’s written Olympic plan downgraded the projected operating profit from $279 million to $92 million.
Knise said, “we laid it all out there during this visit and they saw that we have a realistic, feasible yet still flexible bid. They saw our best. They met our best, and we did our absolute best”.
The Washington Post’s Amy Shipley writes that the USOC evaluation committee, made up of various U.S. Olympic officials and three athletes, “seems to realize it won’t have succeeded in Choosing a U.S. winner if that winner cannot beat a field of cities expected to include London, Paris, Rome, Toronto, Istanbul, and contenders from Germany, South Africa and South America”.
Moore said, “the USOC really needs to win these Games, if not in 2012, then in 2016. So we’re very much on the side with each of these (bidding) cities”.
