Now that the Sochi 2014 Games are over, Sports Business Daily reports the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) plans to turn its attention to a potential bid for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
The USOC hopes to select a potential bid city by the end of the year.
USOC Chief Executive Officer Scott Blackmun said the organization will spend the rest of the year meeting with mayors and city leaders to evaluate the viability of a bid from each city, and hopes to select a candidate city by the third quarter of this year and have its board vote by March 2015 on whether the U.S. will put forward a bid.
Blackmun said, “there’s no matrix for how we’ll choose a city. There’s no scoring system. It’s going to be which city has the most voter appeal, which city can provide the best experience to athletes, which city can provide the best experience for spectators and which city has the best economic situation to host a Games. We don’t want to take substantial financial risks”.
Candidates include San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.
Blackmun said that the competition a U.S. bid city faces wouldn’t weight heavily on the USOC’s decision to put forward a bid. He said, “we need to determine whether we can put forth a quality bid that can win. If we think we will do that, we will bid irrespective of what other cities are in the process”.
When the USOC selected Chicago as a bid city for the 2016 Games it held a domestic bid process and picked Chicago over Los Angeles, but now it plans to forgo that process because the cost for bid cities can be more than $10 million, reports Sports Business.
Blackmun said, “the more formal you make the process, the more difficult you make it for the cities that don’t win. We want to build the Olympic movement in the U.S. We want to designate a partner but not alienate cities as we have in the past”.
