Boston’s Bid for Summer Olympics Is Terminated
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYEJULY

BOSTON — Deep skepticism here about whether taxpayers would be stuck footing the bill for the Olympics has doomed Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Games and raised questions about whether any other major American city might be willing to take on the risk.

The United States Olympic Committee said Monday that it was withdrawing Boston as its proposed bid city because resistance among residents was too great to overcome in the short time that remained before the committee had to formally propose a bid city by Sept. 15.

“We have not been able to get a majority of the citizens of Boston to support hosting the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Scott Blackmun, the chief executive of the U.S.O.C., said in a statement as he raised the white flag. “Therefore, the U.S.O.C. does not think that the level of support enjoyed by Boston’s bid would allow it to prevail over great bids from Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest or Toronto.”

Mr. Blackmun said that the U.S.O.C. intended to move quickly to prepare a bid from another city. While he did not mention Los Angeles by name, many people involved in the Olympics expect Los Angeles to enter the competition. It has successfully hosted the Olympics twice before and, perhaps most important, it already has the sports infrastructure, including an Olympic stadium, in place, unlike Boston, which would have had to build stadiums and most of that infrastructure from scratch.

Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, immediately expressed interest.

“I continue to believe that Los Angeles is the ideal Olympic city, and we have always supported the U.S.O.C. in their effort to return the Games to the United States,” he said in a statement. “I would be happy to engage in discussions with the U.S.O.C. about how to present the strongest and most fiscally responsible bid on behalf of our city and nation.”

The mayor of Boston, Martin J. Walsh, had taken a different stance. While he had become the cheerleader in chief for bringing the Games here, he was constantly having to prod Boston 2024, the seemingly tone-deaf private local organizing group, to be more transparent, release documents, scale back salaries and make other adjustments as the bid foundered.

But on Monday morning, Mr. Walsh distanced himself from the bid completely. At a hastily arranged news conference, he announced that if the U.S.O.C. demanded that he sign a host city contract by the end of the day Monday, he would not do so, acknowledging that this would kill Boston’s bid for the Games. He said he had wanted more time to conduct his due diligence on the guarantees required and a full review of a risk and mitigation package proposed last week.

“I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” the mayor declared. “If committing to signing a guarantee today is what’s required to move forward, then Boston is no longer pursuing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

It was not clear whether the mayor knew that the U.S.O.C. was preparing to pull the plug on Boston before he made his defiant announcement. But after the U.S.O.C. did pull the plug, Mr. Walsh told reporters that he thought “they might have made up their mind before my press conference today.”

Either way, the mayor was positioning himself as the voice of fiscal sanity in seeking to protect taxpayers from having to pay for cost overruns, which polling all along had suggested was the central concern of a majority of Boston residents.

In a statement after the U.S.O.C. withdrew, Mr. Walsh said he believed that bringing the Games here would have brought long-term benefits, but added that “no benefit is so great that it is worth handing over the financial future of our City, and our citizens were rightly hesitant to be supportive as a result.”

The desire by the mayor — and Gov. Charlie Baker — for more time to review the financial details ran headlong into the U.S.O.C.’s urgent need to present a winnable bid, and one backed by a majority of residents, by mid-September.

As spending by some Olympic host cities has soared in recent years — costs surrounding last year’s Games in Sochi surpassed $50 billion — many countries have pulled themselves out of contention. Enthusiasm for hosting the 2022 Winter Games is so low that only two cities, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, have entered bids.

The Summer Games, however, still attract a healthy competition. But whether an American city enters that race remains to be seen.

“The I.O.C. is about to choose a winter host from two dictatorships,” said David Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. “If the only way you can get a government guarantee of funds is to choose a dictatorship, well, that’s not something the I.O.C. is looking forward to.” Given that situation, he said, “it’s possible the I.O.C. may not be as strict about these guarantees as they appear to be.”

Americans across the country overwhelmingly (89 percent) support the idea of holding the Games in the United States, according to a national Associated Press poll in June. But that support dropped to 61 percent when people were asked if they would want the Olympics in their local area. It dipped even further, to 52 percent, when they were asked if public funds should be used on top of private funds to help pay for them.

In Boston, the Olympics never won a majority of support, but it did win a small plurality (46 percent to 44 percent) when the U.S.O.C. picked it in January over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington. As the winter wore on and Boston’s mass transit system ground to a halt, support plunged to just 36 percent. Support has slowly risen since, but only to the low 40s, nowhere near the 60 or 70 percent that the I.O.C. likes to see.

Voters told pollsters that they were most concerned about having to pay for cost overruns. But they were also dismayed by what they considered as Boston 2024’s lack of transparency and the sense that a small cabal of business leaders who stood to profit seemed to be running the show in secrecy. And they questioned whether much-need improvements in transportation, housing and education would get done if the city were so focused on the Olympics.

Mr. Wallechinsky, the historian, said that the U.S.O.C. should “take a good hard look at themselves” and conduct an investigation into “how they could have picked Boston in the first place.” He said one of the worst moments came when the U.S.O.C. watched as Boston 2024 said that its bid, which was not initially disclosed to the public, called for no public financing; the U.S.O.C. knew that was not true, he said, as the public found out later after news outlets obtained the bid.

Dan Payne, a Democratic political analyst here, said that in the end, the Olympics never overcame the image that it was being run by the captains of industry at the expense of average people.

But, he said, he did not see any damage to Boston as a result of the decision to pull the bid.

“The economy is strong, and the city’s self-regard is intact,” he said. “People don’t feel as if they’ve lost something. The mood is good riddance.”

市民不挺 波士頓棄辦2024奧運

波士頓因未能贏得民眾支持，已退出申辦2024年奧運，美國奧林匹克委員會在期限逼近下，正考慮替代申請的城市。

波士頓6個月前擊敗洛杉磯、舊金山和華盛頓，成為美國申辦2024年奧運的代表，但波士頓市長華許表示，他不打算讓納稅人承擔這場運動盛會超支的負擔後，這場角逐也告結束。

此外，波士頓市民在多次民調中顯示，對申辦奧運並無太大興趣，美國奧委會執行長布雷克曼別無選擇，只能讓波士頓退出。

華許還說，為了確保財政責任，放棄申辦奧運是值得的。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/sports/olympics/boston-2024-summer-olympics-bid-terminated.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/sports/20150728/c28olympics/zh-hant/

2015-07-29．Upaper．7．世界．綜合報導