Boston Says No

.@TeamUSA and #Boston2024 have jointly ended the campaign for Boston to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

— Boston 2024 (@Boston2024) July 27, 2015

The big Olympic news this week was supposed to be the announcement of the site for 2022 Winter Games, which will happen on Friday. Before we get to that, however, America's candidate city for the 2024 games, Boston, made news of its own today, declaring that the city will not go forward with its bid. From bleacherreport.com:

Los Angeles, which finished second behind Boston in the competition to win the bid, "would be ready and willing to mount a bid on short notice," according to David Wharton of the Los Angeles Times.

The USOC originally chose Boston over Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles as the U.S. bid representative in January. Despite an initial push from politicians within the city, Boston residents soured on the Olympics almost from the moment it was announced. In April, an NPR poll found 50 percent of Boston-area residents were opposed to the city hosting the Olympics, with most citing the onerous burden on taxpayers. (Read the article here.) 

Boston's not the only city to have fallen out of love with the Olympics. There are only two cities, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, left in the running for 2022, after Stockholm, Oslo and a few others dropped out of the process, and according to gamesbids, a site that tracks every detail of the Olympic bidding process, New Zealand and Spain looked at preparing bids for 2026 but decided against it. Apparently the hassle, the disruption and most of all the exorbitant cost, are causing cities and countries to say No Thanks to hosting the games. 

Gamesbids says that Toronto, Rome, Hamburg and Budapest are among the cities considering 2024 bids; I wonder how many will still be in the running at announcement time in 2017. The 2022 announcement comes first, of course and will be made on Friday. Neither candidate city is ideal for the Winter Games and whichever city is awarded the bid, there's bound to be some grumbling. Maybe it's getting to be time to consider a permanent home for the Games. 

In the meantime, the Summer Games that are not being held in Chicago get underway in 375 days.