Via The United States Olympic Committee. Terrible Paint job by me.
In what may be the most amount of energy wasted on what amounted to be nothing this year (the year is young, though), D.C. won’t host the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic games.
Yesterday evening, the U.S. Olympic Committee finally announced they’d be making a bid for the 2024 Games to take place in Boston, Mass. “We’re excited about our plans to submit a bid for the 2024 Games and feel we have an incredibly strong partner in Boston that will work with us to present a compelling bid,” USOC Chairman Larry Probst said in a statement. “We’re grateful to the leaders in each of the four cities for their partnership and interest in hosting the most exciting sports competition on earth. The deliberative and collaborative process that we put in place for selecting a city has resulted in a strong U.S. bid that can truly serve the athletes and the Olympic and Paralympic movements.”
So that’s that. D.C. will not host the 2024 Games, which, whether you were in favor of, or against it, means one thing: We can finally stop arguing about it. Seriously, since the Washington 2024 committee came into existence, there’s been a lot of heated debate as to why it’s a terrible idea or great idea.
Shortly after the Washington 2024 movement emerged, Washington City Paper’s Mike Madden and Aaron Wiener started laying out the reasons against hosting the games, including the massive price tag to build facilities to host the Games, and the “massive orgies of ‘redevelopment’ in preparation for the Games, which generally tend to result in poor people’s houses being destroyed.”
Most recently, CityLab staff writer (and former DCist contributor) Kriston Capps wrote an impassioned defense of D.C. hosting the Games, in which he argues that, a lot of what hosting the Olympics would bring (new stadiums, redevelopment) would happen anyway, but that hosting the Games would force the D.C. government to do it the right way, making sure the city’s affordable housing, homeless, and transportation improvements aren’t left out in the cold:
What D.C. can’t boast is political consensus around completing an east-west citywide streetcar line, dedicating affordable housing, building a homeless shelter, or planning serious Metro improvements. These are all things that the city would need to accomplish in order to host the Olympic Games. And that’s the great boon of the games to host cities: Mega-events inspire consensus for infrastructure spending that’s otherwise hard to come by.
Hopefully, city leaders paid attention to the major concerns about D.C. hosting the 2024 Olympics, and those concerns won’t be abandoned now that Boston won the bid.
In a statement, Mayor Muriel Bowser said that “all was not lost, however. We must build on the tremendous regional and federal cooperation embodied in the D.C. 2024 Olympic bid, in focusing on the big issues facing our region—transportation, affordable housing and expanding job opportunities for residents in the District of Columbia.” So that’s promising.
Still, in the end, all the prospect of Washington 2024 seemed to bring was a lot of bickering, so now everyone can go back to arguing about something else.
