In Globe Ad, Boston 2024 Says It Needs Public Support to Go Forward
In a full page ad in Monday’s Boston Globe, Olympic organizing committee Boston 2024 said it would only seek to host the 2024 Olympics if its “final bid’’ meets 10 points—among them, majority support in Massachusetts.
The international bidding process begins this fall, and final bids are due to the International Olympic Committee in early 2017.
The ad, as it appears in The Boston Globe.
The ad—the first in either print or broadcast from Boston 2024—comes just days after a new poll showed public support for the bid to be at 36 percent in Greater Boston, representing a 15 percentage point drop-off from January.
Boston 2024 CEO Rich Davey told the Globe that one way of gauging public support could be a statewide referendum. Two separate efforts at Olympic-related referendums are currently underway—one that could poll Boston voters this fall, and one seeking a statewide ballot question in 2016.
In January, former Boston 2024 President Dan O’Connell told WGBH that he did not foresee a scenario in which the bid did not go forward to the IOC in 2017. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said much the same after the United States Olympic Committee chose Boston as its bidding city in January.
At the time, Walsh also said he was “willing to bet’’ the public would support the bid, and has since said he would want to see 70 percent support by 2017 if he were to sign a host city contract with the International Olympic Committee. Over the weekend, Walsh said in an interview with WBZ that he felt support has fallen due to “distractions’’ around the bid—such as its hiring of former Governor Deval Patrick as a $7,500-per-day consultant, a fee Patrick dropped last week.
The IOC conducts its own polling of host city candidates to gauge public support. Earlier this month, USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said: “…candidly, it’s much more important that those numbers be high two and a half years from now than it is that they be high now.’’
Monday’s ad also said the bid would not go forward if Boston 2024 is unable to secure insurance policies that would indemnify “the city and state from financial risk,’’ if the federal government is unable to pick up the tab on Boston 2024 security costs, or if the Games do not serve as a “catalyst for improvements in public transportation and infrastructure.’’ In recent weeks, Boston 2024 has said while it would like to see new public transit projects and that it felt the 2024 Summer Games could kickstart conversation about them, it could operate the Olympics without them.
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