I suspect the real reason NYC didn’t host the 2012 Olympics is because its bid did not include millions of legitimate inducements and under-the-table bribes to the IOC.
Yes, I realize I’m saying that the Olympics is too corrupt for New York City.
That’s perfectly likely, though.
Now, of course, the next three Summer Games will be held in the only three cities that expressed serious interest. This isn’t good for the bribe business.
Some day they’re going to run out of sucker cities. Let’s hope it’s the next time they have to make a decision.
This has really only been common public knowledge for a couple of decades, though. Any answer about why NYC hasn’t ever had a bid accepted historically would need to account for other factors which predate this awareness.
Per the drift of the thread, I don’t think it’s any one thing. It seems likely to be a combination of factors that consistently put NYC behind other candidates.
(It would be an interesting FQ thread to ask when the general public really started to realize that hosting the Olympics is an undesirable financial and logistical boondoggle that significantly outweighs the temporary boost in status. It’s definitely a change in perception in my lifetime.)
I’ll take that hijack. Or at least the financial part. That was Montreal in 1976. It was a real big story about how they lost huge amounts on it. Bids from other cities dried up, so that LA was the only bid for 1984. LA made money, but most, if not all, since then haven’t.
Useful info. Thanks.
Somewhat incredibly to me, a lot of cities have expressed early interest in 2036. Of course, that’s easy to do 14 years out. We’ll see how many stay in the game when it comes time to make spending commitments.
Same thing in Los Angeles in 1984. Traffic was a dream! As a result of lower traffic, air quality was better than any other time around the games. It was a city-wide party. I walked down to watch the stretch of the women’s marathon that was in Playa del Rey. Got to see Joan Benoit run by and got a little L.A. Olympics flag that I still have.
On edit: as mentioned above, the L.A. Olympics made a profit.
Maybe just keep the Olympics at the same place – Athens for the Summer Olympics and Lillehammer for the Winter Olympics. Why Lillehammer? Because the name is so cool.
That’s the usual thing, you get “interest” from a bunch of places when there’s still time to go, but then they start dropping out as time gets closer and the reality of what you’d need to do and spend takes hard shape.
And there is usually an intervening election where the contender makes predictions about how disastrous the incumbent’s Olympic plans will be for the city/country.
One of the events for the LA Olympics – soccer – was held at Stanford’s stadium in Palo Alto. Traffic was wretched but it was only for the few days instead of two weeks. I was taking night classes in massage about a mile and a half from the stadium and one of the nights was during the worst of it, US vs, Mexico. I was fretting because I arrived about ten minutes late but I was the first one there including the instructor. About ten minutes later another student arrived. “Ga-h-h-h-h damn. What happened?”
“Olympics.”
“Oh, yeah.”
The others started filtering in and we started a half-hour late.
Yeah, but Palo Alto is pretty far from L.A. Was that just prelims? Because I had a friend who attended some of the soccer games in Santa Barbara. She went to one where the Brazilians were playing, and she said it was the most fun she’d ever had at a sporting event.
But if you looked at the wikipedia link, you would note that NYC solved that issue by deciding to build Citi Field and putting that forward as the Olympic Stadium.
The answer to the question seems quite obvious to me to be: Because the IOC said no. NYC was 4th in the final voting, among the Top 5 shortlist cities for the 2012 games.
Birmingham is holding the Commonwealth Games this year. This is a pretty big deal - Over 1 million tickets are expected to be issued for the Games. and It was originally supposed to be in Durban.
The whole thing has been put together in record time. Instead of the eight years a city usually gets to prepare for an event of this magnitude, Birmingham has done it all in three. And that during all the problems of COVID.
At one point, the plan was a new football and Olympic stadium over the West Side railyards as the centerpiece of the 2012 bid. Instead, the Hudson Yards development was built there, and the Jets and Giants build a new stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
And incidentally, the most recent season of the Showtime series Billions just concluded, with one of the main characters attempting to win a bid for New York to host the 2028 Games (which, in universe, had been taken away from Los Angeles due to corruption).
To add about the Olympics being a financial boondoggle I would like to point out the last World’s Fair held in NYC was a financial mess as well so that might influence New Yorker’s views about holding another major event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_New_York_World%27s_Fair#Controversial_ending
Wouldn’t it be East Rutherford hosting?
Problem solved!
(ducks and runs)
There does seem to be a whole lot of possible jokes involving both the mob and the IOC with a New York City area hosted Olympics.