Washington, D.C. will make a bid to become the host city of the 2024 Summer Olympics, a nonprofit group called DC 2024 announced on Tuesday.
Washington D.C. will make 2024 Summer Olympics bid
The nation’s capital will look to become the first U.S. city to host the Summer Games since Atlanta did so in 1996.
Michael Regan
Bob Sweeney, CEO of the Greater Washington Sports Alliance, is leading the bid and spoke to the Associated Press on Tuesday about the possibility of the Summer Games being played in the nation’s capital:
“We are the safest and most secure city in the world,” said Bob Sweeney, president of DC 2024. “The largest expense of any Olympic Games is security, and the fact that we’ve got it pretty built in to our everyday life here in Washington, we would leverage that asset tremendously to put on this high-profile event.”
The good ol’ United States of America hosted the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, but hasn’t hosted the Summer Olympics since Atlanta in 1996. Rebecca Cooper of the Washington Business Journal reports that Washington, D.C. is just one of several U.S. cities expected to bid, as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kansas City, Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta will all likely make an effort to host the 2024 Games as well.
The bid will be the first for the nation’s capital since it made a joint effort with Baltimore to become co-hosts of the 2012 Summer Olympics that were instead awarded to London. While Cooper reports that Baltimore will again be in the plans for DC 2024, the name of the bid will belong solely to Washington, D.C.
One point of interest includes the future of RFK Stadium. The 52-year-old home of the Washington Redskins could be remade for the Olympics or rebuilt entirely. As Cooper explains:
On whether RFK would play a role in its current or another form, Sweeney said: “I think it would be naive not to think that that would be part of the dialogue.” He added, however, that specific talks on building a new stadium have not happened.
Early estimations from DC 2024 show that the cost of the games would be $4-6 billion, and the nonprofit group hopes to raise $3-5 million to make its case to the U.S. Olympic Committee. The final decision for a U.S. city will be made by the U.S. Olympic Committee in September 2015 before a final city is decided by the International Olympic Committee in 2017.
More from SB Nation:
See More:
