The U.S. Olympic Committee won’t narrow down its list of candidate cities for a 2024 Olympic bid until after the Sochi Games.
A USOC group scheduled visits to potential bid cities including Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Around the Rings reported in November. City visits will continue into December and January, USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said after a board of directors meeting Tuesday.
“We’re on track to make our decision by the end of 2014, whether we want to bid, and if we do, who our city would be,” said Blackmun, who didn’t want to discuss individual U.S. cities yet but said the USOC is in “active discussions” with less than 10.
The earliest the USOC would “make changes to the list” would probably be in April. The International Olympic Committee will select the host city for the 2024 Olympics in 2017.
“It is our intention to bid for 2024, if all of the elements that we had talked about previously are in place,” USOC chairman Larry Probst said. “That obviously includes: do we have the right message, do we have the right technical plans, do we have the right bid leaders, do we have the financial support from the local community, do we have governmental support. So a lot of things have to fall in place.”
IOC president Thomas Bach said last week he thinks “it’s time for the United States to present a strong bid.”
Probst said he’s heard “a lot of encouragement” from IOC members in travels to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Rome the last few months.
The U.S. hasn’t hosted an Olympics since the 2002 Winter Games and is in the middle of its longest stretch between hosting Olympics since a 28-year gap between 1932 and 1960. The USOC sent letters to more than three dozen cities earlier this year to gauge interest in potentially hosting the Olympics.
It is conducting a more informal process of selecting a host city than for the 2016 Olympics, when cities spent north of $10 million trying to earn the U.S. bid. It went to Chicago, which lost in the first round of IOC voting eventually won by Rio de Janeiro.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors unanimously backed a group exploring whether the California city should make a bid for the 2024 Olympics on Tuesday. The chairman said San Diego hosting the Games is “probably a long shot,” according to ABC News in San Diego.
Other potential 2024 bids could come from Paris, Italy and South Africa.
In other news, Blackmun said the USOC hoped Jesse Owens‘ gold medal that is being auctioned will end up “in a place that people can see it.”
Blackmun was asked if he thought the tearing down of the 1996 Olympic Stadium (Turner Field) could hurt a potential U.S. bid, given that it could be perceived the U.S. isn’t concerned enough with creating a long-lasting legacy after hosting a Games.
“if that’s our biggest issue, I think our bid’s going to be pretty strong,” he said.
