New York City won’t submit a bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, a top member of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s staff said Tuesday.
De Blasio previously said he would consider the Olympics after former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff proposed building a deck over the Sunnyside rail yards to support an Olympic stadium there. The administration, however, has since determined that a 2024 bid “doesn’t make sense,” Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen told the Wall Street Journal.
“I think when you actually ask the average New Yorker on the street whether or not the city should be focusing its planning effort, its infrastructure effort, its policing, its transportation around an event that will happen for three weeks in the summer 10 years from now, versus getting down to business with all the challenges and opportunities we have in front of us right now, I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of New Yorkers would say, ‘I’d rather watch it on my big screen TV at home,’” she told the Journal.
Doctoroff, who apparently had only informal discussions with Glen about the 2024 Olympics, previously lobbied to draw the 2012 Games to New York, proposing the site now known as Hudson Yards. [WSJ] — Julie Strickland