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| Sunday, 3 November 2002 |
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Big Apple and City by the Bay vie for Games SAN FRANCISCO, (Reuters) The City by the Bay or the Big Apple? The Golden Gate Bridge or the Statue of Liberty? Romance or sentiment? Fog or smog? San Francisco or New York? Those are the choices facing the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) when it meets on Saturday in Colorado Springs to choose the city it will put forward as its candidate for the 2012 Summer Games. A week after its team lost the baseball World Series to California rivals Anaheim, San Francisco will step up to the plate and pitch an Olympics framed by the city's scenic beauty and a well thought-out bid that has many world-class venues already in place and sound financing. New York bid (NYC2012) officials say they will not play the September 11 sympathy card but will instead emphasise the resilience of New Yorkers, their can-do attitude, a city that embodies the Olympic spirit and a bid which planners say is the most compact in Olympic history. "You have to have a strategy to telling your story around the world," said Dan Doctoroff, the deputy New York mayor and founder of NYC2012. "You have to have the community support, the financial resources and the will of the people and post 9/11 the will of the people to do this is greater than before. "You have to tell a compelling story. I think New York has the most compelling Olympic story of them all. "If you step back and think about what draws people to the Olympics, it's bringing the world together in one place, it's competition, it's athletes pursuing their dreams. "More than any city of the world, New York embodies those things. There are more people from more places that come to pursue their dreams than any other city in the world." When cities first began to appear on the doorstep of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Lausanne headquarters a year ago expressing interest in staging the 2012 Games, the world's sympathies were with New York as the aftershock of the September 11 attacks on the city's World Trade Center continued to reverberate. In a grand gesture, organisers for a Rome bid said they would step aside and give New York the Games if the other bidders did the same. But there has been no repeat of this offer and indications are that the battle to obtain the right to stage the 2012 Games will be one of the most hotly contested in Olympic history with up to a dozen bids entering the race. Some of world's best known cities - Paris, Rome, Moscow, Madrid, London and Toronto - have either confirmed bids or are pondering pursuing world sport's biggest prize. In making its selection, the USOC's 123-member board will have to determine which city, New York or San Francisco, has the best chance of convincing the IOC to award the Games to the United States. The winner will have to defuse some strong anti-American sentiment within the IOC, where some members still bristle at being investigated and painted as criminals by a Congressional Committee and the FBI over the Salt Lake City bribes scandal. Some IOC members were accused of breaking the rules by accepting gifts or jobs for family members from organisers of Salt Lake's successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games. Situated on the west coast, San Francisco organisers believe they have literally distanced themselves from any strong anti-U.S. feelings that might linger within the Olympic movement while NYC2012 insist their city is more than simply a metropolis. "America is not the favourite son in the Olympic movement but New York is not just an American city. New York, as we like to say, is the world's second home," said Doctoroff. "This is the place where anyone from anywhere can come and find people who look like them, who speak like them and we think at the end of the day we have a very different story to tell." The projected costs of staging the Games are about the same, $2.4 billion for San Francisco and $2.7 billion by New York. However, there are already concerns that these figures, particularly in New York's case, do not add up. Recently, the New York Post ran a report prepared by the investment bank Bear Stearns that put the actual cost of staging the Olympics in New York at $6.5 billion. The Bay Area Bid says it has modelled its plans on the "Rogge agenda" (after IOC president Jacques Rogge) and that 80 percent of venues already exist, limiting the capital construction and infrastructure costs. In contrast, New York would need to build many of its planned Olympic facilities, including an 86,000-seat Olympic stadium, and its budget estimate does not include infrastructure-related issues that are dependent on the bid. |
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