Now that they have made peace with their international partners on the financial front, leaders of the U.S. Olympic Committee must decide whether to try to bring the Olympic Games back to America.
The key to that decision will be weighing the pros and cons of bidding for the Winter Games versus the Summer Games — a debate that will begin in earnest when the USOC board meets next month in the Bay Area.
Two people with knowledge of how the USOC decision-making process would work told The Associated Press that members of the U.S. delegation were being urged by international leaders last week, during private conversations at meetings in Quebec City, to think seriously about the Summer Games in 2024.
Those people spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the bid decision is made privately.
“In anything you do with this, where there’s a lot at stake and you’ve accomplished something extremely important and you’ve got momentum swinging in a different direction, you go for the top,” one person said of trying for the Summer Olympics instead of the Winter Games. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
The USOC announced Thursday that it had solved one of its core problems with the IOC: rewriting the formula for revenue sharing through 2040.
The USOC had said it wouldn’t consider a bid for any Olympics until the revenue issue was resolved. Now that it is, CEO Scott Blackmun said “the strategy is to develop a strategy.”
