Big week ahead for Boston 2024

It will likely be a momentous week ahead for Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Boston 2024 is set to release it “bid 2.0” by month’s end. The document will include key revisions, including new and altered venue locations, an update on its budget, and more details about a potential 60,000 seat temporary stadium at Widett Circle and an Athletes Village at Columbia Point.

Boston 2024 Chief Administrative Officer Joe Rull traveled to Dorchester on Wednesday night to chat with a group of locals in the neighborhood at the McKeon Post. Rull and others from 2024 have been hosting meetings with smaller groups of two dozen or so attendees in an attempt to re-work the group’s pitch and garner support for the Games.

On Friday, the City Council will hold its latest hearing on hosting the Olympics. The public hearing will focus on the financing of operations and venue development–two key aspects to a privately funded Games that Boston 2024, the private nonprofit crafting Boston’s bid to host the Games, says it can deliver. The meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. at City Hall’s Iannella Chamber.

Boston 2024 will travel to San Francisco on Sunday, June 28 and Monday, June 29 to meet for a regularly scheduled meeting with the US Olympic Committee (USOC).

Tuesday night also brings the first city-sponsored public meeting since May’s heated event in Dorchester and the first with “bid 2.0.” The action starts at 6:30 p.m. at English High School in Jamaica Plain.

Boston 2024 is slowly rolling out updated plans for its 33 venues ahead of a June 30 deadline for the latest revised bid. Last week, the private nonprofit announced the Games’ beach volleyball venue would be located at Quincy’s Squantum Point Park, TD Garden is in play for gymnastics and basketball, and slalom canoeing in western Massachusetts’ Deerfield River. The new venue locations also indicate a shift toward a more statewide-oriented Games, a pivot away from the initial tightly clustered “walkable Games” in the first bid plan rolled out in January. Dorchester’s Harambee Park, located in Franklin Field, was announced as the new tennis venue, anchored by the Sportsmen’s Tennis and Enrichment Center. The proposal would create a 20,000-seat venue for the Olympic and Paralympic Games with a permanent 2,500-seat stadium left behind for Sportsmen’s after the Games.

The end-of-month release of bid 2.0 will give the public and its elected officials the chance to “kick the tires” on Boston’s bid to host the Games, Gov. Charlie Baker has previously said. The governor, Senate President, and House Speaker have an independent commission studying the bid and its potential impact on the commonwealth’s taxpayers due out in August.

The next major deadline for Boston 2024 is Sept. 15, when the USOC declares Boston as its applicant city to the International Olympic Committee. As Boston 2024 has said previously, there is a chance the USOC could not back Boston in September.

This week, Budapest emerged as another city in the running to host the 2024 Summer Games, joining Boston, Paris, Hamburg, and, likely, Rome.


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