IOC President Bach: Boston failed to deliver on ‘promises’ to USOC during

And now the blame game.

Hours before his group’s Olympic bid collapsed, Boston 2024 co-founder Corey Dinopoulos wrote a letter to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

“I extended my sincerest apologies for the fact that we would have to change the plan for the new national stadium”, organizing committee head Yoshio Mori said after a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach and his executive board in Kuala Lumpur.

“It wasn’t an easy decision of the Japanese government, but we respect and can understand that in such times you would not like to build the most expensive stadium in the world”, the IOC chief told a press conference. “That letter never came”.

As well as tomorrow’s vote between Brasov and Lausanne to decide the host nation of the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics, Bach also highlighted the new Olympic TV Channel as a “gamechanger” which will realise this ambition. So the mayor and his staff thought the USOC, given the past precedent, would give them more time, the source said.

The US has not hosted the Summer Games since 1996 in Atlanta and has not hosted the Winter Olympics since 2002 at Salt Lake City.

The chairmen of No Boston Olympics released a statement, and planned a celebration at a Boston pub later Monday.

Boston 2024 chairman Steve Pagliuca portrayed the move as a joint decision made “in order to give the Olympic movement in the United States the best chance to bring the Games back to our country in 2024”. “If we are united in our vision and our values, then our future will be one of progress”. The 1984 Olympic torch remains on display at City Hall.

The Said Business School at the University of Oxford studied the games since 1960 and found that substantial cost overruns are almost always present. Walsh, elected in 2014 to his first term as mayor, clearly felt the political winds in his face.

The biggest reason the bid was dropped was because a majority of Mass. citizens didn’t support the games in Boston.

After Rome, Paris, Hamburg and maybe Toronto or Doha – all fighting to host the 2024 Games – the list of Olympic hopefuls may quickly dwindle until only bidders will be places like Beijing or Qatar or breakaway Soviet republic.

Embarrassing as the debacle in Boston may have been, chances are it will be nothing more than a distant memory when the vote for the 2024 Olympics finally rolls around. And, if London sounds bad, wait until we see Rio de Janeiro next year.

Workers will probably still be finishing the Olympic stadium when the Rio Games start in a year’s time, but IOC president Thomas Bach told AFP the world will still be “overwhelmed” by the event. With only seven weeks until the September 15 deadline for applications to the global Olympic Committee, two-time host Los Angeles seems to be the obvious choice.

The original Boston organizers didn’t do that, and it got them in trouble.