An Olympic stadium roaring, albeit temporarily, in South Boston. An athletes village at Columbia Point. Franklin Park’s White Stadium reimagined to host equestrian events. The Emerald Necklace finally finished, connecting green space all the way across Boston.
All of that was part of the vision for what an Olympic Games in Boston could’ve looked like. And if Boston 2024 had gotten its way, that’s what the city would look like right now — buzzing with the greatest athletes, fans from around the world, media and more.
Instead, all eyes are on Paris, where the Summer Games officially begin Friday.
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The Paris Olympics are here, but did you know that Boston was once in the running to host the 2024 Games? See the proposed Olympic Stadium and other venues, hear from some of the people who dreamed up the pitch and find out what ultimately caused the idea to be withdrawn.
There’s no doubt that the Olympic Games would’ve created an international spectacle not only in Boston but across much of Massachusetts, with events slated to be held in Lowell, Worcester, New Bedford and beyond.
But at what cost? That was the question of many city residents, as well as No Boston Olympics, the grassroots organization credited with helping to sway public opinion against hosting the games. The organization was skeptical of the bid’s big promises, concerned that budget overruns could fall onto the shoulders of Massachusetts taxpayers.
Support cratered within months of Boston being selected as America’s choice to host the 2024 Games, and the bid was withdrawn.
Where the 2024 Boston Olympics would have taken place
Fast forward to 2024, and plenty of locals remain skeptical about the whole idea.
“Quite frankly, I think it would have been a bad decision,” said Octavia Pidoux. “Traffic alone here is pretty bad on a regular day, so I feel like the Olympics would have made it 10 times worse … I think Boston is just a little too small to house such a great event.”
Still, members of the former bid team will tell you there’s a certain magic about the Olympics, and their passion for the Games remains palpable, years after it fell apart.
The group that pushed to bring the Olympics to Boston had a reunion Friday to watch an Opening Ceremony that could have happened in the Bay State.
“I just think about all the little kids that are like me that maybe don’t feel like they can play football or baseball or basketball,” Olympic rower Dan Walshe said, who was the only Olympian on the Boston 2024 committee. “They don’t feel like they fit in, and have this just amazing experience surrounded by them of greatness.”
Aside from inspiring Boston’s youth — and adults — other former members of the committee point to long-term benefits it could have brought to the city, by boosting transportation, housing supply and climate resiliency.
“The the big idea was to use the Games as a catalyst for really important planning initiatives for the benefit of the city,” architect and former member of the master planning team for Boston 2024 David Manfredi said. “It was about seizing an opportunity, pointing a spotlight, creating some guidelines and deadlines that could be really impactful.”
Let’s not say Boston will never host an Olympics. It just didn’t this year… I don’t think it’s impossible.
Olympian and Boston 2024 committee member Dan Walsh, who shared visions of rowing on the Charles, a completed Emerald Necklace and Boston’s universities hosting events with athletes from all over the world
Here’s a look at the vision for Boston that would have put it in the global spotlight unlike any other it had ever experienced, and how that vision became a footnote in the city’s history.
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1) The rise and fall of Boston 2024: From ‘cool’ idea to America’s official Olympic bid
Boston 2024 cofounder Eric Reddy remembers talking about bringing the Olympics to Boston as early as 2012.
The Massachusetts native, now 42, has an intense love for Boston and all it has to offer, and he dreamed of showing it off to the world.
“And I just kept waiting until somebody said no,” Reddy said, “and just kept pushing the idea and pushing the idea and pushing the idea.”
With eventual partner and fellow young professional Corey Dinopoulos, he ran with the prospect of an Olympic Games in Boston, turning it from an abstract idea to a legitimate bid that started to gain serious traction.
“One of our big pitches in the beginning was, ‘You need to suspend your disbelief a little bit,'” Reddy said. “We began, really, a grassroots approach to engaging people almost on a one-on-one basis and saying, ‘This is why we think it’s a good idea.'”
In January 2015, Boston was chosen as the United States’ bid city to host the 2024 Olympics. Reddy said the prospect excited him not only because of the magic the Games could bring, but the progress that a hard deadline could spark.
“Everybody agreed it was cool,” he said. “One of the challenges that we had with this endeavor is that it meant something different to everybody.”
Boston 2024’s overarching pitch to stakeholders who may have been wondering what was in it for them was the pressure hosting the Olympics would put on the city, Reddy said. That, he explained, could’ve put a series of transportation and housing projects on the fast track, accelerating needed development in Boston.
“From the transportation sector in particular, what we were going to try to do as an Olympic bid was just piggyback on the the the plans that were already in place that they just needed to put funding towards,” Reddy said.
How our sister station NECN reported on Boston 2024’s selection at the time:
Boston 2024: Why Bid to Host the Olympics?
Boston was picked Thursday as the United States’ best shot at hosting the Summer Olympics in 2024, edging out Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington for the honor. Now, another question looms: Why host?
Many experts, and cities, have begun to doubt whether it’s worth it to host the Olympics as costs for recent Games have soared, to $40 billion for Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games and $50 billion for Sochi’s 2014 Winter Games.
“It’s very difficult to make it pay off economically,” said sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of “Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.”
Such misgivings have fueled local opposition in Boston and in some of the U.S. cities that bid for 2024. They’ve also derailed bids by three European cities for the 2022 Winter Games, leaving just two cities — Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing — vying for that honor.
The International Olympic Committee has tried to respond to that reticence by launching a series of reforms, dubbed Agenda 2020, aimed at keeping down costs, and the U.S. Olympic Committee in turn asked its four bidders to do just that.
But it’s unclear what weight a lean, sub-$5 billion budget proposal may carry when the Olympics — even those, like Barcelona 1992, held up as success stories — are notorious for tending to go far over budget, and for often leaving in their wake expensive, languishing stadium behemoths later derided as white elephants.
In the months that followed Boston becoming America’s bid city, polls tracked wavering public support. At the same time, an opposition effort campaigning against Boston 2024 gained momentum, raising concerns over transparency and cost.
By that summer, the bid was nixed amid the growing pushback.
“I never took it personally,” Reddy said of the criticism. “Think of the bid as a startup company. There’s never been a startup that’s on the front page of The Boston Globe and the Herald every day as they’re getting the shop set up.”
When asked if he would have done anything different, Reddy said that he would’ve been more vocal in the beginning that the proposal would evolve, and that it was not a finished product. He said that people were quick to judge early proposal documents about what an Olympic Games in Boston would look like, but that’s all they were — early proposals.
Still, Reddy said he enjoyed the chance to reminisce about the bid. While Boston 2024 is commonly referred to as a failed bid, the effort achieved significant milestones before ultimately being nixed.
Had it gone through, though, Reddy believes that Boston would be better equipped today to handle some of its biggest issues. Not to mention, the sheer spectacle of the Olympics in the city and its surrounding communities around Massachusetts, could’ve revved the region’s economic engine.
“It’d be absolutely buzzing,” Reddy said. “The hospitality community would be getting ready for what will probably be the most intense six weeks that they would ever have.”
The Boston 2024 cofounder went on to describe an “Olympic fever” that he envisioned: painted streets, buildings with new murals and street poles and flags decked out in Olympic gear.
“It would be amazing,” he said.
2) Meet the de facto coach of the Boston 2024 bid
Dan Walsh loves the Olympics — really loves the Olympics.
The Connecticut native and Northeastern University alumnus won a bronze medal rowing for Team USA at Beijing 2008 and went on to join the push to make Boston a host city with Boston 2024.
He can remember clear as day watching TV coverage of rowing at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics as a child, a moment that proved to be pivotal in his life.
“I had never been into sports at all in middle school — very picked on, very bullied,” Walsh said. “And getting out onto the water kind of literally created a whole new vista for me.”
Rowing became a bigger passion for Walsh over the years, and it led him to Northeastern’s team, the national team and to Athens 2004, where he served as an alternate. He finally got his big call-up at Beijing 2008.
“Beijing is a meteor in my life,” Walsh said. “It’s going to burn up in the atmosphere, right? It’s just a flash.”
Athlete mental health has since become another passion for Walsh, who is open about his own struggles in the past. What helped him through a “dark moment,” he said, was getting the chance to work on Boston 2024.
He was approached by Reddy to join the committee, after he had returned to Northeastern, this time to serve as a coach. At first apprehensive, Walsh agreed to join the 2024 bid as director of athlete engagement. He was the only Olympian on the team, and felt he became the de facto “coach” for the committee.
With Walsh’s passion for sport, athletes and the city of Boston, it’s easy to see why Reddy approached him.
“And then when it was announced that Boston won the bid, it was like, ‘Whoa, this is real?” Walsh said. “That I think was really the fun part of being in that committee, is being the athlete in the room, being the coach in the room, making sure everybody’s motivated.”
As for keeping himself motivated, Walsh said that he wanted to ensure that the experience would be a great one for athletes, and that the Games would be an inspiration for a city of “tough and gritty people.”
“As naive as I may have been to the upper part of the politics and to the corporation side and the business development side, what I wasn’t naive is is that this moment could be very beautiful,” Walshe said. “And it could be especially beautiful for the younger people of Boston.”
Walsh still believes that the Olympics would have been great for Boston. He conjured up visions of rowing on the Charles, a completed Emerald Necklace and universities hosting events with athletes from all over the world. He says that, like other Olympians, he has a powerful imagination, and isn’t afraid to use it to dream about what’s possible.
“Sure, we didn’t get it for 2024, but you know they’re still going to host Olympics in the future,” he mused. “So let’s not say Boston will never host an Olympics. It just didn’t this year… I don’t think it’s impossible.”
3) ‘Games as a catalyst’: What would have been built in Boston
One of the common talking points for people who were against hosting the Olympic Games in Boston was the money, time and resources it would take to build the necessary venues, infrastructure and housing — that it would be too much of an investment for a two-week extravaganza.
David Manfredi, a well-known Boston-based architect and part of the master planning team for Boston 2024, didn’t see it that way.
“The planning of individual sites, the big ideas around creating a very walkable Games, creating compact Games, creating affordable Games. All from the point of view of the benefits — long-term benefits — to the city of Boston, Manfredi explained.
He believes that hosting the Games could have given the city a deadline and cause to rally around, letting it make seismic changes in resiliency, housing and transportation.
“It’s more important than ever, but the Games could be an accelerant, a catalyst that made things happen faster,” Manfredi said.
Financing an Olympic Games
Under Boston 2024’s estimated operating costs and estimated operating revenues, there would have been a $210 million surplus by the end of the Olympics.
There’s no doubt the Games would have brought a flurry of construction and new development.
The centerpiece of it all would have been a temporary Olympic stadium at Widett Circle, an industrial area in Dorchester between the Southeast Expressway and an MBTA layover facility. The plan was to construct a 69,000-seat stadium to hold an Olympic-sized track that could host athletic events as well as the opening and closing ceremonies.
But the plan was to take down the stadium after the Olympics and make way for new mixed-use development in a prime piece of Boston real estate.
“All the infrastructure you brought to it, the the road improvements, the public transit improvements, the power, that you brought to it that’s permanent and that becomes the basis for long-term, permanent development,” Manfredi said.
The “legacy” vision for the area — as organizers referred to it — was 83 acres of “mixed use, transit-oriented residential and commercial development,” according to the official bid proposal. Included in that would be 7.9 million square feet of development, 15 acres of park space, a new commuter train station on the Fairmount Line and enhancements to the existing Broadway Red Line station.
Similarly, Boston 2024 proposed building the athletes village at Columbia Point in Dorchester — a peninsula into Boston Harbor currently home to UMass Boston and the JFK Presidential Library — that would become yet another mixed-use development. That 30-acre plot was slated to include four million square feet of mixed use development including housing, dormitories, retail and more.
“We see in the city big ideas about development on sites that really make sense… But the infrastructure, the improvements to the traffic and the power grid needs investment and, single development, single buildings or even multiple buildings have a hard time supporting that kind of large scale of public improvement. But, boy, if we could use the Games as the means to put infrastructure in place,” Manfredi said.
Boston 2024 didn’t share designs of all the venues it was proposing to build or redesign, but ones they did share would have been distinctive. See them below:
It’s no secret that Boston’s transit system would have needed some bolstering to handle the influx of people that the Olympics would have brought in. The bid called for nearly $3 billion in transit projects, the majority of which were already planned and funded by the Commonwealth, at least at the time.
“It would be crazy to invest billions of dollars to move athletes around for 16 days, insane,” Manfredi said. “But that’s not what you’re doing. What you’re doing is putting transportation in places where the city can use it, modernizing it in a city like Boston, where it’s going to be long-term benefit for as big a part of the population as possible.”
Under the Boston 2024 bid, events would have been held across the city and state. Existing facilities would have been used when possible, like TD Garden for basketball, Gillette Stadium for football and Harambee Park for tennis. Several universities — like Boston University, Boston College, Harvard and Northeastern — were all slated to host events within their facilities, as were cities such as Lowell, Billerica and New Bedford.
Looking back at the bid, Manfredi describes the committee as “high-octane” but acknowledges that mistakes were made. Those mistakes, though, make for lessons learned.
“One of the lessons you really take away is this kind of initiative, this kind of big-thinking planning really needs broad support,” Manfredi said. “Because it’s something that everybody or the vast majority of people have to have to share the dream.”
4) #NoBoston2024: The movement to keep the Olympics out of Boston
The U.S. Olympic Committee selected Boston as the American candidate to host the 2024 Games, not Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. or San Francisco. Within about six months, though, the bid was withdrawn amid wavering public support.
A group called No Boston Olympics was responsible for a lot of the momentum that swayed public opinion.
“This could really mess up what’s a great state and a great city, and it can send us in the wrong direction in terms of our priorities,” Dempsey said in an interview with NBC10 Boston looking back on his group’s efforts.
A WBUR/MassINC poll found that in January of 2015, 51% of the public supported the Olympics coming to Boston, and 33% opposed it. Those numbers had just about flipped by just two months later.
“We had seen abandoned venues in Greece; we had read about the fact that the London Olympics in 2012 was something like five or six billion dollars over budget,” Dempsey said. “There’s no national guarantee for the cost overruns in the U.S. — that means that the people of Massachusetts have to cover all of those billions of cost overruns.”
The famously brutal winter that slammed New England in 2015 furthered the Olympic opposition’s cause, Dempsey said, with the MBTA snarled amid historic snowfall.
“And I think people said, if we don’t even have the basic commuting system right, for our people that live here today, why are we going to be focused on a three week event nine years in the future,” Dempsey said.
At the time the bid was nixed, the U.S. Olympic Committee said that Boston 2024 believed it could rally more support, but that time was of the essence, WBUR reported at the time.
“The USOC does not think that the level of support enjoyed by Boston’s bid would allow it to prevail over great bids from Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest or Toronto,” USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said in the announcement.
It was Paris, of course, that ultimately would ultimately have the successful bid to host in 2024. But the U.S. would get its Olympics after all — the parties struck a deal that named Paris the host city of the 2024 Games and Los Angeles the host city of the ones in 2028.
os Angeles will host the 2028 Olympics across various pre-existing locations around the city and surrounding areas. Oklahoma City will host some events due to limited venue space and the goal to not construct temporary venues solely for the Olympics.
We reached out to many of the politicians who were part of the push for Boston 2024 but they didn’t want to be interviewed.
5) Boston 2024’s legacy
With the Olympic Games getting underway in Paris, Bostonians are watching the athletes compete from afar. But perhaps the “failed” bid to bring the Games to the Bay State wasn’t a total loss.
“I have to say, the experience, but for the end, was really, a very positive one,” Manfredi said. “Both personally and hopefully some benefit in uncovering opportunities for the city.”
In a similar vein, Walsh hasn’t been discouraged from dreaming big. He still believes that Boston could still someday host the Olympics.
“It’s amazing to think this was nine years ago and what could have been,” the Olympian said. “Everybody just keep on hoping and believe in yourself and realize that, with the power of your imagination, all things are possible.”
Reddy, on the other hand, said he was disappointed to say that he doesn’t think Boston will ever serve as host — he doesn’t believe the public will ever be on board. Still, he stands by his vision for what could have been in 2024.
“Any Bostonian you talk to will already tell you we’re, like, the world’s greatest city,” Reddy said. “Why not try to push that out, you know, to to the entire world to see even more?”
We take a look back at the Boston 2024 bid for the Olympics – what went wrong, and what could we do if we pursue a bid in the future?
NBC10 Boston’s Ryan Kath, TJ Killilea and Maria Bonnemaison contributed to this report.