Long Odds for Olympic Bid

Having won the nomination as the U.S. candidate to play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics, New York must confront key local obstacles, both political and financial, even as it undertakes to sell to an international audience -- one not always inclined to embrace the United States -- on the most in-your-face American city of all.

The U.S. Olympic Committee’s selection Saturday of New York over San Francisco as this nation’s 2012 candidate gives impetus to plans that Olympic promoters have called a “catalyst” for rebuilding New York in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The bid calls for $5 billion of construction in all, on sports facilities as well as a key subway extension, an athletes’ village and an Olympic stadium.

At the same time, New York officials must now focus on appealing to the International Olympic Committee, which will pick the site in 2005, and competing against a field that will include Moscow and perhaps Paris and Toronto as well as candidates from Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

Comedian Billy Crystal, for instance, was a winner in his joke-laced appearance before the USOC, wisecracking that New York already has so many “foreigners” it’s like being in “a giant 7-Eleven.” Bid officials say they know that won’t play with the IOC.

The odds of New York ultimately prevailing, Olympic insiders said, remain considerable. Recent history works against New York; the Games have already been held in the United States four times since 1980, most recently in Salt Lake City in February. In addition, there lingers within the IOC a strain of anti-U.S. resentment, and the USOC is so deficient at lobbying internationally that just a few weeks ago Rio de Janeiro, not San Antonio, was chosen to host the 2007 Pan-American Games.

In the meantime, next year the IOC picks the site of the 2010 Winter Games. Vancouver is a leading candidate. If it wins, that could scramble U.S. chances for 2012, because the IOC likes to rotate the Games around different continents.

Moreover, world events -- such as a U.S. war with Iraq -- may alter the Olympic dynamic.

All that said, New York offers a compelling story of courage and valor in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks -- values that bid officials like to stress are Olympic values.

And the international field may well prove not as formidable as first glance might suggest.

Moscow and Paris, for instance, have staged the Games before; the Games have never been in New York.

The IOC thought so little of Paris’ 2008 bid that, in the first round of voting last year, Paris trailed even Istanbul, ultimately coming in third, behind Beijing and Toronto.

With the USOC nod, New York has already shown it can beat long odds. The Olympics in Manhattan seemed inconceivable to anyone who witnessed the Goodwill Games in New York in 1998, dogged by transportation and other woes. Yet New York emerged as the U.S. 2012 choice.

“You had to do something new,” said Dan Doctoroff, the New York 2012 bid chief and the city’s deputy mayor for economic development. “And if you were going to do it, you had to do it in a way that would transform New York and leave an enormous legacy for world sport.”

The 2012 plan calls for Olympic-only ferries and commuter trains to carry athletes to the venues; in theory, the stars of the Romanian gymnastics team will not be scrambling to catch the westbound No. 7 subway line to connect at the Times Square station to the 1, 2, 3 or 9 trains to get to Madison Square Garden on time.

Bid plans call for $904 million in construction for various sports facilities.

The bid also, however, details some $4 billion in other expenditures, including an extension of the 7 line to the West Side, a 4,400-apartment Olympic village across the East River from the United Nations and an 86,000-seat stadium on the far West Side.

The stadium would be the home of the New York Jets after the Games; the Jets now play in New Jersey, sharing the Meadowlands with the Giants. The stadium would cost at least $700 million and be financed largely by the Jets and the NFL; an added cost is $500 million, perhaps more, for a retractable roof and a platform to build the stadium over existing rail yards.

The stadium and village -- and an extension of the 7 subway line to the far West Side -- are to be built by the city, state or private developers and will, Doctoroff said, be built whether or not New York gets the Games.

Much depends on a complicated process called tax increment financing, which may require state legislation.

The aim is for construction of the subway -- engineering and design studies are already funded with $60 million -- to be underway by 2005, in time for the IOC’s vote for 2012.

Over the years, various projects for the far West Side have been blunted. Most recently, for instance, there was a plan to build the Yankees a stadium. It wasn’t built. In the 1980s, there was a plan for a highway and development project. It wasn’t built.

What’s different now, city officials argue, is that everything is different -- because of Sept. 11.

“There’s this unbelievable spirit in the city that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” Doctoroff said.

New York is, however, grappling with a municipal budget crisis. Community activists have already registered complaints about the stadium. Questions have been raised about the environmental impact of the stadium and the traffic it might generate.

At the same time, recent weeks have seen in the local and state political leadership, as well as on Wall Street and from private developers, demonstrations of a real zeal to think big -- a recognition that the attacks have afforded the city a once-in-a-generation opportunity to contemplate projects on a grand scale.

“Bottom line,” said Richard T. Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, a trade group that backs the Olympic bid, “I think there is a good possibility we can pull this off. The obstacles, the issues, are certainly not insurmountable.”

Before the terrorist attacks, he said, “I don’t know if I would have said that.”

Added Wellington Chen, a land-use consultant who serves on the New York 2012 board of directors: “It’s not that we’re playing the 9/11 card. But this,” the Olympic bid, “is an inspiration for us. And people need hope.”