Bruner Blog

Glad to see I called this correctly back in August: NY won the U.S. Olympic Committee’s designation for the international competition for the location of the 2012 Olympics. Judges told the NY Times that NY won based on its superior plan and presentation:

Several board members said that they sensed in recent days that sentiment was shifting to New York, and that NYC2012’s forceful, funny and highly detailed presentation to the United States Olympic Committee today further swayed votes.

. . . 

San Francisco sold what it had to sell, but New York sold what the people here wanted. There was no there there in San Francisco’s presentation.

That’s pretty much what I said in August based just on their respective web sites. The Times said the judges also had a problem with my major objection to the California plan:

Perhaps the starkest contrast was in how the two cities laid out their plans. New York situated all but three of its venues within the five boroughs. San Francisco envisioned a “Ring of Gold” that placed some events within the city, but many others were in Berkeley, Oakland, Santa Clara, San Jose and Palo Alto, home to Stanford University.

It was worse than that. They had events staged as far from San Francisco as Sacramento, L.A. and San Diego, on the border with Mexico, for Pete’s sake. It was totally stupid. It was the San Francisco Olympics at all, it was the California Olympics. Granted, the NY plan does have a few events in Newark, NJ, but that’s about 20 minutes by bus. I love being right.

The Times piece has the judges saying that NY won based really on the better professionalism of its final bid presentation: more attention to details, specificity in the numbers, better presentation flash and pizzazz, better celebrity spokespeople (Woody Allen, Itzhak Perlman, Cardinal Edward Egan, Robert DeNiro and Rudolph Giuliani vs. SF’s Tony Bennett and Robin Williams), better music Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Lennon’s “Imagine” (vs. “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”?), and so on. Sounds almost like one big ad campaign, in which case SF didn’t have a chance against Madison Avenue.

The International Olympic Committee is to reach a decision among international contenders in 2005.

No tags for this post

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 3rd, 2002 at 1:26 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.