Today the United States Olympic Organizing Committee has decided to choose Chicago over Los Angeles as the site for our country’s bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to America.  The field had already been narrowed down to these two finalists.

I guess this is good news or bad news depending on how you look at it.  I will let other people share their perspective, but I will tell you that as far as I am concerned, this is great news on two levels.

From a concerned-taxpayer perspective, I was very disturbed to see the State of California provide a financial guarantee (courtesy of taxpayer dollars) in case the games lose money.  How much?  If the games were to tank financially, we’d be on the hook for up to $250,000,000.00.

Let me share another perspective on why this is good news for… me.  I love the Olympic Games.  There is almost nothing the beats being present to watch the best athletes in the world compete against one another!  To give you an idea of my enthusiasm, in 2004, I made the decision to skip the 2004 Republican National Convention to spend twenty days in Athens to be on hand for those amazing games. 

To be honest, a big part of the fun for me is the adventure of traveling to a far away place.  The idea of having the games here, where not only is travel out of the picture, but instead everyone I know is traveling and sleeping at my house…???  No thanks!

Anyways, you can read the story of the USOOC’s decision here

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.