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America’s Olympic Dilemma

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By @Alex_Drude

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The city of Boston beat out San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles to be the United States’ prospective host candidates for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Interestingly, no major eastern American city has ever hosted the summer games. St. Louis is the most northern U.S. city to host, but that was in 1904, when the games were a sideshow to the World’s Fair. Atlanta in 1996 is as far east as the games have been in America.

Of course, Lake Placid in New York hosted the 1932 and 1980 Winter Games, but neither were the Winter Olympics, the major event it has since become. For 1980, Lake Placid was the only bid — worldwide.

With the greatest athletes in the world, America needs to bid for the Olympics, but I don’t think that the country really needs to win the bid and host the games ever again. I think of the Olympics as a chance for smaller or emerging cities to show their worth on the word stage. Since 1996, the summer games have been held in Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London, and it will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

London being the obvious exception, the other cities needed something like the Olympics to capture the world’s attention. No American city needs this. Boston already hosts some 300 major international sporting events during year involving thousands of people from many different countries and millions of people watching worldwide — it’s called the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.

Boston, and the other potential American nominees, are all well-known cities across the world. There is no need for an American city to seriously ever bid for the Olympics.

There are also monetary, crowd, housing and traffic considerations. Boston and the other American nominees are hard enough to get around in when there isn’t an Olympic Games happening, and I can think of a thousand better community uses for public money than, say, a concrete white-water rafting course.

I’m a proud American and want to see the U.S. win Olympic gold as much as every other red-blooded fellow. I just think it’s better when the country’s athletes compete on somebody else’s home turf.

Alex Drude is a Pac-12 writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @Alex_Drude. “Like” him on Facebook and add him to your network on Google+.

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