Dan and Mike have been maintaining for a while that the Olympic bid is now or never, and the deputy mayor makes the point particularly strongly in the Washington Post today:
“Our bid today is a combination of a unique series of resources that I’m not sure are replicable,” Doctoroff said in an interview.
Apparently, the U.S. Olympic Committee was under a different impression, however:
“Two officials associated with two other U.S. bids said they were under the impression that a long-term commitment was vital to winning the USOC’s support, and some board members indicated at the time they believed New York was prepared to bid twice if necessary.”
There’s some evidence, though, that this isn’t just a negotiating stance, and that Dan is serious when he says he won’t bid again.
Brian Hatch, no fan of the stadium, notes that the folks at NYC2012 must be serious about not bidding again, since they never bothered registering the URL www.nyc2016.org.
That was left to a quick-thinking NYC2012 volunteer, Dan Flax, who told us that he grabbed the URL in 2002 when he noticed that the people running NYC2012 hadn’t.
“I figured if something happened, it would be better if [the URL ] was available to them,” he said.