As they made their way to the Washington Hilton from every corner of the globe, some 1,400 members of the international Olympics community flew or rode past some of the most well-known symbols of the U.S. government. In case that fleeting view wasn’t satisfying enough, many of those officials braved the rain to take a tour of the city’s monuments and history on Wednesday.
While Washington’s hopes of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics died a quiet and painless death earlier this year — when the city essentially finished fourth out of four finalists to secure the U.S. bid — this week marks a milestone of sorts in the region’s quest to host a Summer Games.
The Association of National Olympic Committees, or ANOC, may be an obscure organization. But its reach within the international Olympic community is vast, and in holding its annual general assembly in Washington — bringing together the national Olympic committees from more than 200 countries — ANOC has given the seat of American democracy a rare opportunity to boost its profile as an international sports destination.
“There are 50 voting members of the [International Olympic Committee] in D.C. for the next five days, not to mention the entire Olympic community,” said Bob Sweeney, the president of the local ANOC host committee and formerly the president of the DC2024 bid group. “What we wanted them to see is that this is the place we call home. This is a great sports town. And we have great facilities, all the way from the bay to the mountains. It’s a big opportunity for Washington, which is not known in these circles, to showcase itself as something more than just what they see on CNN.”
While representatives of the five cities vying to host the 2024 Games — Budapest, Hamburg, Los Angeles, Paris and Rome — work the lobby and boardrooms to try to sway IOC voting members, local officials from the District, Virginia and Maryland will meet with leaders of various international sports federations in hopes of luring world championships and other elite events to the region.
Sweeney said the local officials hope to come away from the ANOC meeting with “one or more” commitments from international federations to stage their world championships in the region in the next several years — on the heels of the successful International Cycling Union (UCI) world championships held in Richmond in August.
The D.C. contingent is also trotting out its biggest star attraction — Katie Ledecky, the 18-year-old Bethesda native and the most dominant swimmer in the world — to be a presenter at the ANOC Gala Awards Dinner Thursday night at DAR Constitution Hall.
When Washington launched its upstart bid for the 2024 Games, it was considered a longshot in Olympic circles, in large part due to what is perceived as a strain of anti-American-government opinion within the international Olympic movement. Even the DC2024 organizers acknowledged the tough sell of convincing global powerbrokers to look past the city’s deep symbolism.
But ANOC president Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah of Kuwait, who is also an IOC member and an executive committee member of FIFA, said it was not Washington’s politics, but its lack of recent experience with international sporting events, that has held it back.
“I think this is related to sports more than politics,” Sheikh Ahmad said. “To host the Games you have to have lots of [smaller] events, and start to build. I hope this [ANOC general assembly] will give invitation to the city to think to host [an Olympics] in the future.”
Asked if he could foresee a day when Washington hosts an Olympics, he said, “I think in the right time.”
For the U.S. Olympic Committee, hosting the ANOC event is the latest step in repairing its standing within the IOC, which suffered in the wake of the Salt Lake City 2002 corruption scandal and the failed bids for New York and Chicago for the 2012 and 2016 Games, respectively. After passing on bidding for 2020, the USOC initially chose Boston — over Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco — as its 2024 bid city, before that effort died amid local political and public opposition, forcing the USOC to revive the Los Angeles bid.
“I’m not interested in coming in here with some heavy sell,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, part of a six-person delegation from the city. “I’m interested in hearing from the people who have devoted lives to the Olympic movement, to hear where it goes next. As we refine and evolve what we will ultimately present [within the formal bid], it’s important to hear what people would like to see and to learn what mistakes have been made in the past, and to try to be as aligned to the values of the movement as possible.”
Sheikh Ahmad, however, downplayed the impact of the Boston debacle in the minds of IOC voters, who, he said, would consider the Los Angeles bid on its own merits. With the U.S. seeking its first Summer Games since Atlanta 1996, the L.A. bid is considered one of the frontrunners for 2024, along with Paris, which last hosted in 1924.
“Today, I think there is a good recovery for Olympic movement in America,” Sheikh Ahmad said. By bringing its ANOC General Assembly to town, he said, “This is a good signal that we are looking to come back to America.”
