Brennan: Blame USOC for Boston's failed Olympics bid

The U.S. Olympic movement has had plenty of dark days over the years, but Monday might have been the worst of all.

After grandly proclaiming little more than six months ago that Boston was the city to bring the Summer Olympics back to the United States for the first time since 1996, after throwing every ounce of energy and political capital into a Boston bid, the U.S. Olympic Committee is declaring defeat, pulling the plug and leaving.

This is an organizational disaster. It’s a national debacle. It is an embarrassment of the highest order. Take your pick. Or choose all of the above.

Everyone is blaming everyone and everything for this fiasco: local politics, angry citizens, the terrible Boston winter, promises reneged upon and the like.

But there’s one group that should take the ultimate responsibility: the organization that represents the United States on the world sports stage, a collection of veteran leaders who should have known better.

That’s the USOC.

After years of board-room estrangement from the Euro-centric International Olympic Committee, USOC leaders spent quite a bit of time and effort working their way back into its good graces. The USOC’s re-entry into society, its debutante moment if you will, was the announcement of its bid city for the 2024 Summer Games. (Such was the embarrassment of losing early and often for the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympics that the United States didn’t even bid for the 2020 Games, which were awarded to Tokyo.)

So, after all that, after Boston became the symbol of the USOC’s re-emergence into the world of bidding for – and even winning – the right to host future Olympic Games, to lose Boston so quickly is just an awful turn of events for the USOC.

To say jobs should be lost over this mess represents a visceral reaction to the news, but it’s also likely to be the right reaction over time.

Who do we blame for this gold-medal-winning ineptitude? Where do we start?

The USOC’s 16-member board of directors picked Boston over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington in early January, even though it knew Boston’s bid had the lowest public support of the four bidding cities and came with its own ready-made protest group.

That should have disqualified Boston right then and there. Clearly, the board somehow didn’t figure that out, so USOC chairman Larry Probst (who had ¼ of one vote as one of the four IOC members from the United States) and CEO Scott Blackmun (who had no vote) should have stood up, screamed, banged a shoe on the table or done whatever it took to make it clear that this was too important a decision to fritter it away on a city that already was balking at the idea.

Even if Probst and Blackmun didn’t personally make the Boston decision, it’s on their watch, and that is not good.

Then there are the other members of the board of directors. They’ll never fire themselves, but they should consider it. They blew it. Even though some certainly voted for another city rather than Boston, the end result is that they wasted everyone’s time and likely sabotaged whatever chance a U.S. city had to host the 2024 Summer Olympics.

That’s not leadership. That’s abject failure.

What now? The deadline for the USOC to put up a bid city for the 2024 Games is September 15. The organization will certainly go back to the other three finalists, and perhaps other cities will want to jump in.

The surest bet now is Los Angeles, beloved host of the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympic Games. With its rich Olympic history and ready-made stadiums, it should have been picked from the get-go. It’s the only American city that can play ball with Paris, Rome, Toronto and the others already in the running for the 2024 Games.

Now, though, it would enter at a huge disadvantage, dragging the Boston soap opera like a ball and chain into the competition.

So L.A. would try for 2024 in the hope of positioning itself for success in either 2028 or 2032. Looking that far ahead is about all that’s left for the bumbling, blundering USOC.