A San Diego group is serious about wanting to host the 2024 Olympics, submitting an 80-page proposal to the U.S. Olympic Committee, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“We have excellent momentum,” Vincent Mudd, chairman of the San Diego 2024 Exploratory Committee, told the newspaper. “San Diego has something that doesn’t exist in other cities — a youthful culture and an active lifestyle.”
San Diego is so into it that it has received help from more than 700 part-time or full-time volunteers and plans to ask the public to choose a mascot and create a bid logo.
Previously, a joint San Diego-Tijuana, Mexico, bid was talked about, but that didn’t get very far as it was deemed all events must be held in the same country.
The USOC is not guaranteed to bid for the 2024 Olympics, but CEO Scott Blackmun repeated Wednesday that his organization was in discussions with fewer than 10 cities.
“We want to make a decision by the end of the year,” Blackmun said at the Best of U.S. Awards in Washington. “We feel like we’re on track to do that. We want to give everybody a chance to sit down and express why they would like to do this and sit down together and talk about it. Probably, we’ll start sitting down with our board in May or June and really beginning to narrow the field.”
The list of potential cities has also reportedly included Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported the USOC is expected to evaluate proposals late this month and announce three finalists in early May.
The U.S. hasn’t hosted an Olympics since the 2002 Winter Games and is in the middle of its longest stretch between hosting Olympics since a 28-year gap between 1932 and 1960. The USOC sent letters to more than three dozen cities in 2013 to gauge interest in potentially hosting the Olympics.
Other potential 2024 bids could come from South Africa, Paris, Rome and Berlin.
Bidding for the 2024 Olympics will officially begin in 2015, with the winner chosen in 2017.