The Windy City Looks to Blow-in the Olympics

The U.S. Olympic committee stuns the world by picking Chicago over Los Angeles as the U.S. choice to hold the 2016 Summer Olympic games.

Los Angeles was hoping to play host to their third Olympics, but in a surprise move it was decided Chicago would get the honor of bringing the Summer Olympic games back to the U.S.

Chicago now has to persuade the International Olympic Committee (IOC ) that it is the right choice to play host instead of other international cities that may include the likes of Madrid, Prague, Rome, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. And this may be no easy task because Chicago has all ready had to overcome USOC( United States Olympic Committee ) concerns about a lack of venues in which to hold the many different Olympic events. The IOC will choose the host city of the 2016 Summer Games in 2009.

The 11 member USOC board decided to go with Chicago despite Los Angeles having many Olympic venues set-up because L.A. hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics. However, Chicago was able to sway the committees votes based mainly on the idea of developing venues along the cities lakefront area. This lakefront idea seemed to impress the committee because they think a lakefront venue will bring the needed 'magic' required of a city playing host to the world.

The Chicago bid centers around building a massive 80,000, $336 million temporary Olympic stadium in Washington Park. Chicago's bid also includes building a $1.1 billion lakefront village that would be built south of downtown Chicago which would be near the convention center.


The USOC has been looking for a suitable host site for the 2016 games ever since their 2012 site choice, New York City, lost out to London as host of the 2012 games. The USOC feels New York lost the bid because financing for a new stadium in Manhattan fell apart just weeks before the International voting took place.

This time around, the USOC required that any private financing had to be all ready in place, and that if the private financing fell through, then the local governments must be willing to pick-up the tab. Both Chicago and Los Angeles were able to meet this requirement.

The USOC feels Chicago has a good chance of winning the 2016 bid because 2016 will mark 20 years since the U.S. has played host to the Summer Olympic games. Atlanta was the last city to host the Summer games and that was in 1996.

USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth thinks Chicago falls in nicely into the IOC's idea of rotating the Summer Games on a geographical basis, so he feels 2016 will be the United States turn to host the Summer games. Ueberrouth feel this way because the IOC picked a European city for the Summer Olympics of (London) and an Asian city (Beijing) for 2008 as host cities for the next 2 Summer games. Another European City ( Athens ) played host to the 2004 Summer games.

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