ROME’S BID TO host the 2024 Olympics was dealt a potentially fatal blow today after the city’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, said she would not give her formal backing.
Giovanni Malago, the president of Italy’s Olympic Committee (CONI), said last week the committee would abandon its bid to host the Games in the event Raggi refused to give her backing.
In an emphatic speech in front of bid supporters, opposition and media in Rome, Raggi was unequivocal.
“This is our position: it is irresponsible to say yes to this candidature,” she told a packed media conference.
We are effectively asking the people of Rome and of Italy to shoulder the debts (of hosting the Games). We just don’t support it.
“Sport was an integral part of our electoral campaign, but we don’t want it to be used as a pretext to a building spree around the city.”
Raggi succeeded the controversial Ignazio Marino in October 2015 and, as the first female mayor of the Eternal City, she is determined to get Rome’s house in order.
After years of mismanagement of the city, hosting an Olympics is not top of her list of priorities. Raggi highlighted the spiralling deficits of former host cities and, in a reference to the building works that would be required, said she opposed another ‘concrete Olympics’.
“We only finished paying off the debts for hosting the 1990 world swimming championships in 2015,” she said.
The debts related to the Torino winter Games in 2006 are still ongoing. I say no to another concrete Olympics.
The decision now leaves Paris as the favourites to host the 2024 Games although the French capital, which lost out to London in 2012, will be battling Los Angeles and Budapest.
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