June 24--No sooner had French Olympic Committee leaders announced Tuesday that Paris was officially a candidate to host the 2024 Summer Games than a British bookmaker established it as a 5-4 favorite.
Boston was given 9-4 odds, a strong second best among the top candidates, with Rome and Hamburg listed at 5-1.
No sooner had the Paris chapeau landed in the ring than Guy Drut, the 1976 Olympic hurdles champion and one of France's two International Olympic Committee members, was quoted as saying, "Boston remains the favorite," a prefab show of humility France lacked in its recent failed bids.
What irony in the timing of such encouraging words and numbers for Boston's 2024 Olympic hopes.
Because next Tuesday, if the U.S. Olympic Committee has come to its senses, its board of directors will wisely choose at a regularly scheduled meeting to pull a doomed Boston bid that has been a disaster from the start.
If not, the USOC risks wasting a lot of its staff's time and energy, which could be better spent on helping U.S. athletes prepare for the 2016 and 2018 Olympics and Paralympics.
That is the major principle of the USOC's stated mission, which begins thus:
"To support U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes in achieving sustained competitive excellence ..."
The Boston bid already has made a mockery of its stated philosophy: a compact games that would make extensive use of the sports installations at the area's many universities.
At the rate the bid committee has changed plans over the two weeks, it won't be long before the only Massachusetts city without a proposed Olympic venue will be Boston.
The latest iteration of Boston 2024's scheme has shooting 26 miles away, whitewater canoeing 110 miles away, sailing 60 miles away and beach volleyball eight miles away instead of on Boston Common, a locale that was to be the iconic equivalent of London's having staged the sport at the Horse Guards Parade. There is talk of having volleyball 100 miles away and basketball prelims 90 miles from The Hub.
The moves are blatantly pandering to a poll showing statewide support for the 2024 bid is nearly 50 percent (hardly overwhelming) if events are spread around Massachusetts. And the planned November 2016 referendum on the bid would be statewide. Support in the Boston area is barely 40 percent.
One of the venue moves takes tennis from Harvard to a club in nearby Dorchester. Apparently, no one at Boston 2024 got Harvard's formal buy-in before deciding it would host an Olympic sport.
That was among the areas where Boston bid proponents hornswoggled the USOC.
In selecting Boston, the USOC board did not heed one of its members, who noted the idea of using university sports facilities was not a comprehensible selling point to most IOC members who will choose the 2024 host in September 2017.
After all, they come from countries whose universities seek to educate, not provide sports entertainment for the masses.
If the USOC dumps Boston, it must decide whether to present Los Angeles, its second choice.
Some argue the USOC needs a bid city to continue its global relations rebuild by showing its belief in IOC President Thomas Bach's pet project, Agenda 2020, which will ostensibly cut the cost of staging an Olympics. Others contend it also would set up two-time host Los Angeles for a successful 2028 bid.
The deadline for that decision is Sept. 15.
The deadline to put Boston out of its misery should be Tuesday.
Correction: an earlier version of this story misstated the distance from Boston Common to Quincy and said the sites for volleyball and basketball preliminaries were plans rather than ideas under discussion.
