USOC names Boston as its representative for 2024 Olympic bid

The United States Olympic Committee has named Boston as the United States' bid city for the 2024 Olympic Games.

Boston has never hosted an Olympic Games. The city will require construction of an Olympic stadium, and projected costs run to more than $7 billion, according to the AP.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington D.C. had all been seeking the opportunity to represent the United States in bidding for the 2024 Games. The International Olympic Committee is expected to name the host city in 2017. The United States has not hosted a Summer Games since Atlanta in 1996.

Los Angeles based its bid on a series of "clusters" scattered around Southern California. San Francisco sought to make use of iconic backdrops such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Coit Tower. Boston intended to use university facilities for a compact Olympic experience. Washington's odds for hosting seemed dubious at best because of the city's polarizing nature.

While hosting the Olympics has long been deemed an honor, in more recent years local governments have understood that it's been the IOC doing the deeming and the citizenry doing the paying. Costs for hosting Olympic Games have soared past $50 billion, and while most governments will not go to the ridiculously lavish (and, by all accounts, corrupt) extremes of Russia with Sochi, the price of entry now is a substantial one for a two-week event.

In fact, the prestige of hosting an Olympic Games is so dimmed that four cities have already dropped out of the bidding for the 2022 Winter Games, leaving only Kazakhstan and China as the bidding nations. Many nations don't want to bear the crushing expense of trying to meet the IOC's demanding standards only to see their facilities plunge into disuse or even ruin within months after the Games' end.