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San Francisco withdrew its bid for the 2016 Olympics today just days after the city's professional football team, the 49ers, said they would not build a new stadium that would have been a centrepiece of the bid.
City officials envisioned a new stadium at Candlestick Point between San Francisco's airport and business centre as the venue for Olympic opening and closing ceremonies and other sporting events.
But those plans collapsed when the 49ers, the only professional team to play there, abruptly announced last Thursday that they would move the team from a famed but ageing stadium to Santa Clara in California's Silicon Valley by 2012.
"We've damaged our reputation," Scott Givens, managing director of San Francisco's 2016 Bid Committee, told reporters in announcing the withdrawal decision. "We've put our city in what we believe is an unrecoverable position."
The timing was particularly embarrassing because it came midway through a two-day seminar hosted by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) for the three potential US candidates.
"We are shocked, we are numbed, we are very disappointed," said Anne Cribbs, a winner of a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics who had supported the San Francisco bid.
USOC will decide whether to continue a 2016 bid by the end of this year, with a candidate city to be selected in April. The other cities in the running are Chicago and Los Angeles.
The International Olympic Committee plans to choose the 2016 host city in 2009. The city of Madrid may bid and there also is interest in Italy, India, Japan and Brazil.
San Francisco has never hosted an Olympics but had hoped that the city's natural beauty, high-tech image and links to Asia would help make the city a winner in its 2016 bid.
- REUTERS
