What A Shame

Our beloved Boston has well-deserved egg on its face with news yesterday that the city has withdrawn its 2024 Olympics bid. There was an inevitability about this outcome, given the disastrous, mind-numbing combination of unbridled ego, extreme naïveté, sloppy management and wholesale indifference among the small band of self-appointed czars who delivered this Games bid to us virtually stillborn.

Boston should have competed for the Pan Am Games or World University Games first, each of these a daunting exercise that would have taught us many things - including how painfully complex and expensive these quests have become - while building the necessary credibility and coalitions. 

Instead, Boston and the USOC are laughingstocks globally and the former in an untenable position to compete again for an Olympic Games, at least in my lifetime. If there ever is a next time, fellas, avoid making this a private junta among a handful of guys in over their heads and let the adults run the show.