Bush boosts NY Olympic bid
2005-02-24 13:30
New York - President George W Bush boosted New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics, sending a message of assurance to an International Olympic Commission group that the US government was prepared to help cover security costs - which soared above $1bn in Athens last year.
Later on Wednesday, the group was wooed by Meryl Streep, Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg and heard Wynton Marsalis play at a Jazz at Lincoln Centre performance - followed by a surprise fireworks display.
"Our city is your city," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the group, "but the honour is ours."
Next came dinner at Bloomberg's Upper East Side home with guests including Henry Kissinger, Matt Damon, Vera Wang and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists behind the orange Central Park exhibit "The Gates."
The group was then treated to a performance by Paul Simon who played such old hits as "The Sound of Silence" and "The Boxer."
The evening of entertainment followed a day of meetings at the Plaza Hotel, which is the IOC Evaluation Commission's temporary home.
In a morning session featuring the Bush videotaped greeting, Gov George Pataki and Bloomberg answered questions from the commission on issues from security to financing to construction of a new stadium considered key to the city's bid for the Summer Games.
The pair were accompanied by Roland Betts, a Yale classmate of Bush and the president's choice as a member of the board of directors for the New York Committee on the Olympic Games.
He spoke with the IOC panel about the government's commitment to covering spiraling security costs for the Games.
"The federal guarantee is not tied to a number," Betts told a morning news conference.
The government was financially committed to "whatever degree necessary to make it work," Betts added.
That's a number likely to grow larger across the next seven years. The cost of security for last year's Athens Games, the first in the summer since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, totaled $1.44bn.
Just two years earlier, in Salt Lake City, the total security bill was $310m.
Bush's videotaped greeting to the Evaluation Commission came as the president was traveling in Europe.
The president "believes that having the Olympics in New York would build bridges across cultures and bring the world's greatest sporting event to one of the world's greatest cities," White House spokesperson Dana Perino said on Wednesday.
Betts described Bush's greeting as "very warm, very friendly and very well received" by a commission that's already met with Queen Elizabeth II of England and King Juan Carlos of Spain.
The evening's entertainment included musical performances and a selection of clips of New York City scenes in movies, all shown to the group in a room with views of Central Park South and Broadway.
- AP