Rome mayor Virginia Raggi is expected to officially withdraw from the 2024 bid today.
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Rome’s bid to host the 2024 summer Olympics was dealt a fatal blow Wednesday after the city’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, said she would not give her formal backing.
But Raggi has long stated that other priorities are more important, despite not definitively saying no during the electoral campaign. “They will only bring debts”.
However, amid revelations of systematic corruption involving Roman politicians and bureaucrats in 2014, and having seen a bid to host the 2020 games withdraw by then-Prime Minister Mario Monti due to concerns over Italy’s finances, Raggi had always been set to declare there would be no backing.
This would leave a three-horse race of Budapest, Los Angeles and Paris ahead of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) electing a host at its Session in Peru’s capital Lima next year. He has said the bid would be doomed if Rome’s mayor doesn’t support it. Plus, a nightly parade of athletes at the Colosseum.
Rome has previously hosted the Olympic Games in 1960 and also withdrew from the 2020 bidding early in the process.
The reforms were aimed at avoiding a repeat of the bidding for the 2022 Winter Games, which was depleted by the withdrawal of four cities – Stockholm; Oslo; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland – for political or financial reasons. Brazil spent about $12 billion on the Rio Games last month, which proved a sporting success but were marred by empty seats and street crime.
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Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer who is Rome’s first female mayor, said during her candidacy that the city needed to focus on ordinary issues before it should consider “extraordinary events” like the Olympics.
