Opponents to the games won with 51.6 percent of the vote, with 48.4 percent in favor.
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The residents of Hamburg have voted against bidding for the 2024 Olympics, meaning just four cities are now in the running.
Hamburg’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics fell at the first hurdle on Sunday when residents voted “No” in a crunch referendum as the German public again torpedoed plans to host a Games.
“The senate and I would have preferred a different decision, but it is a clear one”.
More than 40 percent of those eligible to vote had already done so through a postal ballot.
Opinion polls were promising but support dwindled from 63 to 57 per cent lately although Scholz and sports officials remained positive that they would get a majority.
Public support waned with the government citing the influx of refugees, the corruption scandal surrounding the FIFA soccer association, and fears of further terror attacks in the wake of the November 13 atrocities in Paris.
German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) chief Alfons Hoermann said the result marked “a harsh setback and hit below the belt for sporting Germany”.
Germany has not hosted the Games since 1972 in Munich.
Hamburg’s concept involved the Games being held in the Kleiner Grasbrook area, technically an island but only a 10-minute walk from the city center, that would have become the Olympic park and offered athletes and spectators short distances to travel to the competition venues. Germany is also the country among the world’s four biggest economies with the longest absence from the Olympic stage.
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The two-year bid campaign will conclude September 2017 when the International Olympic Committee elects a victor at its all-members session in Lima, Peru.
