Toronto will not bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, according to multiple reports on Monday.
The city’s mayor had earlier scheduled a news conference for yesterday when many felt he would announce that Canada’s largest city was going to join a race for the 2024 Games that includes heavy favorite Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg.
However, according to reports in the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star newspapers, each citing two sources with knowledge of the decision, Toronto Mayor John Tory has opted against sending a bid to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
According to the sources in the Globe and Mail report, Tory reached his decision based on a tight timeline and lack of interest from the private sector.
The Toronto Star report said Tory’s decision was made after he “received a lack of corporate enthusiasm and without firm support from the province. Key potential sponsors have also been lukewarm to backing a Toronto bid to host the mega event.”
While opponents have argued that an Olympic bid would consume too much public money, backers were greatly encouraged after Toronto successfully hosted this year’s Pan American Games, the largest multisport event ever staged in Canada.
For 16 days in July, Toronto had a taste of the Olympic experience and ate it up with gusto as more than 1 million tickets were sold and Canadian athletes enjoyed unprecedented success in the multisport event between countries from North America, Latin America, South America and the Caribbean.
Toronto has failed in its five previous attempts to host the Olympics, the most recent being a bid for the 2008 Summer Games that ended in a second-place finish to Beijing.
The IOC, which set yesterday as the deadline to accept candidates, is to elect a winning bid for 2024 in September 2017.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier