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New York City is Off and Running for the 2012 Olympics
By Mayor Rudy Giuliani

On March 14th at City Hall, we officially launched our campaign to bring the Olympic games to New York City in 2012.

The City of New York hosting the Olympics makes perfect sense - after all, we're the most diverse city in the world. Athletes from every country could find people in our city who share their background and speak their language.

In addition to that, having the Olympic games in the City of New York would be the perfect culmination of the ongoing renaissance of our city. We have transformed our city from a symbol of all that was wrong with urban America to a symbol of hope, success and innovation that is looked to - and learned from - by cities around the world.

Just as hosting the World's Fair in 1939 and 1964 had a tremendous effect on our city, hosting the Olympics in 2012 would have a powerful effect on the shape of our city in the 21st century.

Preparing for a serious Olympic bid involves significant preparation and investments, including improvements to our already excellent infrastructure and world- class facilities.

In particular, our drive to host the Olympic games should spur the City to make necessary investments in the construction of a West Side sports stadium; and the Olympic Village planned for the Queens West waterfront would be converted to 5,000 units of middle-income housing.

The games would be staged along the waterways from Staten Island to Brooklyn and Queens, and from the Bronx to Upper Manhattan -- all connected by a network of fast ferries and special trains that would allow people attending Olympic events to move around the city without using roads.

The return on this investment would be approximately $10 billion to our local economy, in addition to the benefits of a tremendous infusion of community spirit and New York pride. That can't be quantified, but it's no less real, and no less important to the city.

The Olympic bid process has two phases. First, New York will be competing against seven other cities for the privilege of being named the nation's "candidate city." That decision will be made by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2002. Then, as the candidate city, New York will compete against cities from other nations around the world to be selected by the International Olympic Committee in 2005 as the host city for the 2012 Olympics.

Competition is something that New York and New Yorkers excel at, so I'm confident that we can hold our own against other cities' bids from around the nation and around the world.

NYC 2012, a non-profit corporation led by prominent New Yorkers from the fields of business, labor, fashion, entertainment, culture, and education, is preparing a 600-page bid that will be submitted in December to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Let's get this done, and show the world that New York City is not just the capital of the world but - without a doubt - the sports capital of the world.