DENVER — The U.S. Olympic Committee has released a copy of the host city contract for the 2020 Tokyo Games — a boilerplate document that will be outdated when Boston, Rome, Hamburg and other cities prepare their bids for the 2024 Olympics.
The contract is filled with stipulations a city must fulfil to host the Summer Games — including security, agreements not to sue the IOC, and an outline of the marketing agreements. But the template is being altered now that a new bidding process is in place.
Leaders in Boston said they have reviewed the 2020 contract but they did not make it public because it wasn’t their document. The USOC released it Thursday. It was virtually identical to the boilerplate material for previous Summer Olympics that all candidate cities sign.
The USOC gave the 2020 document to Boston and other cities when they were considering bidding for 2024. But since that contract was written, the IOC has adopted Agenda 2020 in an attempt to streamline the bidding process and make the games less expensive and unwieldy.
"Because the template was created prior to the adoption of Olympic Agenda 2020, it is not a reliable model for the 2024 Host City Contract, and for that reason we asked that it be maintained in confidence," USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky said. "However, due to ongoing interest and because template contracts for other Games are publicly available, the document is now available."
The document gives the broad brushstrokes of what any candidate city must do to host the Games. There are some details — for instance, the organizing committee must agree to give the IOC 7.5 per cent of cash revenue from contracts it signs as part of the marketing program — but there are no hard figures about how much money is spent on the massive construction projects that all Olympics eventually become.
The draft contracts for other Olympics, including the 2022 Winter Games, have been in the public domain for some time.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams said the 2024 contract "will evolve to reflect the changes brought about by the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms."