Hamburg Olympics Referendum: No Dice on 2024 Summer Games

Hamburg is out as a 2024 Olympics site after voters rejected an $11.9 billion offer that city officials had made to put on the world's largest sporting event.

The referendum was turned down by 51.6 percent of those taking part on Sunday, according to BBC News, leaving Budapest, Los Angeles, Paris and Rome in the running for the 2024 games.

The Summer Games will be held in Rio de Janerio next year and Tokyo in 2020.

"The financial concept put forward for Hamburg was coherent, in our eyes, and we checked it thoroughly," Christoph Metzner, of BdSt Hamburg, a federal taxpayer lobby, told Deutsche Welle. "From our point of view, therefore, nothing spoke against the plan. But this is the result now in Hamburg – hardly anybody reckoned with it, and yet we have to accept it."

It was the second time voters in a German city rejected a chance to host the Olympic Games in recent years. Munich turned down the 2022 Winter Games at the ballot box.

Krakow in Poland and St. Moritz/Davos in Switzerland also dropped out of the 2022 running, leaving Beijing to win the Winter Olympics bid after bearing out Kazakhstan's Almaty.

"Germany and the Olympic ideal don't seem to fit together at the moment," Alfons Hörmann, president of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, said after the vote.

Florian Kasiske, of the "NOlympia" campaign, told the BBC News that voters felt there were other needs for such a large amount of public money, adding that the current refugee crisis in Europe may have played a role.

"It's really about city politics," said Kasiske. "Many people are just arriving in this city and have to sleep in tents – and there has to be money for that."

A spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, which will select the winning city in September 2017, said Hamburg could have received a major investment, according to BBC News.

"Now there will be a strong competition with four excellent candidate cities," the IOC spokesman said. "With these strong competitors we all can look forward to (an) exciting Olympic Games 2024, whoever the winner will be."

Related Stories:

• 2020 Olympics' 5 New Sports: Baseball, Softball, Surfing, Karate, Climbing Make the Cut
  
• Rio Olympics Water Is 'Basically Raw Sewage,' Finds AP Investigation