Lawmakers seek bid for 2020 Olympic Games

03/22/2006

The Olympics in the Twin Cities? In 2020?

Associated Press
March 22, 2006

Don’t dismiss the idea as impossible, two Democratic state legislators said Tuesday.

State Reps. Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park and Steve Simon of St. Louis Park held a Capitol news conference to plug their proposal for Gov. Tim Pawlenty and legislative leaders to appoint a 17-member task force to study a Minnesota bid for the Summer Olympics.

Pawlenty later endorsed the concept of the Twin Cities competing to host the games 14 years from now but said he had not seen Hortman and Simon’s legislation.

“I think we could more than accommodate the Olympics,” Pawlenty told reporters. “I think it is an exciting proposal, and we should explore it.”

In 1987, former Gov. Rudy Perpich, a big promoter of amateur athletics as an economic development tool, enlisted the then-mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis, George Latimer and Don Fraser, in a campaign to win the 1996 Olympics. But the U.S. Olympic Committee’s executive board voted in 1988 to choose Atlanta over the Twin Cities as the U.S. contender for the games.