Two-Time Olympian Advocating for 2024 Olympic Bid

With World Championship fever at its height right now, most of us gymnastics enthusiasts are too distracted by all the buzz and bustle to be thinking of much else. Sure, we may have visions of Rio 2016 in the back of our minds as we watch our favorite gym

Oct 2, 2014 by Karen Psiaki

Two-Time Olympian Advocating for 2024 Olympic Bid

With World Championship fever at its height right now, most of us gymnastics enthusiasts are too distracted by all the buzz and bustle to be thinking of much else. Sure, we may have visions of Rio 2016 in the back of our minds as we watch our favorite gymnasts compete, but anything beyond that is too far away to be worth discussing at the moment!

Thankfully, two-time US Olympian Jair Lynch is doing just that--thinking about the future of gymnastics (and the Olympic movement as a whole). He was recently named to the board of Washington 2024, a group trying to organize a bid for the 2024 Olympics in Washington, D.C.

Lynch, a native to the capitol region, has remained in his hometown and now owns a successful civil engineering firm. Although he is one of only a few former athletes on the board at this time, he is joined by a host of other prominent figures from the Washington, D.C. area including Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank, former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliobue, and former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams, among others.

As a two-time Olympian, silver medalist on parallel bars (at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics), NCAA champion, and USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame member, Lynch brings a wealth of experience to the committee regarding the athletes' perspective on the Olympic experience. This perspective will be important as D.C. competes against three other major U.S. cities for the potential bid: Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. The USOC will likely vote to select the bidding city by next year, with the IOC selection for 2024 taking place in 2017.

Good luck to Washington 2024 and all the other potential bidding cities as they work towards this impressive goal! And, on an unrelated note, we wish happy birthday to Jair, who is 43 years old today.

Related: USOC Narrows Citites for 2024 Olympics Bid