NYC2012 officials maintained their public silence yesterday about their plans for the Olympic bid, spending the day talking to board members and contributors to dissect their predicament over the failure of the Far West Side stadium plan.
Their posture was in marked contrast to the confidence that the NYC2012 team had expressed over the past several years, with the bid founder and deputy mayor, Daniel L. Doctoroff, now unwilling to say anything more in a brief interview than, "We're looking at all of our options."
No one would say what those options may be. One seems to be trying to salvage the West Side stadium project in some form, but there were no conciliatory signals from either side.
The executive director of the NYC2012 bid, Jay Kriegel, circulated an e-mail message to bid supporters urging them to vent their frustration at Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly, and Joseph L. Bruno, the State Senate majority leader, for refusing to support the stadium project Monday in a vote by the state's Public Authorities Control Board.
Kriegel's e-mail message included phone and fax numbers for Silver and Bruno.
"Our people are still trying to understand what happened," Kriegel said yesterday in a telephone interview. "Because what happened is really inexplicable."
Still, the biggest question is what the NYC2012 team plans to do next, with the vote on the Olympics coming July 6 in Singapore. That is where the 116 members of the International Olympic Committee will choose the site of the 2012 Games from among New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow. Monday's decision by the Public Authorities Control Board cost the NYC2012 bid its signature site, and bid organizers have no backup plan.
While United States Olympic Committee officials said yesterday that they were waiting for NYC2012 to explore its options, they also refused to define them. The last, and most painful, option would be pulling out of the race altogether, a step the U.S.O.C. would have to approve and one that officials said they would take only under dire circumstances.
With time running out, those circumstances are growing more dire every day, although Doctoroff and Kriegel have not given up.
In his e-mail message to supporters, Kriegel said, "Let me assure you that we are making every effort to find a way to ensure that New York's bid can continue and be successful."
There was no word from the Jets on what avenues they were pursuing, despite saying earlier in the week that they would not walk away from the West Side plan. The team's president, Jay Cross, did not respond to requests for comment yesterday. But the Jets do not have the same timetable as the NYC2012 bid, whose fate will be sealed in less than a month.
Doctoroff is still scheduled to make a trip next week to Ghana for a presentation on the New York bid to a group of I.O.C. members, the last gathering before the committee heads to Singapore for the final vote.
But if no stadium plan has been salvaged by then, NYC2012 leaders and the U.S.O.C. will have to start thinking about what would cause less damage to their standing with the I.O.C.: an unconvincing presentation, or a less-than-graceful early exit.
It is a choice no one wants to make. The NYC2012 team has proceeded so confidently through the bidding process that the defeat of the stadium plan on Monday sent the entire organization into a defensive posture. The initial reaction was shock and sadness, with NYC2012 employees grouped around television sets watching Silver's news conference. Many left the office in tears.
Up to now, Doctoroff has stormed through a process that seemed stacked against him. New York is the only non-European city competing for these Games, while 55 of the 116 I.O.C. members hail from Europe. The bid also tied its hopes to a stadium plan that faced opposition at every turn. But up until its defeat, Doctoroff had not wavered, even saying Monday morning that he had no regrets about hinging the Olympic bid on such a politically risky project.
When Silver announced his final stand against the stadium, he held his news conference in his political district: Lower Manhattan, the site of NYC2012's offices. From their 33rd-floor perch, NYC2012 employees watched the stadium plan go down to defeat in the name of developing ground zero.
Some bid supporters still hold out hope that Doctoroff will come up with a solution.
"We still have time to resurrect this," said Donna de Varona, a former Olympian who has lobbied for the bid. "I am really disappointed. But I am eternally optimistic."