Hamburg mayor Olaf Scholz announced that the German city will not host be hosting the Summer Olympic Games in 2024 after voters rejected an $11.9 billion offer that city officials had made to host the event on Sunday.
Hamburg's Office for Statistics confirmed that despite not having the final count of the votes available yet, the most recent tally of 51.6 percent of voters that came out against the summer games in a referendum on Sunday means that it would be impossible for supporters of the bid to get in a majority anymore, according to the BBC.
People who voted against the bid argued that the money set aside for the games could be better spent elsewhere. Florian Kasiske, of the "NOlympia" campaign, said the current refugee crisis in European crisis may have played a role in the voters decision.
"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."
Despite this, officials were shocked at the outcome, saying that the plan was coherent from a financial standpoint.
"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."
Germany hasn't played host for the Games since 1972 with the Munich games, and this now marks the second time voters in Germany have come out against a bid to host the games in recent years. The first time was when voters in Munich turned down the chance to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in 2013.
"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, according to Newsmax.
Germany's decision to opt out of the bid comes after the city of Boston also decided to withdraw from the race to host the 2024 Games in July.
A spokesman for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that Germany lost a great opportunity by voting against hosting the games. "The city also misses the investment of the IOC of about $1.7bn to the success of the Games, which compares to the €1.2bn Hamburg wanted to invest," he added.
Now with those two out of the picture, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Budapest are the final four contestants whose bid to host the Games still remain. The winning city will be selected in September 2017.
