S.F.’s Olympic dreams dashed: Boston beats out Bay Area for bid

San Francisco 2024 Olympic committee members Steve Strandberg (left), Anne Warner Cribbs, Giants CEO Larry Baer and Mayor Ed Lee at S.F. City Hall speak after losing the bid to host the Summer Games. San Francisco 2024 Olympic committee members Steve Strandberg (left), Anne Warner Cribbs, Giants CEO Larry Baer and Mayor Ed Lee at S.F. City Hall speak after losing the bid to host the Summer Games. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close S.F.’s Olympic dreams dashed: Boston beats out Bay Area for bid 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The temptation of a new stadium in Oakland apparently wasn’t enough to win the Bay Area its first Olympics, as Boston was chosen Thursday to be the U.S. contender to host the 2024 Summer Games.

Boston now will face an international field of candidates that includes Rome, Berlin or Hamburg, and possibly others, like Paris. The International Olympic Committee is expected to decide on the host city for the 2024 Games in September 2017. Officials in San Francisco and the other U.S. cities that had been in the running, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., were left wondering why they came up short.

“I don’t know yet what the points were or (where) we came in,” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said shortly after the announcement that Boston had won. “We’re obviously very interested in how we did.”

Lee, new Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Raiders executive and others involved in the bid updated U.S. Olympic officials in a phone call on Wednesday to reinforce the possibility that the Opening and Closing Ceremonies — plus track and field events — could be held at a new stadium in Oakland.

Lee said shortly after that call that the update “was very welcomed by the USOC, saying by all means measured, this enhances your bid. This is what they said to us.”

A USOC spokesman declined to comment on San Francisco’s bid, but the decision followed “a spirited discussion and more than one round of voting” during a meeting of the committee’s board of directors in Denver, the USOC said in a statement.

“We’re excited about our plans to submit a bid for the 2024 Games and feel we have an incredibly strong partner in Boston that will work with us to present a compelling bid,” USOC Chairman Larry Probst said. “We’re grateful to the leaders in each of the four cities for their partnership and interest in hosting the most exciting sports competition on Earth.”

Even with the Oakland stadium sweetener, the first option in the Bay Area bid remained a $350 million temporary stadium on a patch of land in Brisbane holding a soil and concrete recycling operation, a San Francisco organizer said. Still, after Schaaf was sworn in Monday, her support gave new momentum to the backup idea of partnering with Oakland and the Raiders to build a long-sought stadium for both the Olympics and the football team.

Opponents of hosting the Olympics in San Francisco saw the move as an indication of a faulty proposal.

“A last-minute change to the most important venue in the Games? It seems like amateur hour,” said former San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, who was organizing a small group of Olympic opponents, largely from the area’s political left.

Daly’s group sent a letter to the USOC last week warning they were “prepared to take political action to ensure that Bay Area voters have a say in ensuring that no public funds are spent to host the 2024 Olympics in our region.”

Still, Daly downplayed the possibility of that opposition influencing the USOC — Boston, after all, had a larger and more organized opposition movement, yet still got the nod.

“I’d love to take credit for killing this thing, but unfortunately, to be honest, the bid was flawed,” Daly said. “Even if I didn’t send that letter ... San Francisco wasn’t going to win.”

The U.S. last hosted the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. Efforts to bring the Olympics to the Bay Area have fallen short four other times, most recently involving the 2012 and 2016 Games.

The latest proposal, led by Lee and San Francisco Giants President and CEO Larry Baer, had a projected $4.5 billion price tag that would have been privately financed. But it also called for hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending on already planned infrastructure projects, such as extending BART to San Jose and electrifying Caltrain.

The plan called for utilizing existing venues and temporary facilities, with most concentrated in San Francisco. Others would be in the South Bay and East Bay.

When Baer’s phone rang as he and other organizers awaited word in Lee’s City Hall office on Thursday afternoon, everyone in the room knew San Francisco had lost.

“The bad news call was coming to me, and the good news call was going to the mayor,” Baer said. “All we can do is tip our hats to Boston and say congratulations.”

John Coté is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jcote@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnwcote