Some critics, and even some supporters, of the U.S.O.C.’s choice of Boston over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington said the Olympic committee should have given more concrete reasons it picked Boston in the first place. They also said the committee should have conducted more thorough polling beforehand and provided more details and fostered more public debate before announcing its selection of Boston in January.

“The U.S.O.C. did some polling, so they obviously had a perspective, but if I understand correctly, a lot of the local community, business leadership and others were somewhat blindsided by this,” said Mr. Payne, the former I.O.C. marketing director, who said he had exchanged ideas about the bidding process with Mr. Blackmun. “Would it have been better to have a more open discussion? Looking back now, probably a lot of people would say yes.”

The U.S.O.C. said that its polling beforehand showed a majority in favor of the bids in all four of the American candidate cities for 2024. The committee also imposed certain parameters on the bidding process that it thought would be good for the cities, but in retrospect they might have backfired.

For example, it did not want Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington to spend $10 million each on their bids just in hopes of winning, as Chicago did in its futile campaign for 2016.

And it did not want the American cities to divulge all of the details of their plans nearly three years before the I.O.C. chose the 2024 host. Doing so, the committee argued, could give a competitive advantage to international challengers and risk the kind of bid fatigue that befell Chicago.

“We felt there were pros and cons of doing it the way we did it,” said Patrick Sandusky, a spokesman for the U.S.O.C.