The United States will bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, but whether the contender will be San Francisco or one of three other finalist cities is a decision for another day.

“It’s a four-way tie,” Scott Blackmun, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said after a day of meetings Tuesday in Redwood City, where delegations from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C., made their pitches during one-hour presentations.

The U.S. Olympic Committee then voted unanimously to bid on the 2024 Games. It is expected to make a decision early next year on which of the four cities to put up against an international field of announced or possible contenders that includes Rome, Paris, Budapest, Istanbul, a joint Johannesburg-Pretoria bid and others.

“We’re going to take our time,” said Larry Probst, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “We are going to pick the city that we think has the best chance of winning the competition against the other cities around the world.”

Entering the day of meetings, there had been a slight chance the USOC wouldn’t bid for the 2024 Games. Its last two attempts — New York City for the 2012 Olympics and Chicago for 2016 — were rejected by the International Olympic Committee in favor of London and Rio de Janeiro. The United States hasn’t hosted the Summer Olympics since the Atlanta Games in 1996.

But the four U.S. finalists for 2024 all gave “spectacular” presentations, Probst said, and there is a strong appetite among the 105 voting International Olympic Committee members that the United States compete for the Games.

“I think there is a feeling amongst the members that the Games have been away from the United States for a long time,” he said, “and summer of 2024 is a time when we have an opportunity to host the Games successfully.”

If that makes the U.S. the early front-runner, it seems certain to buoy a San Francisco delegation that has seen the Bay Area fall short in at least four attempts to host the Olympics, most recently in 2012 and 2016.

Mayor feels upbeat

This time, the San Francisco delegation, led by Mayor Ed Lee and Giants President and CEO Larry Baer, left the presentation feeling upbeat.

“We displayed our passion,” Lee said as he left the meeting held at the suburban headquarters of electronic game company Electronic Arts, where Probst is the executive chairman.

“It’s exciting to make the case just given what’s happening in this region right now with all of the growth and the new facilities and a vibrancy that’s palpable,” Baer added.

Those facilities include the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, which opened this year. Both Stanford and UC Berkeley have recently renovated stadiums, the Earthquakes are nearly finished with a soccer stadium in San Jose, and the Golden State Warriors plan to open a basketball and multiuse arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood in 2018.

New venues a plus

Olympic gold medal swimmer Anne Warner Cribbs, who has been involved in multiple efforts to bring the Games to the Bay Area, said the greatest difference this time is “the existence of the new venues.”

Such venues could go a considerable way in reducing the out-sized price tag for hosting the modern Games, which have become a flash point for criticism after billions have been spent on athletic facilities that are little used after the Games leave town. The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is estimated to have cost $44 billion.

A new Raiders stadium in Oakland — if one materializes — also could play a central role, but for now, San Francisco organizers are planning on building a $350 million temporary stadium on a desolate, damp stretch of land alongside Highway 101 in Brisbane to host track-and-field events and the opening and closing ceremonies.

Other temporary venues are planned for well-known locations in San Francisco, like beach volleyball in front of City Hall, and select field events at Kezar Stadium, where the track is being renovated.

U.S. Olympic organizers said their approach, as much as possible, is to harmonize infrastructure for the Games with the various cities’ long-term development plans.

A regional effort

While San Francisco is a candidate host city, putting on the Games would be a regional effort. But the venues would not be as widely dispersed as the bid for the 2012 Games, when events were proposed for Monterey and Marin counties, a plan that U.S. organizers panned as too spread out.

“The city is our Olympic Park,” said Jerry Anderson, senior principal at Populous, a venue and urban design firm that worked on both the 2012 Summer Games in London and the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. “We want people to embrace the city, to stay in our hotels, to be at our restaurants and cafes, to actually be able to walk or take a short BART trip or bus ride to the majority of our venues.”

San Francisco organizers project the cost to host the Games at about $4 billion, which would come from private sources, with additional public funds to complete planned infrastructure improvements like the $2.6 billion extension of the Caltrain line to the Transbay Transit Center that is under construction in downtown San Francisco.

Concerns about cost and congestion have fueled apprehension among city residents about hosting the Games, but San Francisco hasn’t seen the type of organized opposition that has cropped up around Boston’s bid.

Los Angeles has the distinction of hosting the 1984 Summer Games, which were privately financed and produced a surplus of almost $250 million.

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