Minneapolis, MN
How Close Was Minneapolis To Hosting the 1996 Olympics? – Racket
Take a moment and think back to the 1996 Olympics. What do you remember?
It might be Muhammad Ali, his body trembling as he lights the cauldron. Or Kerri Strug, on one leg, stoically saluting the judges. Perhaps it’s the Olympic debuts of beach volleyball, softball, and women’s soccer. Or, on a darker note, maybe it’s the pipe bomb that killed one reveler and injured more than a hundred more.
Now imagine those taking place in Dinkytown, the St. Paul Civic Center, and the Metrodome. (We’ll skip the terrorism for the rest of this exercise.)
The 1996 Olympics were in Atlanta, of course. But what if they had been in Minneapolis?
Sounds like a crazy idea, right? And it probably was. But Minneapolis actually has a long history of bidding for the Olympics, and perhaps never was it closer to getting the world’s biggest sporting event than in 1996.
Hosting the Games
Almost no one locally has experienced as many Olympics as Jay Weiner. A longtime sportswriter with the Star Tribune, he covered every Games—Summer or Winter—from 1984 to 2006, then added two more after leaving the paper. (His longtime colleague/Olympics reporting partner, Rachel Blount, was “heartbroken” that the paper didn’t send her to Paris this year.)
“Today it would absolutely be absurd and a waste of money and a waste of time” for Minneapolis to bid for the Olympics, Weiner tells Racket.
But in the late 1980s?
“It was legit,” Weiner says.
First held in 1896 in Athens, the modern Olympics have enjoyed periods of great relevance but also some very real threats of extinction. And in the early 1980s, the movement was in a bad way. Terrorism overshadowed Munich’s attempt at a postwar reintroduction in 1972, then Montreal went into serious debt to host in 1976. Major boycotts in ’76, ’80, and ’84 undercut the global nature of the Games.
Though we now look back at Los Angeles’ highly successful 1984 Olympics as a turning point, when the Games morphed into the commercialized juggernaut we know today, the event was still much humbler and more amateur in nature just a few years later when the U.S. Olympic Committee put out a call for potential 1996 hosts.
And for people like Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich and Strib publisher Roger Parkinson, this presented an opportunity.
Thinking Big
Dynastic Minneapolis Lakers aside, Minnesota, it’s generally agreed, became a “major league” state when the Twins and Vikings arrived in 1991. Yet more than a decade earlier, in 1948, Minneapolis was already making a serious push to get the Summer Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee ultimately gave the nod to London for its first postwar Summer Games, and it spurned Minneapolis’ efforts again in 1952 and 1956. (Minneapolis also tried for what would have been the third-ever Winter Games in 1932; so did, remarkably, Duluth.)
Minneapolis clearly had global aspirations, a mantle that was picked up in the 1980s by Perpich, the DFL governor reelected in 1986. His investments in amateur sports helped Minneapolis secure the 1990 U.S. Olympic Festival, an Olympics-like event for domestic athletes. The early 1990s also brought us the National Sports Center in Blaine, the Mall of America in Bloomington, and a Super Bowl at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.
Why not add an Olympics too?
Parkinson, the ambitious Star Tribune publisher/president, signed on to lead the bid. Six major players in the business world stepped up with cash. And Perpich put all his weight behind the effort.
“This will put us on the map internationally,” Perpich told the Star Tribune. “I can’t think of anything that would do more for the state than the Olympics.”1
A Twin Cities Olympics
So, what would a Minneapolis Olympics have looked like in 1996?
First, even though it’s referred to as a Minneapolis bid, the plan really encompassed the entire Twin Cities, with sports spread throughout the metro and sailing events in Duluth. Fans could have watched archery at Fort Snelling, gymnastics at the St. Paul Civic Center, boxing at the Met Center, and road cycling along Hwy. 12 from Minneapolis to Delano.
Among the 27 planned venues, all but one either already existed or was in the process of being developed. New venues included an NBA arena in Minneapolis, an aquatics center at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, a cycling velodrome in Blaine, and field hockey at the speed skating oval in Roseville.
Alas, the one missing venue was a big one: a stadium that could house track and field, soccer, and the opening and closing ceremonies. Organizers considered Blaine but ultimately proposed a site roughly where Huntington Bank Stadium sits now for a $70 million open-air stadium that with temporary seating could fit 70,000 fans. (The Metrodome, completed just six years earlier for $55 million, apparently wasn’t a fit, though it was slated to host baseball.)
Other key questions remained. The athletes’ village was pegged for northeast Minneapolis, near the Columbia Golf Club, with organizers planning for 1,500 units that would be sold off as condos or senior housing after the Games—or perhaps something else, if the housing market couldn’t absorb it. St. Paul’s Lake Phalen, the would-be site of canoe and rowing events, needed further dredging to create enough space at the south end for boats to safely finish.
There were also concerns about a shortage of hotel rooms and a lack of public transportation, though city officials were promising a light rail line up and running in time for the Games. Private financing to the tune of $740 million would fund the effort, but cities would be on the hook for costs like increased police presence.
The Vote
Nashville and San Francisco also put their names in for 1996. Ultimately, the choice came down to the Twin Cities and Atlanta. The cities made their case to the USOC executive board on April 29, 1988, at the Hilton in Washington, D.C.
Going into vote, Atlanta—behind its charismatic and well-connected mayor, Andrew Young—was selling itself as a bigger, more international city with more hotel rooms, better transit, and experience hosting major conventions. A Minnesota delegation including Perpich emphasized their bid’s milder weather, compact footprint, dedicated venues for each sport and, notably, the state’s strong tradition of nurturing amateur athletics.
“There was a certain level of seriousness that we felt it could happen,” Weiner says now. Looking back, however, he acknowledges the mood might have been a little too optimistic. The first sign of trouble came at the delegation receptions ahead of the vote. The Minnesotans rented out a hotel ballroom: “It was like a modest bar mitzvah,” Weiner said. He recalls guests were served cheese and crackers.
Atlanta, on the other hand, invited guests to a Georgetown mansion, where they were greeted by violin players and mingled with international dignitaries drawn to Young from his former role as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
“It was not a bar mitzvah. It was like a royal wedding,” Weiner says. “And that’s when I think we all understood that Atlanta knew how to play the game.”
The final vote, which took place in private, reportedly wasn’t close.
It turns out the local bid’s understated, buttoned-up—dare we say Minnesotan—approach didn’t land compared to Atlanta’s unapologetic lobbying and lavish parties.
Or, as staff writer Bruce Benidt put it the next day’s Star Tribune, the voters “sidestepped the Twin Cities’ avalanche of earnest information to dance with Atlanta’s dash, style and stature.”2
The Legacy
Unlike some other sporting losses, this one didn’t seem to inflict long-term pain into the local psyche. That’s perhaps because any U.S. bid for the 1996 Games faced enormous odds from the start. After all, the Olympics had (kind of) just been here in ’84, and whichever city the USOC picked would then have to beat out four international cities, including a strong effort from Toronto and the sentimental favorite, Athens, at the full IOC election in 1990.
Of course, we all know what happened.
It may be a stretch to say Minneapolis came “close” to hosting the 1996 Olympics. But the Twin Cities had a credible plan, and if Atlanta could shock the world… maybe we could have too?
Weiner doesn’t go quite that far.
“It wasn’t totally outrageous that Minneapolis could have shocked the world,” he says, “until we got to Washington and saw the Atlanta show versus our show, and saw that we were in a whole other league.”
The 1988 vote came at an inflection point in the Olympic movement. The Minnesota delegation appeared taken aback by Atlanta’s bravado and lobbying, with one local official calling for more rules and cost controls after the Washington vote. Instead, host city campaigns grew so expensive, unpopular, and ripe for corruption that in 2019 the IOC finally adopted a new approach: It now essentially handpicks a preferred host city.
“Everybody comes in there promising everything,” Perpich, who died in 1995, said at the USOC vote in Washington. “The follow-through is what’s important, and we’ve been very, very steady on that.”3
Back in 1988, Perpich & Co. focused on the sports infrastructure they’d already invested in here. Thirty-six years later, much of that remains in place or improved upon, and the Twin Cities have retained their reputation as a hotbed for NCAA and international events, including just this year with a cross-country skiing world cup, the men’s Frozen Four, the Olympic trials in gymnastics, and the Paralympic trials in swimming.
So while we didn’t get Muhammad Ali, the “Magnificent Seven,” and a big new stadium at the U, in a roundabout way, we may have ultimately fulfilled that 1996 vision anyway.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Organizers of Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies across the country are predicting that the protests against the actions of President Donald Trump and his administration could add up to one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, with Minnesota taking center stage.
Organizers say more than 3,100 events have been registered in all 50 states, with more than 9 million people expected to participate.
And they’ve designated the rally at the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul as the national flagship event, in recognition of how the state where federal agents fatally shot two people who were monitoring Trump’s immigration crackdown became an epicenter of resistance.
Headlining that observance will be Bruce Springsteen, performing “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in response to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and in tribute to the thousands of Minnesotans who took to the streets over the winter. Springsteen’s Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour, which has a “No Kings” theme, kicks off Tuesday in Minneapolis.
Minnesota organizers have told state officials they expect 100,000 people could converge on the Capitol grounds, where last June’s event drew an estimated 80,000 people.
The St. Paul rally will also feature singer Joan Baez, actor Jane Fonda,Sen. Bernie Sanders and a long list of other activists, labor leaders and elected officials.
The White House dismissed the nationwide protests as the product of “leftist funding networks” with little real public support.
“The only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Rallies are also planned in more than a dozen other countries, from Europe to Latin America to Australia, Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a group spearheading the events, said in an interview. Countries with constitutional monarchies call the protests “No Tyrants,” he said.
For those unable to attend in person, another activist group, Stand Up For Science, is hosting a “virtual and accessible” event online.
National organizers told reporters in an online news conference Thursday that they expect Saturday’s protests to be larger than the first two rounds of No Kings rallies, which they estimate drew more than 5 million people in June and more than 7 million in October.
“This administration’s actions are angering not just Democratic voters or folks in big blue city centers – they are crossing a line for people in red and rural areas, in the suburbs, all over the country,” said Leah Greenberg, the other co-executive director of Indivisible. “The defining story of this Saturday’s mobilization is not just how many people are protesting, but where they are protesting,”
Two-thirds of the RSVPs have come from outside of major urban centers, Greenberg said, listing registration surges in conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota and Louisiana, as well in competitive suburban areas of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.
“Millions of us are rising up from all walks of life, from rural communities to big cities at No Kings,” said Katie Bethell, executive director of MoveOn, another major organizer. “And as we do so, we will send the loudest, clearest message yet that this country does not belong to kings, dictators, tyrants. It belongs to us.”
Copyright © 2026 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
On a freezing February evening last year, around a dozen people gathered on an interstate overpass in Minneapolis and hoisted a sign in view of oncoming traffic.
The sign — letters screwed to long, thin pieces of lumber — read: “STOP THE COUP.”
A week later, the group gathered again, though they had doubled in number. The week after that, they doubled again.
Over a year later, around 40 neighbors and up to 100 on busy nights now squeeze onto the overpass Thursday evenings with a new message for the rush-hour traffic.
They call themselves Democracy Bridge Minneapolis, and have protested almost every week since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
And in the lead-up to the third nationwide No Kings protests tomorrow, Democracy Bridge catalyzed a wave of demonstrations like their own spanning the 1,568-mile length of Interstate 35.
From Duluth, Minn., to San Antonio, 47 different bridge protests cut through the midline of the country Thursday with the same message: “YES DEMOCRACY NO KINGS.”
Grassroots organizations 50501 Kansas City, Indivisible Twin Cities and The Visibility Brigade also took the lead on mobilizing this week.
Organizers said they hope their efforts inspired onlookers to participate in what’s projected to be the largest turnout for a single-day protest in United States history.
“We have to help us and we have to start by letting our neighbors know what the hell is going on and why they should care,” Sarah Linnes-Robinson, a founding member of the group, said.
While millions of Americans will take to the streets in cities across the country, as many as 100,000 people could attend the No Kings Day flagship rally in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul.
The flagship rally will feature progressive leaders Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders, as well as legend Bruce Springsteen, who will headline with his “Streets of Minneapolis.”
“ICE OUT OF MN:” The Twin Cities fight back
Past the stardom, the rallies across the Twin Cities may provide catharsis for residents whose lives over the past several months have been upended by Trump’s winter immigration enforcement operation.
Dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” Trump’s massive deployment of immigration officials in Minnesota resulted in mass unlawful detentions, repeated violent assaults against peaceful protesters, and ultimately, the killings of two U.S. citizens, who were both shot by federal officers.
Democracy Bridge protesters channeled their outrage over Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s killings through their weekly messages.
“DEFUND ICE” and “ICE OUT OF MN” lit up the bridge on Jan. 29, 2026.
Similarly, “HANDS OFF ELECTIONS” appeared following Trump’s threat to “take over voting” this February, as well as signs protesting the escalation of the Iran war.
Other messages, all of which can be viewed on the organization’s website archive, urged for the release of the Epstein files, opposed a war with Venezuela and admonished Trump’s proposed 2027 budget for its potential impact on Minnesotans’ healthcare.
Most messages are succinct and sometimes abbreviated so while organizers said they would like it, words like “authoritarianism” don’t make the cut.
Some have backgrounds in community organizing, while other bridge-goers are architects and retired researchers. Some come straight from pickleball practice and others from church.
“All are welcome so you can have a Ukrainian flag, you can have a Palestinian flag, a right side up flag, an upside down flag I mean come as you are,” Rosemary Dolata, a Minneapolis resident and bridge protest organizer, said.
Mary Jane Levine has lived in Minneapolis since 2000 and works in a garden store. But before that, she was a federal law enforcement officer. It’s what brought her to the bridge.
“I’m horrified by what was done to the civil service and even more horrified to see what my former federal law enforcement officers are doing to our citizens,” Levine said.
Do protests work? What the data and the locals say
With thousands of other local protests planned across the U.S, this follows a trend of increasing decentralization within civic action.
That’s according to data from American University researcher Dana Fisher, who has been conducting surveys of widespread protests since the Women’s March in 2017.
Fisher’s data shows that nationwide protests in recent years have been largely composed of white, highly educated, and primarily older women. While multiple factors are at play, Fisher noted that a lack of diversity is not always reflective of a lack of interest.
As pointed out by organizers as well, many people of color don’t feel safe showing up to a large crowd and making their presence known amid Trump’s deployment of federal agents. And for young people, some are just burned out.
“They’ve had a really hard go of being adults,” Fisher said. “And the country has been in precarious moments of democracy basically consistently.”
In addition to her vast demographic research, Fisher said she’s worried about the national focus on high turnout without a solid plan for what’s next after No Kings Day.
While excited about the potential record turnout this weekend, bridge regulars underscored how their smaller efforts have engendered meaningful local impact in Minneapolis.
Everyone who protests has their first one, and Linnes-Robinson said the project has been a way to meet the moment in a time when many in Minneapolis “are just ready to say yes.”
Fisher added that despite her doubts or larger organizational aims, these local actions remain important for “collective mourning” and fostering “collective identity formation.”
Demonstrators came together overwhelmingly on the top two issues of “Trump” and “Immigration” at the last No Kings Day, according to Fisher’s data.
“While I’m critical of the way the organizers keep banging on the number, I also just want to recognize that they are very much doing other work to get people to build power and capacity in their communities,” Fisher said.
Sarah Strzok, another founding member of the group, described the organizing process as a true grassroots effort. Each Monday, members text in their Signal group to brainstorm and settle on a message for the signs. Neighbors then build the signs from their “letter library” with wooden sticks and sign holders.
Because they are not permitted to fasten the signs to the bridge itself, participants get creative with pieces of bamboo and pool noodles to hold up the signs.
Apart from sign logistics, unforgiving Minnesota weather has been another consideration for bridge regulars. While some still made it outside in freezing temperatures, the group organized an indoor project in the coldest months where others could write letters and assemble whistle kits.
Once daylight savings hit, the group moved their demonstration an hour earlier and community members donated reflective tape to ensure signage visibility and safety.
Dolata lives in South Minneapolis and said protesting at the bridge has been a way to not just advocate for change but connect with the community she’s lived in for more than 25 years.
“It’s just been neighbors reaching out to neighbors,” Dolata said.
This “reaching out” has transcended the bridge demonstrations. This winter, Rebecca Shield told Democracy Docket that some in the group found out that families at local schools were facing food insecurity.
It wasn’t long before the crew decided to chip in. What began as boxes of food for 20 families in need has surged to about 120, Shield said. And bridge friends are pitching in to cover rent for some of the families, too.
The solidarity and community-building that Fisher said No Kings protests have the potential to engender have manifested at the bridge – from mutual aid to merely flashing a smile to a fellow protester in the grocery store.
“It [the bridge] was just another thread that knit us all together,” Strzok said.
Police say two people were hurt and one other man died.
A homicide investigation is underway in Minneapolis after a shooting early Friday morning killed one man and hurt two others.
Minneapolis police were called to the area of East Franklin Avenue and Chicago Avenue at around 12:30 a.m.
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS cameras caught more than 65 evidence markers scattered across the ground in the area and shattered glass at a bus shelter. Some nearby businesses also appeared to have some damage.
Minneapolis police are still working to determine what led up to the shooting and who was involved but investigators say first responders found the three men suffering from gunshot wounds.
One injured man is in his 40s, the other in his 50s, police say. Both were taken to a hospital by ambulance.
The third man died at the scene. His name and age haven’t yet been publicly released.
Police say early information suggests the men were on a sidewalk when at least one person opened fire, then fled in a vehicle.
So far, no arrests have been made.
Anyone with information about what happened is asked to call police at 612-673-5845 to leave a voicemail or email policetips@minneapolismn.gov.
“This is a tragic and deeply disturbing act of violence that has taken a life, and left others seriously injured,” MPD Chief Brian O’Hara said. “This kind of violence is unacceptable, and we are committed to identifying those responsible and holding them accountable.”
Minneapolis police investigating alleyway shooting near East Franklin Avenue
It comes less than 30 hours after another serious shooting along East Franklin Avenue, just a half-mile west of Friday’s scene. That incident left a man hospitalized with a potentially life-threatening gunshot wound. No arrests have been announced in that case either.
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS is still working to learn more about this shooting. Stay with KSTP-TV for the latest updates on air and on the KSTP app.
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