Bain executives largest donors to Boston Olympic bid

Bain managing director and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca co-chairs Olympics fund-raising.Kathy Willens /Associated Press/File 2014

A group of wealthy Massachusetts business people and companies have funded phase one of Boston's bid to host the Olympic Games.

Of the roughly $11 million effort, it took $6.7 million in cash to pull together the proposal that is expected to come up for a vote Thursday in Denver.

The largest slice of that sum came from several executives at Bain Capital: $650,000, or nearly 10 percent, according to two people briefed on the fund-raising who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Stephen Pagliuca, Bain's managing director and co-owner of the Boston Celtics, is one of the donors. He co-chairs the fund-raising and finance committee of the Boston 2024 bid organization. In an op-ed piece last month in Banker & Tradesman, Pagliuca wrote that a Summer Games in Boston "would be transformative — and the necessary planning would set the course for what we want our city and the Commonwealth to look like for decades to come."

Other donors include Roger W. Crandall, the chief executive of MassMutual Financial Group in Springfield and co-chair of the fund-raising committee. The private equity executive David Mussafer of Advent International and Putnam Investments chief executive Robert Reynolds also wrote checks, along with John Fish, the chief executive of Suffolk Construction Co. who is chairman of the Olympic bid group.

The precise number of contributors and how much each gave could not be learned. Dunkin' Brands Group, a former Bain Capital investment, contributed, as did State Street Corp., people briefed on the process said.

The rest of the $11 million was in-kind donations, including consulting analysis from Bain & Co. (a separate company from Bain Capital) and an examination of the financing by the Boston law firm Mintz Levin. Its chairman, Robert Popeo, sits on the Boston 2024 committee.

The US Olympic Committee's 15-member board is meets Thursday in Denver to select this country's contender for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Boston is up against Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

If Boston gets the nod, a formal bid to the International Olympic Committee could cost $50 million to allow the city to vie for the role of host against other major cities in the world.