“We’re just trying to get smarter and see which cities we might want to have serious discussions with,” chief executive Scott Blackmun said after the board voted last month to explore possibilities for the 2024 Summer and 2026 Winter events.

There’s no shortage of potential candidates. Los Angeles, Dallas, and Tulsa are interested in the summer version and Salt Lake City, Denver, Reno-Tahoe, and Bozeman, Mont., in the winter. New York and Chicago, which were crushed in their quests for 2012 and 2016, could be up for another go, as could San Francisco, the runner-up to New York in the domestic race.

The landscape is decidedly more favorable for an American bid now that the International Olympic Committee and USOC have settled on a long-term revenue-sharing plan, helped by some savvy fence-mending by Blackmun and chairman Larry Probst, who has re-upped for a second four-year term.

But given the immense cost of staging the Games — London spent an estimated $15 billion — and a lead time of nearly a decade from lobbying for the USOC’s imprimatur to the opening ceremonies, it’s imperative that candidates know exactly what they’re undertaking.

“We will be smarter at the end of the year than we are at the beginning,” predicted Blackmun.

The chase for the 2020 Summer Games got down to the meat-and-potatoes phase Monday when finalists Tokyo, Madrid, and Istanbul submitted their detailed bid books at Olympic headquarters in Switzerland. The IOC’s evaluation commission will visit the cities in March and prepare a technical report for the members, who’ll choose the site at their September session in Buenos Aires.

Rupp on boardOlympic pole vault champion Jenn Suhr and distance medalist Galen Rupp will be the marquee domestic names, along with London hurdles gold medalist Aries Merritt, at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix Feb. 2 at Roxbury’s Reggie Lewis Center. Rupp, whose silver in the 10,000 meters was the first US medal in the event since Billy Mills’s gold in 1964, will be challenged by Ethiopia’s Dejen Gebremeskel, the silver medalist in the 5,000 in London. Tickets are available online at nbindoorgrandprix.com or by calling 1-877-849-8722 . . . A star-spangled slalom star? Mikaela Shiffrin has the Alpine world buzzing after winning her second World Cup race of the season by more than a second last weekend in Croatia. The 17-year-old Shiffrin, a native of Vail, Colo., and a product of Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, is the first American woman to accomplish that before 18 and the youngest since 1977. With Austrian defending champion Marlies Schild sidelined for three months after her December knee surgery, Shiffrin, who is atop the slalom standings and sixth overall, has a shot at next month’s world championships to become the first Yank to win the title in that discipline and figures to be the first podium finisher since Julie Parisien in 1993. Shiffrin earned the Snow Queen title with her Zagreb triumph, which came with a glass crown (broken in the box, as it turned out) and a robe. “I think I have a new Halloween costume for next year,” she said. “First I need to glue [the crown] back together.” . . . While the six races she missed while recovering from her intestinal ailment likely will keep Lindsey Vonn from retaining her overall Cup title, she still has an excellent chance of keeping both the downhill and Super G globes and reclaiming those titles at the world championships. Though Vonn has dropped to seventh on the table, 725 points behind Slovenian leader Tina Maze, she’s still ahead in both speed events with a chance to pad her lead in next weekend’s races in St. Anton, Austria. With six more Cup victories, Vonn will overtake Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Proell for most in a career. By winning last weekend’s slalom in Zagreb, Austria’s Marcel Hirscher took the men’s lead over Norway’s Aksel Lund Svindal. Ted Ligety, who skied out of the first run, is in third but leads the GS standings going into the upcoming races in Adelboden, Switzerland.