Five days later, Cablevision sued the MTA, the City of New York, and the Jets.

“The bidding was rigged against us,” Lynn says.

Krieger speculates that the reason the MTA selected the Jets’ proposal had nothing to do with the quality of the team’s plan for the stadium.

“It has to do with ambition and commitment on the City of New York to land the Olympics,” he says. “For a number of years now, the city has marshaled most of its public forces on behalf of an Olympic bid.”

Paris is widely considered the front-runner for the 2012 games. London, Madrid, and Moscow are also vying to host the event.

According to Krieger, part of the reason why his firm, Chan Krieger & Associates, was commissioned to design the Cablevision bid was because of its location in Cambridge, which is removed from the site of the West Side wrangling.

“We were not already embroiled in the controversy one way or another,” Krieger says. While a design firm that opposed the city’s development plans could potentially face trouble garnering municipal contracts in the future, “we were not fearful of not getting other work in NYC,” Krieger says.

Although the Jets’ bid was officially accepted by the MTA, Krieger says that if New York is not selected this July as the site for the 2012 Olympics, the MTA might reopen the bidding process.

In that event, Krieger says, “I suspect a much longer bidding process will emerge. There will be another request for proposals. The Jets might submit again. I’m sure Cablevision will submit.”

And Krieger’s grand vision could finally become reality.

THE JETS SUIT UP

In the meantime, the fate of Krieger’s plan could be determined in court.

In a lawsuit filed in the New York State Supreme Court earlier this month, Cablevision charges that the MTA gave bidders insufficient time to develop alternatives to the Jets’ proposal.

“We only had 27 days from when we got the [request for proposal] to when we had to respond,” Lynn says. “For something of this size and complication, it was very difficult to do the work.”

Krieger says the nature of the space and the tightness of the time constraints demanded constant work from a team of designers.