The president of the New York Jets, Jay Cross, said yesterday that his organization will increase substantially its $100 million offer for the development rights over the Hudson rail yards at the far West Side of Manhattan.

The fight over transforming an industrial wasteland on the far West Side into a new residential and business district has been coming to a head in a year in which Mayor Bloomberg faces re-election and New York City’s bid to be named host city of the 2012 Olympics will be decided on.

The mayor is pushing a development that would create tens of thousands of square feet of office space, a New York Sports and Convention Center – featuring the domed stadium for the Jets and, he hopes, the Olympics – adjacent to an expanded Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and, he says, an economic engine for a city that is having trouble making ends meet.

The Jets’s announcement came during an interview for WCBS’s “Kurtzman & Co.” news show yesterday in which Mr. Cross said the Jets would present “a competitive bid” by the March 21 deadline set by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which wants to sell the development rights, or air rights, at the rail yards.

The Jets currently have a $100 million bid on the table. Madison Square Garden, owned by Cablevision, offered $600 million, less the cost of erecting a platform over the 13-acre rail facility. A third interested purchaser, TransGas Energy, offered $700 million – though various strings attached to its proposal will probably preclude its even becoming a qualifying bid.

“We’ve always said that we’ll pay what market value is,” Mr. Cross said. “These numbers people are throwing around are not really bids. People are not bidding $600 million. … Cablevision is really bidding about $300 million, so actually we’re all in about the same range.”

While Mr. Cross didn’t say explicitly how much the Jets would offer for the development rights, clearly he expected to boost the Jets’ offer so it would be competitive with the $300 million or so budget analysts say the Cablevision offer is worth, less the cost of the platform.

The proposed 75,000-seat stadium for the Jets, on the riverfront at the western portion of the rail yards, has been portrayed not only as the heart of this grand vision but also as the make-or-break factor in the city’s bid to be named 2012 Olympics host. To date, Mr. Bloomberg’s critics have discounted that argument, saying any stadium could be suitable, but then the visiting International Olympics Committee evaluation commission indicated last week that the agreement to build the West Side stadium would be a critical factor in their deliberations over the best host city.

“We need a stadium and we received assurances the stadium will be there,” the leader of the evaluation team, Nawal El Moutawakel, said. “The site that has been shown to us, if it comes to an agreement, can be a very important legacy to the city, to the athletes, and to the Olympics movement.”

Mr. Cross’s signal that the Jets would come up with more money and the Olympics official’s statement constitute two hopeful signs in what has otherwise been a difficult political battle for Mr. Bloomberg, in which he has had to lock horns with the man who runs Madison Square Garden, James Dolan, as well as with several candidates who hope to unseat him in November.

“If Bloomberg doesn’t get the stadium it is going to be interpreted as a huge loss for his administration,” a political consultant, Scott Levenson, president of the Advance Group, said. “In the short term he is a bit damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If the Jets win the stadium, then he still is going to have to deal with the repercussions of it being an unpopular move. If they don’t get the stadium, he’ll have to explain why he put all his eggs in one basket.”

A former New York City deputy mayor, who declined to be further identified, agreed that the stadium project has taken on a life of its own and, as such, has put the mayor in a tenuous political position. “If Bloomberg gets the Olympics then he gambled and it paid off,” she said. “If he actually wins the Olympics bid, there may be enough early-stage excitement that he’ll get everything he wants. But that’s a big if. In taking that chance, he has painted a bit of a target on his back.”

In an interview Friday with The New York Sun, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg’s point man on the Olympics bid and the West Side redevelopment, disagreed.

“What people have missed is that we’ve succeeded in doing what people have been talking about for 80 years: We have passed a monumental plan to transform Manhattan,” he said. “That’s done. The rezoning is a fact. The Javits Center expansion is a fact. And now we’re waiting for the last piece. Everyone is so focused on the stadium they have missed all this other stuff that has taken place.

“Without a stadium,” he said, “the development will be slower, but we already have what we need to transform Manhattan.”

Mr. Bloomberg may not have to wait until the July 6 vote by the International Olympic Committee to learn of the city’s 2012 prospects. It is in mid-April that the state Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, will probably weigh in on the stadium. If Mr. Silver wants to extract guarantees from the city that will protect his district in Lower Manhattan, and if Mr. Bruno wants a commitment that a substantial amount of state money will be invested in development projects upstate, they have to trade for those promises before the Olympics decision is announced in Singapore. If the city doesn’t win the bid and the Jets stadium dies, Messrs. Silver and Bruno will have lost their leverage, analysts said.

The timetable between now and then is fairly straightforward. The MTA will close the bidding for the West Side development rights March 21 and is expected to vote on the sale at its March 31 meeting. The ball will then go into Albany’s court. Even if the Jets buy the rights, the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s economic development arm, will have to approve the project, as will the state’s Public Authority Control Board – whose three members are controlled by Governor Pataki, who also assured the Olympic commission the stadium would be built, and Messrs. Silver and Bruno.

The horse-trading will most likely climax in early spring. Among the issues under discussion, aides said, are special tax incentives for Lower Manhattan that will ensure that the new West Side development doesn’t suck investment away from Mr. Silver’s district, and a promise to Mr. Bruno of about $300 million in extra state investment upstate.

For Mr. Bloomberg, who this time last year was saying the New York Sports and Convention Center would not run into much opposition because it was transforming a wasteland into a business Mecca, the stadium debate has made the difficult job of running for re-election that much harder.

In his State of the City address last week, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, vowed to seek quick rezoning of the stadium to make it more attractive to other bidders and block the Bloomberg financing plan for it so the mayor couldn’t do “an end run around the council.” The former Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, has used the stadium as an example of the mayor’s disconnect with the people he serves. Setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars in public money for the platform below the stadium and the retractable roof above it when the city’s schools are ailing, Mr. Ferrer has said, just proves the point that Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman turned politician, is out of touch with his constituents.

If Mr. Bloomberg ends up landing the Olympics, that argument will lose its impact. If the Olympic committee chooses Paris, London, Moscow, or Madrid instead, not only will the mayor’s Olympic dreams vanish, his reelection chances could be diminished, too.