Los Angeles Makes Its Case for 2024 Olympics
Los Angeles Makes Its Case for 2024 Olympics, Los Angeles this week will showcase the multibillion-dollar trade it is proposing to the International Olympic Committee: Bask in the abundance of our competition-ready stadiums, and please try to overlook the sprawl and inevitable traffic.
Those issues—for better and for worse—will likely be front and center as the campaign for the 2024 Summer Olympics begins in earnest when commission members make site visits to the two finalists, Los Angeles and then Paris.
Both cities will at least be able to argue that fever-pitch political tensions are beginning to dissipate.
For Los Angeles, the election of Donald Trump had raised some fears his economic-nationalist agenda might clash with the global event. Any mixed signals from the administration threatened to upend years of efforts by the U.S. Olympic Committee to ease international tensions stemming from a long-running financial dispute with the IOC. Instead, Trump has consistently expressed support for the Los Angeles bid, much to the delight of the effort’s leaders.
Meanwhile, in Paris, the election of former investment banker Emmanuel Macron as France’s new president should quell concerns that the anti-internationalist spirits raised by Marine Le Pen could overwhelm the IOC site visit.
Still, the Paris bid requires billions of dollars in government funding -- a fact that Los Angeles officials see as their main advantage. In recent years, the IOC has faced persistent criticism that governments waste money building white elephants for the Games in cities like Sochi, where Russia spent an estimated $50 billion on infrastructure improvements, and Rio, which came in some $2 billion over budget.
Los Angeles organizers have said they will almost exclusively use existing facilities, many of which can be accessed by either existing or planned rail systems. They argue those elements will allow them to stay within the proposed $5.3 billion budget.
Casey Wasserman, the sports and entertainment executive chairing the Los Angeles bid, recently said in a conference call with the media that the characteristics that have “made our bid viable and popular remain the same from the beginning, and that is the opposite of what has driven people to criticize other bids.”
But when the IOC officials visit the various venues and sports parks around the city this week, they will be reminded of the vastness of the region and the distance been the various facilities.
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| Los Angeles Makes Its Case for 2024 Olympics |
The LA2024 plan has venues stretching from Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley—home to equestrian, shooting and slalom canoeing—to 90 miles east at Lake Perris in the heart of the Inland Empire. Anaheim’s Honda Center, the proposed site of volleyball, is 45 miles from the athletes village at the University of California at Los Angeles, which is 25 miles from the tennis center in Carson and 35 miles from the Long Beach waterfront that would host triathlon, water polo and other events.
Even the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, near the campus of the University of Southern California, the site of swimming and track competitions, is 15 miles and an hour in regular weekday traffic from UCLA. In Beijing and London, athletes were minutes away by bus from the biggest competitions.
Still, LA2024 spokesman Jeff Millman calls Los Angeles the “low-risk solution.” Millman also raised eyebrows among some Olympic observers when he recently said the 2024 Games “must help restore the credibility of the Games.” It remains to be seen how that went over with IOC members overseas, who likely don’t view the Olympics as having a credibility problem.
Oddsmakers, who have been prescient in past Olympic host handicapping, have long placed Paris in the favorite’s position. Los Angeles’s chances improved when other candidates—first Hamburg, then Rome, then Budapest— dropped out of the race. People involved with IOC now view it as essentially a toss-up, which is partly why IOC President Thomas Bach has created a working group exploring the possibility of awarding the 2028 Games to the runner-up though neither city has agreed to such an arrangement.
The IOC will select the 2024 host in Lima in September.
Los Angeles suffered a potential complication to its bid last month when Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, arguably the most influential IOC member since he controls the distribution of IOC money to the developing world, was described as “co-conspirator No. 2” in a federal criminal bribery case in Brooklyn connected to world soccer’s governing body FIFA. The sheikh, whose family maintains a home in New York, proclaimed his innocence, but he stepped down from FIFA’s ruling council and alerted the IOC ethics panel. Any efforts to pursue a case against the sheikh could put the U.S. government and the IOC at odds.
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
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