The Los Angeles 2024 Olympic bid committee will propose housing Olympic athletes at UCLA’s residential facilities, while members of the media would be based on the USC campus, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Monday.
Garcetti said the selection of the UCLA and USC campuses in Westwood and downtown Los Angeles, respectively, makes the city’s bid “fiscally responsible, sustainable and deliverable.”
“We are fitting the plan for the Olympic Games to our city, not the other way around,” said Garcetti, who joined officials of LA24, the bid committee, at UCLA to make the announcement.
The Los Angeles 2024 Olympic bid committee must submit a concept and strategy plan for the games to the International Olympic Committee by Feb. 17.
Garcetti said UCLA offers existing athletic facilities and accommodations, and is close to other training venues, while USC is near several sports venues, including the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Staples Center, and is home to a major journalism school.
The selection of UCLA as the site of the Olympic Village is a shift away from an earlier, proposal — expected to cost more than $1 billion — to house athletes at a Union Pacific rail yard known as the “Piggyback Yard” in Lincoln Heights, near downtown Los Angeles.
Garcetti said that while the cost of the initial choice was considered, it was not the main reason a different venue was ultimately chosen.
“It’s the athletes’ experience that drove this decision,” he said.
Garcetti said LA24 looked at about 20 sites before choosing UCLA for the Olympic Village.
LA24 chairman Casey Wasserman, who is an alumnus of the university, said “this is a historic moment for UCLA.”
Current Olympians already train at the UCLA athletic facilities, which have also produced Olympic gold medalists like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Wasserman said.
“UCLA offers amazing world-class facilities such as a great track and field stadium which already conforms to Olympic standards,” he said.
Olympics-bound athletes already choose Southern California as a training base, said Janet Evans, an Olympic gold medalist in swimming and LA24’s director of athlete relations.
LA24’s bid is focused on ensuring that the “athlete’s voice has the first and last word in the 2024 Games,” Evans said.
Los Angeles is competing with Paris, Hamburg, Rome and Budapest to host the 2024 Olympics. If held in Los Angeles, the 2024 games would be the first summer Olympics to be held in the United States since the Atlanta games in 1996, and the third time the city would play host to the summer Games.
— Wire reports