The president of the International Olympic Committee toured potential Southland venues for the 2024 Games Monday, and said the group leading Los Angeles’ bid to host the event was a “strong” team looking to build on the area’s Olympic legacy.
Thomas Bach attended a Lakers game at Staples Center, a potential Olympic venue, on Sunday and Monday he received tours of the USC and UCLA campuses. The Los Angeles 2024 Olympic bid committee is proposing to house athletes at an Olympic Village on the UCLA campus, while putting the media village at USC.
Los Angeles is the last stop on Bach’s four-city tour of Olympic bidders. Paris, Rome and Budapest are also vying to host the 2024 Summer Games.
Bach, who joined Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in a pick-up game of soccer with UCLA students on the university’s athletic field, said he anticipates “a fascinating competition ahead of us” among the four cities looking to host the Games. The visits “have encouraged us very much,” with each city taking different approaches to following the IOC’s newly adopted policies for host cities, Bach said.
Bach said he found Los Angeles’ 2024 bid committee to be “a strong team,” with its bid emphasizing how a city that hosts the Olympic Games could “build on an Olympics legacy, and build an Olympic future … which will be going beyond 2024, and at the same time addressing the youth, linking very well sport and education.”
Garcetti said the city’s bid tried to show how the city is continuing its legacy of hosting two previous Olympic Games with programs like LA84, which uses surplus money from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles to fund youth sports programs.
Garcetti also said the bid committee showed off the fact that many athletes come from and train in Los Angeles, arranging meetings between Bach and Lakers All-Star Kobe Bryant, as well as former Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who is vice chair of the LA 2024 committee.
Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals in track-and-field events during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, also greeted Bach during his visit.
Another goal of the committee during Bach’s visit was to “show the political commitment here in Los Angeles, with widespread support among the people of Los Angeles,” Garcetti said. Bach said he discussed the “concept of the Olympic Village” with Garcetti and Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson, and told them the IOC is looking for a “competition of ideas, and we do not want to impose anything on a city.”
“We do not want to give lessons to a city of how to develop a city,” Bach said. “We want to listen to them, and we want to give them the opportunity to devise a vision for the future of their city and to tell us how their Olympic Games is fitting into this vision.
“This approach we saw in all four cities,” he added. “This again is very encouraging for us.”
Bach also visited the Getty Center Monday, and he will travel to San Francisco Tuesday to meet with tech company executives, according to LA 2024 officials.
The first set of candidature packages laying out the competing cities’ bid concepts and strategies are due later this month.
The two-year bid process also includes two additional stages in which candidate cities need to show how they will fund and deliver the Games. The IOC is expected to pick a city in 2017.
—City News Service