LOS ANGELES — Eight months after finishing as the runner-up to Boston, Los Angeles has officially been chosen as the U.S. candidate for the 2024 Olympics, city officials announced Tuesday. ADVERTISING LOS ANGELES — Eight months after finishing as the
LOS ANGELES — Eight months after finishing as the runner-up to Boston, Los Angeles has officially been chosen as the U.S. candidate for the 2024 Olympics, city officials announced Tuesday.
After a week of delays over concerns about the potential costs to taxpayers, the City Council voted unanimously, 15-0, to allow Mayor Eric Garcetti to sign an agreement with the U.S. Olympic Committee over bidding for the games. Soon after, the mayor and the USOC announced that an agreement to make Los Angeles the official bidder was in place.
Los Angeles is throwing itself into a contest — along with Paris; Rome; Budapest, Hungary; and Hamburg, Germany — that some cities have grown increasingly hesitant to enter in recent years, as the financial pitfalls of hosting the games have become more apparent.
Boston, the USOC’s original choice to bid for the 2024 Games, backed out earlier this year, when concerns about costs the city might incur eroded public support. A handful of European cities declined to bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, citing similar concerns. And recent hosts like London found that the budget for putting on the Olympics outstripped initial projections by as much as three or four times.
In announcing the bid, Garcetti said that Los Angeles would face few of the financial challenges that have troubled other hosts, citing the city’s history of hosting successfully twice before, in 1932 and 1984, and the infrastructure that is already in place.
“It is important to stress that we are not changing the face of our city to fit the Olympic Games,” Garcetti said. “We have a vision of our city that the Olympics can benefit from, not vice versa.
“So the issues of legacy should be at the heart of deciding whether or not to bid for the games,” he said.
Scott Blackmun, the chief executive of the USOC, also stressed how well Los Angeles’ bid fit with the International Olympic Committee’s Agenda 2020, which stresses sustainable development and as little building as necessary for the host cities.
“The Olympic movement is clearly at a turning point,” he said. “We believe in the vision of L.A. We believe this city can produce a new kind of games.”
Garcetti had said that if Los Angeles was chosen as the host, he would sign the contract with the IOC, guaranteeing the city would cover any cost overruns. But the City Council did not release all control to the bid committee LA24. Wary of the potential for runaway costs, the council members authorized the mayor to sign an agreement with the USOC that will keep them involved in decision making until the summer of 2017, when the IOC selects a host.
Los Angeles has existing stadiums, which the bid committee plans to use to keep costs down if the city is chosen to host the games for a third time. In a draft bid released last week, LA24 projected a surplus and a budget of $4.1 billion. But that figure did not include more than $1 billion that the committee hoped private partners would contribute to major construction projects, like building an Olympic Village and refurbishing the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Casey Wasserman, one of the chairmen of the bid committee, said that 85 percent of the venues that would be used for the games already existed or would be built irrespective of the Olympics. “L.A. was built to host the Olympic Games,” he said. “As a global sports destination, we can put on an exciting games with substantially reduced costs and risks.”
