CARSON — In agreeing to award the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games to Los Angeles, the International Olympic Committee, desperate to reinvent the Olympic movement and re-connect it to a youn…
CARSON — In agreeing to award the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games to Los Angeles, the International Olympic Committee, desperate to reinvent the Olympic movement and re-connect it to a younger audience, has once again turned to a city that does storytelling for a living.
With an tripartite deal that awards Paris the 2024 Games and delivers a record-setting payout to Los Angeles that could exceed $2 billion, the IOC is counting on two iconic global cities with rich Olympic histories to launch the Olympic movement into the 21st Century on a new trajectory after decades of corruption and doping scandals, financial crises and dwindling interest among both younger fans and major cities has diminished the Olympic brand.
“In 2028 we’ re bringing the Games back to L.A., one of the great capitals of this Olympic movement, ” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said. “A city that has always been a Games changer and will be again in 2028.
“The Olympics, ” Los Angeles 2024 chairman Casey Wasserman said, “are coming home.”
The Games, however, will return to a city much different than the one that hosted transformative Games at similarly critical junctures for the Olympic movement in 1932 and 1984.
“This is a bid about the future, not the past, ” Wasserman said.
And the IOC is convinced that a diverse, re-energized Los Angeles at the intersection of entertainment and high-tech industries, and at the crossroads of Latin America and the Pacific Rim, can reinvent the Olympic movement just as the city has reshaped itself since the 1984 Games.
“Los Angeles in many ways is the bid of reconnecting with the future, whether it’s California technology, Hollywood storytelling, new sports that have been invented here and new sports that will come, ” Garcetti said. “We really have the potential to touch a new generation and show a new model where we’ re a little more humble, a little more modest in what we need for those 17 Days in order to make it more sustainable for cities not to go into debt.
“We have put forward a model that will be good for the next 50 years for this movement, ” Garcetti said.
A model that comes with a balanced $5.3 billion budget and relies on the region’s wealth of existing venues and already approved infrastructure still needs the approval of the IOC membership, the Los Angeles City Council and the U. S. Olympic Committee’s board of directors.
A city council subcommittee on the Olympic bid on Friday will review the agreement between Los Angeles 2024 and the IOC that was finalized Monday morning. Council president Herb Wesson said he hopes the whole council will approve the agreement the following Tuesday or Wednesday. The USOC board is expected to approve the deal in the coming days.
Los Angeles officials have spoken to every IOC member since the organization voted unanimously on July 11 to award two Games in the same year for the first time since 1921. Garcetti and Wasserman said they have been assured that the agreement will be unanimously ratified by the IOC on Sept. 13 in Lima, Peru.
“The IOC welcomes this decision of the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic bid committee. They presented a strong and enthusiastic candidature that embraces the Olympic Agenda 2020 sustainability priorities by incorporating existing facilities and encouraging the engagement of more youth in the Olympic Movement, ” IOC president Thomas Bach said. “Therefore, we are very happy that as part of this Host City Contract, we are able to expand the impact of city youth sports programming and encourage the healthy lifestyle of Angelenos for the next 11 years. We are very confident that we can reach a tripartite agreement under the leadership of the IOC with L.A. and Paris in August, creating a win-win-win situation for all three partners. This agreement will be put forward to the IOC Session in Lima in September for ratification.”
If there were celebrations in Los Angeles and Paris, there also was relief at IOC headquarters in Lausanne.
While IOC officials have had lavish praise for the Los Angeles and Paris bids, Bach’s push to award both the 2024 and 2028 Games at the same time was also driven by concern within the IOC that no major city from a non-authoritarian country will bid to host the 2028 Olympics.
“It buys us some time to take a longer term view of how we attract and encourage and deal with the candidate cities, ” Richard Pound, an influential IOC member from Canada, said of the 2024/2028 plan.
Eight cities have withdrawn bids for the past two available Olympic Games. Four cities — Boston, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg — pulled out of the 2024 bidding, with Toronto officials deciding against even entering the race.
“This is a total (full) -blown crisis that no one, or fewer and fewer cities and countries and populations want the Olympic Games, ” said John J. MacAloon, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively on the Olympic movement and was a member of the 2000 IOC commission that reformed the bidding process.
All of which left the IOC in a vulnerable position in negotiations with Los Angeles officials.
“One of the things that works in L.A.’s favor is the fact that the IOC has been put on notice by a lack of city and nation interest in bidding for the Games in light of the experience of relative recent times, ” said Robert Baade, a Lake Forest College economics professor and author of “Bidding for the Olympics: Fool’s Gold?”
Wasserman, LA 2024 chief executive Gene Sykes and USOC CEO Scott Blackmun were able to leverage the IOC’s need to deliver the joint award into the most lucrative Olympic host city deal in history.
Under terms of the agreement, the IOC will pay LA 2024 at least $1.8 billion, plus another $200 million from an automobile sponsorship deal and all IOC profits from the 2028 Games. The IOC will also waive at least $50 million in fees and other charges and provide LA 2024 with a five-year interest free loan starting in January that will not only fund the local organizing committee but contribute to a foundation that underwrites local sports programs.
The 1984 Games generated a $232 million surplus. The USOC and Los Angeles’ 84 Foundation reach received $93 million from that surplus.
“Simply put, what we were able to negotiate, this deal was too good to pass up, ” Garcetti said. “A model to move forward in a responsible, low-risk way.
“We’ re getting more money, we’ re getting more financial security and if we go 2024 we have to wait for the people of L.A. to feel the legacy. In other words we can’ t spend those profits until the year after. This deal is so good that we’ re able to spend those resources up front and that means people will feel as early as next year what the Olympic legacy and the Games are going to be about.”
Monday’s agreement ends Los Angeles’ quest for a third Games that began even before Garcetti’s first day in office in 2013, when wrote a letter to the USOC expressing the city’s interest in bidding for the 2024 Games.
“A remarkable journey, ” Garcetti said.
