Where’s the large stadium with a 400m track in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco? And while you can put a swimming pool in pretty much any arena (weren’t the 2016 USA swimming trials in a “portable” pool?), the same can’t be said for diving, although most big cities have universities with natatoriums that should be big enough to host Olympic swimming and diving events.
You also need separate arenas to hold basketball, volleyball, handball, boxing, wrestling, judo/taekwondo (one ends before the other begins), and gymnastics simultaneously. In most major cities worldwide, while outdoor stadiums shouldn’t be that hard to come by, indoor stadiums are another matter.
One thing missing: a velodrome. Los Angeles solved that problem in 1984 by building a portable one (on what is now the site of the stadium in Carson, I think) and then moving it to the training center in Colorado.
Another problem, but one that no longer exists: a baseball and a softball stadium. Okay, in the USA, this isn’t really a problem, but in other countries, what do you with a stadium that holds what is in effect a 60m x 60m field?
Very few Olympics hold all of the events in the single city where the Games are being held. They scatter them all over the place. In the case of San Francisco, there are stadiums, arenas, and 400 meter tracks all over the place - professional and college venues.
I’m sure New York and Chicago have the same capabilities.
I’m not up for looking up Chicago and New York but depending on how you define San Fransisco there are D1 college track teams in Davis, Berkley, and Palo Alto. All are certainly within Olympics range.
I think that the Olympics in LA will be very successful and financially beneficial to the area. Using and upgrading existing facilities will be less expensive than building new and the infrastructure improvements will be good for the city long term.
A large stadium of almost any kind can be temporarily repurposed for baseball. Most big cities have a few big soccer stadia. You can build a temporary outfield fence and boom, baseball diamond. The Toronto Blue Jays played in this for twelve years.
It’s not going to produce something as lovely as a real baseball stadium but it’d do for a couple of weeks.
There are plenty of tracks in the area. There are plenty of large stadiums in the area as well. What there are not any of are tracks inside of stadiums considered large enough to host the Olympics. Stanford used to, but the stadium was reconfigured to make it smaller, and the track removed. In Berkeley, Memorial Stadium does not have a track, and Edwards Stadium, where the track is located, holds something like 25,000, which is not nearly large enough for the Olympics.
It is a crying shame, but on a happier note London venues are doing very nicely (and I was in the olympic stadium a few weeks back for the anniversary athletics with the World Championships soon after)