Trump is a big disadvantage for LA’s prospects of winning. Their argument may be that by the time 2024 comes around, Trump probably won’t be president then.
100% incorrect. The Rams/Chargers stadium is being privately financed. The reason LA went over 2 decades without an NFL team was we refused to use tax money to pay for a billionaires toybox. Eventually the NFL owners blinked when St. Louis and San Diego refused to be extorted anymore. Inglewood (the city where the stadium is being build) has offered tax breaks, but the taxpayers of Los Angeles aren’t coughing up a dime. (At least not officially - who knows what’s going on behind the scenes).
Part of LA’s bid centers around the fact that we don’t need to build a bunch of new stuff. For the 1984 Games, only 3 new facilities were built. A Tennis stadium at UCLA (still in use), the Velodrome at CSU Dominguez Hills (torn down and replaced with the Stub Hub Center soccer stadium) and the Swimming center at USC (still in use)
Even compared to the Sochi and Beijing events, this would be crazy expensive. You’d need to build tens of thousands of hotel rooms, along with all of those oddball venues.
My crazy idea was to put some of those venues on one or more barges and to tow them from Olympic host city to Olympic host city. As it is, some of the hotel capacity at these events is provided by docked cruise ships, so this would be a similar sort of thing.
Yeah, but it’d only need to be built once. Not every four years.
How many new facilities are in their current bid, and how many would be reused? The L.A. Coliseum still exists, but it was built in the 1920s. Even if they plan to use it, it’s hard to believe someone isn’t salivating over the chance to make a couple hundred million dollars worth of renovations.
I live in Boston and was somewhat torn over the local bid. With so many colleges there are already a lot of athletic facilities. I think the biggest issue was that there wasn’t one big enough for the opening ceremonies and track-and-field.
Couldn’t the stadium being built for the LA Rams be used for the opening/closing ceremonies and the track & field events? And in Boston, why wouldn’t Gillette Stadium work for the same thing?
I think the size of a 400-meter track is larger than the typical playing surface of an American football field. I know Gillette Statdium also hosts soccer; not sure if that requires a larger field or not, or if Gillette moves some seats to make room. It may also have to do with capacity; I think the Olympics require a certain number of seats and some football stadia don’t meet the requirement.
Plus, they may have had something planned for Gillette, possibly soccer. If they had the track-and-field there, then they’d need someplace else for the soccer.
What stadium did LA use for their last Olympics (1984, I think)? If it was good enough then, why wouldn’t it still be good enough now?
By a considerable amount, particularly in the end zones. Here’s a picture of the LA Coliseum, showing both its track and football field. Very few (if any) purpose-built U.S. football stadiums would have that much extra room between the field itself and the seats, especially in the end zones.
I wonder if the lower tiers of seating could be removed from a football stadium to make it suitable for the Olympics,
The Coliseum, which as was mentioned was built in the 1920s. With a little upgrading it would work fine. Definitely no need to build a brand new stadium.
The coliseum was also the site of the 1932 Games, so it would be nice for the same venue to be used for three Olympic Games.
You’d sacrifice a lot of seats in order to do that (which is the opposite of what you want), and the front row would be fairly high above the level of the field. That could ruin the sightlines; people behind the front row couldn’t see the action happening on the near side of the field. I suppose you could remove rows of seats and then raise the field up to the level of the new front row.
<snigger> You’re either being snarky or so darn cute
A few years ago one especially stupid “Sports Illustrated” writer, Joe Posnarski, was telling us how Chicago would get the Olympics because Obama was President and how he was a citizen of the world (or some other such bologna). The USA didn’t get either the Olympics or soccer world cup
Did Chicago even want them?
I don’t think the idea (of bidding for these upcoming Games) was ever even floated here. In the years since losing the 2016 bid to Rio, Chicago’s finances have gone in the tank – their bond status is junk, or close to it, and the city is facing a massive budget deficit. Mayor Daley loved vanity projects like the Olympics, but he’s been gone for 6 years, and Mayor Emanuel is unpopular enough without proposing a project that the city could never afford.
Look up bids for 2016 summer Olympics on wiki. Chicago was one of the four finalists Bids for the 2016 Summer Olympics - Wikipedia
You have a link to this article? Posnanski is one of the best sportswriters out there.
Velodrome is still there, dude. I was just in it, and it’s pretty damn sweet.