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Here's The Video L.A. Made For Our Bid As The 2024 Olympics Host
This new video makes Los Angeles look like a pretty excellent place to host the Olympics.
LA24, the campaign for L.A. to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, just released a one-minute promotional video positioning the city as the ideal place to hold the games. With the help of beautiful, sweeping drone shots of skylines and coastlines, close-ups of athletic Angelenos and a soundtrack provided by Arcade Fire, it's hard not to get excited about the prospect of L.A. beating out other cities around the world bidding to host.
The video kicks off with an early morning shot of downtown L.A. from Griffith Park, a pink and yellow-toned "This Is L.A." logo and the chugging guitar riff of Arcade Fire's 2005 jam "Wake Up." Instead of focusing on existing stadiums that could be used for the games, the shots focus on individuals running, playing soccer, surfing and biking, offering an understated emphasis on sports in L.A. There's even some people doing yoga—it is L.A. after all—using virtual reality gear to highlight the region's tech startups and a guy who seems to be welding because, well, we'll need to build some more infrastructure should we win the bid, we guess.
The video also emphasizes L.A.'s diversity, noting that it's "a city made of more than 100 nations." Not only does it consider the city to be the "western capital of the U.S.," but also the northern capital of Latin America" and the "eastern capital of the Pacific Rim." It also points out that the metropolitan area of L.A. is home to 18-million "hard-dreaming people." And in a subtle nod to the region's expanding public transit system—a selling point in the face of concerns over traffic congestion from the games—a Metro train pulls into the station as it says those hard-dreamers are "working to transform the city." The video concludes with a sunset vista and the words, "Welcome to the new L.A."
We even spotted a shot of the Santa Monica Pier from the 5:40 minute mark of this drone video at the 0:51 mark of the LA24 video.
L.A. is going up against a string of international contenders to host, including Rome, Paris, Hamburg, Germany and Budapest, Hungary. But we haven't seen any videos from them yet. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will make a decision on who will host on Sept. 15 in Lima, Peru.
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