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It's Official: Los Angeles Is The U.S. City Bidding For The 2024 Olympics
After some back and forth, it's now official: Los Angeles is the U.S. city bidding to host the 2024 Olympics.
The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) board of directors endorsed Los Angeles' Olympics and Paralympics bid following a unanimous vote by the L.A. City Council today supporting the decision.
Mayor Eric Garcetti made the announcement at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica. "We all know the next two years are about fleshing out the details, but this is in our DNA," Garcetti said, according to NBC Los Angeles. "We know how to do Olympics, we know how to do them well, we know how to do them economically."
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will make a decision in Lima, Peru on Sept. 15, 2017 on which city to choose as the host of the sporting events. Basically, Los Angeles has about two years to convince the committee why they should choose them over other cities also bidding, which include Rome, Paris, Hamburg, Germany and Budapest, Hungary.
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Boston was originally chosen in January to be the American city to bid as host, but they decided to step down after voicing concerns about overrun costs that would affect the city. The USOC then asked Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. to consider rebidding.
Garcetti told the IOC that if Los Angeles was picked, then the city would guarantee covering any costs that go over the IOC budget, according to the New York Times. It's projected that it will cost Los Angeles $4.5 billion, and that it will produce a $161 million surplus in revenue. Garcetti and other leaders plan to submit a detailed budget by mid-2017 to the IOC, Bloomberg reports. City officials are still voicing concerns about possibly going over budget, and have worked out a deal so that the Los Angeles City Council still gets to vote on the final contract, if the city is chosen as the official host.
Though hosting the Olympics can be a costly burden on any city, the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games are considered by many to be the financially successful, mostly because the city was able to use existing infrastructure instead of building massive new stadiums. For the 2024 Olympics, a similar proposal is in place, like using existing facilities like the Staples Center and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Still, NBC Los Angeles reports that details on the budget are still vague. City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana and Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso wrote in a report last week that one of the projects, the Olympic Village, could "significantly exceed" the budged $1 billion for the project.
The last time the U.S. hosted a summer Olympics was in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996.
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