Public firmly behind LA 2024 Olympic campaign: chief

‘Athletes ‘heart’ of Los Angeles bid’

LOS ANGELES, Dec 17, (AFP): The leader of Los Angeles’s bid for the 2024 Olympics believes there is no chance the city’s quest to stage the games for a third time could falter through public scepticism following the abrupt withdrawal from the race of Hamburg.

LA24 chief executive Gene Sykes told AFP in an interview that polls had shown overwhelming public support for the city’s bid, which faces stiff competition from Paris, Budapest and Rome.

Hamburg’s bid ended last month after a referendum in the German city surprisingly

LA24 has said the Games could generate $4.8 billion, resulting in a profit of around $161 million.

Sykes meanwhile said that security concerns raised by the recent bloody attacks by a Muslim husband and wife in San Bernardino near Los Angeles would not redefine the city’s bid, adding security challenges were shared across the Olympic movement.

“I do not think these challenges stand in the way of the Olympics. The challenges say ‘We need the Olympics more than ever’,” said Sykes, who has said security will be a “very high priority.”

The host of the 2024 Olympics will be chosen by the International Olympic Committee at a meeting in Peru in September 2017.

Meanwhile, nearly three decades after she dazzled in the competition pool in Seoul Janet Evans finds herself back in the thick of Olympic competition -- as part of Los Angeles’ bid to win the 2024 Summer Games.

Evans, a Southern California native whose Olympic career spanned three Games, is a staunch believer that Los Angeles can deliver a supreme athletes’ experience if given the chance to host the Games for a third time -- after staging the global sporting extravaganza in 1932 and 1984.

She was happy to take on the role of leading the bid committee’s athletes’ commission, recalling how the 1984 Olympics inspired her in her swimming career.

“I was a good swimmer, I went to the opening ceremony, I watched Rafer Johnson (winner of the decathlon at the 1960 Olympics) light that cauldron -- it moved me,” she told AFP.

“It made me want to be part of the Olympic movement, it made me want to do anything to be an Olympian.

“It became my passion,” she added.

In this file photo, Tom Shields swims in the men’s 400-meter medley relay during the Duel in the Pool swim meet on Dec

11, in Indianapolis. (AP)

In the first allegation of corruption linked to next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Epoca magazine reported that construction company Carioca Engenharia allegedly bribed the speaker of the lower house of Congress in order to secure funds for a massive port area regeneration project.

The report, which Epoca attributed to leaked documents, could cause headaches for the city of Rio and its mayor Eduardo Paes who has repeatedly said he would deliver Olympic projects free of corruption, delays and cost-overruns.

Porto Maravilha, or Marvelous Port, is a regeneration of Rio’s downtown port area that has been heralded by authorities as one of the potential great legacies of the Olympic Games.

Although accounting for a fifth of the nearly 40 billion reais being spent on the games in Rio, it is not supervised by the organizing committee of Rio 2016 as it is not an Olympic venue.

Epoca cited plea bargain testimony by bosses of Carioca Engenharia, who are under arrest for participating in the widespread corruption scandal centered on state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA.