The United States Olympic Committee 2016 Applicant City Technical Team will be visiting Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting Wednesday, in what it calls a continuation of the USOC’s Applicant City Evaluation process to determine if the USOC will formally submit a bid for the 2016 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The commission will be in Chicago Wednesday, San Francisco Thursday, and Los Angeles Friday.
The meetings will involve a detailed review of the technical analysis that was completed by the USOC Technical Team on the initial Games plans submitted by each city, and discussions on how to reshape and alter the initial plans and bid concepts to better position the cities for competition on national and international levels.
Each of the three applicant cities recently received the USOC’s Domestic Applicant City questionnaire which is the initial step in the possible selection of one of the three remaining cities, although USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said, we’re still working on the larger question of whether or not we’ll proceed with the U.S. bid. If we do, we have set the end of March 2007 as the time frame to have (a) U.S. city selected”.
City officials in San Francisco said if the city wins the bid, they plan to build a new stadium and housing for athletes by the city’s waterfront that would later be used as apartments.
A proposal asking for a non-binding vote on whether the city should host the 2016 Games fizzled Tuesday at City Hall when the sponsor of the motion, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, acknowledged he didn’t have the necessary support from the board. He asked for and received permission to table the motion, ending the debate on the matter.
He said Tuesday, “I love sports. I would love nothing more than to have the Olympics come to San Francisco”. But he said the reality for cities that have hosted the Games recently is that they have been a “financial burden”. We should not be afraid to ask the average person on the street what they think. People very well understand the bottom line. People understand very well traffic and congestion”.
If Los Angeles hosts the Games the city can use the stadiums and water parks left over from the 1932 and l984 Olympics, said officials.
Chicago has promised support from corporations, compact events near downtown, and mass transit.
