Bring the Olympics Back to L.A.

LOS ANGELES VS. CHICAGO. Never mind all the usual rivalries that come to mind when the cities are mentioned: Kobe vs. Michael, Wilco vs. Beck, Gehry vs. Gehry … something about newspapers. When the subject is hosting the 2016 Olympics, the choice between the two remaining U.S. contenders (San Francisco dropped out last week) is clear. As much as there is to admire in Chicago’s civic tradition and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” L.A.’s bid is superior.

Los Angeles isn’t perfect, but it may be the perfect place to hold the Summer Olympics. The weather is brilliant. The time zone — in an era when NBC pays $5.7 billion for a dozen years of U.S. broadcast rights, such things matter — is ideal. The infrastructure, from stadiums to freeways to (growing) rail, is extensive.

And the history is glorious. It’s not just Olympic Boulevard or the city’s rows of delicate towering palm trees, both legacies of the 1932 Games. The Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games is one of the oldest such organizations in the world, in existence since 1939. It has played a crucial role in Olympics and local history, bidding for every Summer Olympics from 1948 to 1984, when its bid was selected. Those games were so profitable that the committee was able to distribute tens of millions of dollars to local groups such as the Amateur Athletic Foundation.

The committee has brought this expertise to bear on its 2016 bid. No public money would be needed for the games, say organizers, and relatively little private money. Only one venue (for shooting) would need to be built. Athletes would live at dormitories at USC or UCLA. The Los Angeles Coliseum, which hosted opening and closing ceremonies in 1932 and 1984, would reprise its historic role. For such a forward-looking city, L.A. is steeped in Olympics tradition.

Yet L.A.’s history with the Olympics might also be the best argument against its bid. This city has already hosted the Olympics twice, the argument goes; shouldn’t it give other places a chance? And if ever there were a city that deserved a chance, it’s Chicago, which has already suffered the indignity of being one of the only selected cities ever to lose an Olympics, in 1904. Make that a double indignity: It lost those games to St. Louis.

But sentiment only goes so far with the U.S. Olympic Committee, which is to decide next month whether it will submit a bid for 2016 to the International Olympic Committee. The USOC’s criteria tend more toward the quantitative: how many venues are built; how new ones will be paid for; how spectators and athletes will get around. On that score, L.A. stands head-and-big-shoulders above Chicago.

Chicago has a compact site — most events would take place within seven square miles of the Loop — and better public transportation. But it would have to build an Olympic stadium, as well as an aquatics center and a few other venues, from scratch; that cost could reach $800 million. Organizers are talking with developers to build an athletes’ village, which could cost up to $1 billion.

Chicago and L.A. still have time, of course, to refine and improve their bids. The USOC will select a U.S. candidate city next spring, and the IOC is to choose a site for the 2016 Games in October 2009. Because of the complicated and mysterious geopolitics of the IOC, 2016 looks to be the best chance for a U.S. bid in the next few decades.

If the United States wants the Olympics in its future, then it should look to the Olympics in its past — to the city known as the epicenter of global entertainment. Los Angeles has represented the United States twice before in the Olympics, to great fanfare. It can do so again.