Olympic Panel OKs Otay Tract for Training

A 150-acre tract of land near the Upper Otay Reservoir was officially selected Saturday as the site for a new, year-round Olympic training facility. San Diego leaders hope it will be in open in time to help U.S. athletes prepare for the 1992 Summer Games.

Gloria McColl, a city councilwoman and president of the San Diego National Sports Training Foundation, said the full executive board of the U.S. Olympic Committee unanimously chose the San Diego County site and approved a local financing plan that officials hope will see the training center operational a year before the next Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

The center, designed to include an initial complement of 300 beds, eventually will house up to 1,000 athletes who will live and train at the complex. The project is envisioned to encompass facilities for such sports as track and field, swimming, soccer, handball, bobsledding and the luge.

“It’s a very multipurpose center,” McColl said Saturday night, shortly after returning to San Diego from Minneapolis, where the executive board approved the San Diego County site.

“It was very exhilarating. We are very pleased. We are moving along very, very nicely now.”

In EastLake Area

The site approved for the training facility, which will be in the EastLake area east of Chula Vista, will be the biggest of the four Olympic training centers in the United States.

McColl said she and other officials with the local foundation assured the executive board that they have already secured a third of the $15 million needed for the first phase of land improvements and construction.

She said that five private contributions of $1 million have already been pledged and that the foundation has hired a Houston-based firm to devise a plan to raise the remaining $10 million, which should be in hand in the next 14 months.

Impact on Youth Cited

McColl said the biggest boon that the training center will bring to San Diego is its impact on area youths.

“Really, it’s our children who are going to benefit by having such a facility,” she said. “They will be able to visit the center, see the athletes as role models and know firsthand that if they work hard there is a possibility that they, too, can achieve these kinds of goals.”