Olympics’ Glow Reignited as Flame of 2004 Beckons

The leader of the 1984 Olympics joked that he can now be found in the lines of the unemployed. Then Peter Ueberroth’s former second-in-command recited a poem suggesting how he might be put back to work--in about 15 years.

“I pray, let’s do it again,” Harry Usher, general manager of the Games, told 600 former members of the paid staff of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee.

At the Saturday night reunion marking the fifth anniversary of the end of the event, the notion of a reprise was a popular theme, several speakers calling for a bid for a third Olympics in Los Angeles in 2004.

But Ueberroth, president of the 1984 Olympics and the featured speaker at the Biltmore, preferred to look back and praise the people who helped him make the Los Angeles Games financially the most successful of any sporting event in history, with a surplus of $222.7 million.

“You have been the bright spot in this community in the ‘80s,” Ueberroth told the former staff members, who were returning to the hotel that served as their headquarters in 1984. “In a free society, if enough of us care about something, we can do anything.”

Ueberroth remarked wryly that he has been out of a job since completing a term as commissioner of Major League Baseball. Now back in California, he has been exploring opportunities ranging from corporate acquisitions to political office, and his Orange County telephone answers to the name of the “Ueberroth Corp.” Calling himself unemployed may have been an exercise in hyperbole.

But it did not seem to be an exaggeration when others asked the staff members to hold themselves in readiness for a campaign for the 2004 Olympics.

It took 52 years for the Olympics to return to Los Angeles after their first stand here in 1932, so those looking forward to a third Los Angeles Olympics know that it may take more than one effort. Bidding for a return of the Olympics to Los Angeles for the second time began in 1939, 39 years before the International Olympic Committee finally awarded the 1984 Olympics to the city in 1978.

Nevertheless, Usher, who now heads the Los Angeles office of an executive search firm and is chief organizer of the 1991 U.S. Olympic Festival to be held in Los Angeles, was optimistic in the poem he had composed on the subject of a return of the Games. Standing under a huge display of balloons shaped to form the Olympic rings, he recited:

Where is the dream Where Go the Hopes, Future and Plans . . . I pray, let’s do it again.

Anita de Frantz, a member of the 1984 Olympic staff, who later was elected to the International Olympic Committee, promised that a Los Angeles bid for the 2004 Games would have at least one committee vote--hers. The approximately 90-member IOC awards each Games by majority vote.

The reunion was sponsored by the Los Angeles Sports Council, a group directed by David Simon, another former Olympic staff member, which has as its purpose the bidding for major sports events for Los Angeles.

It cost $50 a person and brought former staff members not only from Los Angeles but from 15 states and even some European countries. Door prizes included tickets to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC, sent a message saying in part:

“It is indeed somewhat saddening to realize that five years have already passed since that glorious sunny afternoon in the Coliseum where, along with the world, but alone on the stage with the man (Ueberroth) who made it possible, I asked President Reagan to proclaim the Games of the XXIIIrd Olympiad in Los Angeles open.

“To all those assembled here to celebrate this historic event, I should like to convey the heartiest and warmest affection and thanks on behalf of our entire Olympic family, of which you will forever remain proud and active members.”