Festival Is Loaned $1 Million : Finance: Amateur Athletic Foundation steps in to provide breathing room for event. Opening ceremony is tonight.

Elizabeth Primrose-Smith, executive director of the local organizing committee, said that the final day before the opening of the U.S. Olympic Festival was “hectic but not frantic” as she attended to ordinary last-minute details--if borrowing $1 million can be described as ordinary.

Citing a “temporary cash-flow problem” caused by bills arriving before revenues, Primrose-Smith called upon one of the Festival’s largest sponsors, the Amateur Athletic Foundation, for a $1-million loan. The AAF, which was established with profits from the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, approved the loan Thursday afternoon, said Harry Usher, the chairman of the organizing committee’s board of directors.

The opening ceremony is scheduled for tonight at 8 at Dodger Stadium.

“There are rumors going around that we’re $1 million in debt, but that’s wrong,” Primrose-Smith said. “We have a typical situation for an event like this where costs are loaded at the front and revenues come later.”

While expressing optimism, not even Primrose-Smith was willing to guarantee that the revenues will enable the organizing committee to finish the 10-day Festival in the black. She said that $3.4 million in ticket sales is required to meet a $15-million budget. That would equal the Festival record for ticket revenues set last year in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“Whether we get that or not, your guess is as good as mine,” she said.

Except for a parking problem at the UCLA venues that required the intervention of Chancellor Charles Young to solve, U.S. Olympic Committee officials said Thursday that they had no complaints with the organization for an event that involves more than 3,000 athletes in 36 Olympic and Pan American Games sports.

“It’s been very quiet,” USOC spokesman Mike Moran said. “We’ve had no problems whatsoever with athletes’ housing or registration or practice facilities or transportation. It’s safe to say that the athletes will enjoy the venues and the competition and the Southern California atmosphere. That won’t be an issue that many people will discuss, but it’s an important one to the USOC.”

The issue that most concerns the USOC, Moran said, is whether the Festival will be embraced by Los Angeles, the largest of nine cities to play host to the event since it was established in 1978.

“I think we’re all a bit apprehensive--or at least in the dark--about what we’re going to see for crowds,” he said. “We understand that ticket sales have picked up dramatically in the last three days for the opening ceremony and some sports.

“But this area is so big and the communities are so different that we don’t have a handle on the whole picture the way we normally do.”

Primrose-Smith said that about 30,000 of 38,000 available seats for the opening ceremony had been sold through noon Tuesday and that the finals in tennis and racquetball are sold out. Other sports for which tickets are selling well, she said, are boxing, swimming, volleyball, baseball, diving, figure skating and equestrian events.

“We’re going to have a super opening ceremony, and we expect that to generate an increased level of interest and a whole lot of ticket buying,” Usher said.

“I anticipate that, consistent with the L.A. ticket-buying tradition of putting everything off until the end, we’ll sell a lot of tickets. Once the Festival starts and everyone is aware that there is something going on, a lot of people will show up. Out of 15 million people in the area, we don’t need a large percentage of them for this thing to take off.”

Asked whether he believes that the organizing committee will reach the break-even figure of $3.4 million in ticket revenues, Usher said: “It’s impossible to tell, but it’s do-able.”

The organizing committee has been beset by financial problems from the outset. Don Porter, chairman of a USOC task force appointed last year to study the future of the Festival, said Thursday that the organizing committee was in such dire financial straits last November that the USOC considered moving this summer’s event to another city.

But he said that the move was averted because of increased sponsorship revenues and cost-cutting measures adopted by the organizing committee and the USOC, including the transfer of the ice hockey competition to St. Cloud, Minn., because 10 days of ice time at the only acceptable local venues, the Forum and the Sports Arena, would have been too expensive.

“This is a tough city,” said Porter, a Los Angeles native who has lived for several years in Oklahoma City. “There are so many things going on, not just sports. This is a great event, but it’s a difficult sell.

“Not to take anything away from Los Angeles or the organizing committee, because we think this is going to be a competitive success, but in the future, the USOC should take a serious look at not putting the Festival in cities like this one. Obviously, we’d have the same problems in cities like New York, Chicago or Philadelphia.”

When the USOC chose Festival sites for 1993, ’94 and ‘95, Porter said that the problems in Los Angeles were a factor in eliminating bids from New York and South Florida. The cities chosen were San Antonio, St. Louis and Denver.

“We think those are just about the the right size for this event,” he said.