Wraps Taken Off Training Center : Olympics: At a cost of $65 million, 150-acre site near San Diego joins Lake Placid, N.Y., and Colorado Springs as training facilities.

Dedication of the $65-million ARCO Training Center on Saturday marked a major step in the Olympic movement for the United States.

Bruce Jenner, Olympic decathlon champion in 1976, called the 150-acre facility, 20 miles south of downtown San Diego, a boon not only to aspiring athletes but to the nation’s sports image.

“Times have changed,” said Jenner, now involved in various physical-fitness oriented businesses in Los Angeles. “The Soviet and East German machines don’t exist anymore. Their athletes are competing on our level now.”

Jenner compared the facility to the conditions he faced when he was preparing for the 1972 and 1976 Olympics.

“After college, there’s a big gap,” he said. “When I finished fourth in ‘72, I decided to give it four more years. But I had no program, no place to go, so in ’73 I picked up stakes [from New York] and trained in San Jose.

“And besides the advantage in training, the athletes here have all expenses paid. I lived on nothing. I sold insurance, and my total income for three years was $9,000. My one big deal was a free pair of track shoes.”

Bill Toomey, who won the decathlon gold medal in 1968 and is now a major Olympic fund-raiser in San Diego, told a similar story.

“I finished fourth in ‘64, and in ’65 I traveled to Germany,” he said. “There was no place to train in the United States. When I returned, I found an excellent spot in Santa Barbara, but it was nothing like this.”

The United States’ leading current decathlete, Dave Johnson, third in the 1992 Olympics despite a stress fracture of his right foot, speculated that a facility such as this might have accelerated his career.

“It gives the athletes a chance to hone their skills,” Johnson said. “I would have loved to have a place like this to develop when I was up-and-coming.”

Johnson has been training at his alma mater, Azusa Pacific College, but plans to move here as soon as the pole vault and high-jump pits have been completed.

Athletes in seasonal outdoor sports are expected to benefit even more from the year-around facility than those in track and field.

For example, Mike Harbold of the canoe/kayak team, already in training here, said, “We used to train on the Potomac River in Washington, and last winter we were snowed in.”

This is the third Olympic training facility in the United States, and the first to be built from scratch. Others are located in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Colorado Springs.

Gov. Pete Wilson attended the opening ceremony, but did not speak because of his recent throat surgery.