L.A.’s chances of winning the 2024 Olympic bid could rest with Tuesday’s election

The whispers have grown louder — day by day, week by week — leading to the U.S. presidential election.

International Olympic Committee members, be they from major European nations or tiny countries in far-flung corners of the world, have quietly grumbled about Donald Trump.

They don’t like his positions on NATO and international trade. They don’t like his proposals on immigration.

Now, with the polls tightening, there is renewed speculation about how a potential Trump victory could impact Los Angeles’ campaign to bring the Games back to Southern California in 2024.

IOC leaders insist that domestic affairs will not factor into their decision-making when they gather to select a host city in September. But Hillary Clinton is a more sympathetic figure in Olympic circles and some experts suspect a Trump win on Tuesday could all but sink L.A.’s chances.

The truth probably rests somewhere in between.

“It’s a fairy tale the IOC tells, this notion that politics and sports don’t mix,” said Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at Pacific University in Oregon who studies the Olympic movement. “Heads of state can both help and possibly hurt a bid.”

Certainly the IOC has done business with a broad scope of political figures since the resumption of the modern Games in 1896. The list includes Democratic and Communist officials. It includes royalty and Adolf Hitler.

Two recent examples illustrate how politics can have a direct effect on bidding.

Paris was favored to win the vote for the 2012 Summer Games until Tony Blair, then prime minister of Britain, showed up at the 2005 IOC meetings in Singapore.

Blair spent two days pressing the flesh with dozens of members and was credited with helping the British eke out a victory in the final round.

“A momentous day,” he called it, adding, “It’s not often in this job that you punch the air and do a little jig and embrace the person next to you.”

Four years later, President Obama became the first American leader to personally lobby the IOC when he flew to Copenhagen to speak on behalf of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Games.

The result was far different.

In what has become a cautionary tale within the Olympic movement, Obama’s visit was seen by some as a fly-by, lasting only a few hours. Though he was both popular and well-received, his presentation lacked the passion exhibited by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who lobbied for Rio de Janeiro’s winning bid.

“I confess to you that if I died now,” a teary Lula told reporters afterward, “my life has been worthwhile.”

Said Obama: “One of the things that I think is most valuable about sports is that you can play a great game and still not win.”

This time around, L.A. and Paris appear to be the front-runners in a contest in which Hamburg and Rome have withdrawn over cost concerns. Budapest remains a presumed darkhorse.

The LA 2024 bid committee and its partner in the process, the U.S. Olympic Committee, have tried their best to skirt political talk over the last year.

“As a privately run and financed nonprofit organization, LA 2024 is nonpartisan,” committee spokesman Jeff Millman said in a statement. “The Olympics and our bid transcend politics.”

But politics intruded at the recent Summer Olympics in Rio when IOC President Thomas Bach spoke openly about the plight of refugees, bemoaning a “world of selfishness where certain people claim to be superior to others.”

His comment coincided with Trump’s campaign proposals to temporarily ban Muslim immigration and deport millions of other immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

As part of an LA 2024 contingent that traveled to the Games, Mayor Eric Garcetti acknowledged that he and the rest of the bid committee faced persistent questions about the Republican nominee.

“For us, I think IOC members might have said certain things,” he said in Rio. “But, as I mentioned, an America that turns inward, like any country that turns inward, isn’t good for world peace, isn’t good for progress, isn’t good for all of us.”

Larry Probst, the USOC chairman, expressed his hope that IOC voters would ultimately “think about what has transpired over the last six or seven years, not about what may transpire in November.”

The USOC has taken steps to improve America’s standing in the Olympic movement by hosting conferences and international sporting events and renegotiating a contract that now shares a larger portion of U.S. broadcast revenues with other countries.

LA 2024 also has worked to develop relationships with the IOC. Next week, the committee will travel to Doha, Qatar, to make a presentation at an important sports convention.

“Our bid leaders maintain strong relationships with leaders in both parties,” Millman said, “and we are confident that our bid will continue receiving strong federal support after the election, regardless of the outcome.”

It would not be difficult for bid leaders to point out that whomever wins the election this week could be long gone by the 2024 Olympics.

Still, with the host-city vote less than a year away, the world will be watching as a new president takes office. There will be sufficient time for the Olympic community to either warm or cool to the next U.S. leader.

What if Trump continues his history of making controversial statements? What if Clinton does not exude the kind of enthusiasm that IOC voters are looking for?

“There’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved,” Boykoff said. “It’s not too difficult to make a misstep that can be seen as a slight by the Olympic honchos.”

david.wharton@latimes.com

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