The way Casey Wasserman sees it, any city that wants to host the Olympics is asking the International Olympic Committee to take a leap of faith — and that won’t happen if the group doesn’t trust you.
In the early months now of what will be a two-year campaign, Wasserman, co-chairman of the Los Angeles 2024 bid group and chairman of Wasserman Media Group, said he’s working to prove the Los Angeles group can be counted on as good stewards of the IOC’s product.
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L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti (center) and Casey Wasserman (right) talk with Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah last week.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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The IOC will make its host selection for the 2024 Summer Olympics in September 2017.
“If they’re going to vote for you, they’re giving you their most important asset — at least in terms of summer opportunities — their most important asset for seven years, from 2017 to 2024,” Wasserman said last week, speaking from an easy chair in U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun’s temporary offices at the Association of National Olympic Committees’ meeting in Washington, D.C. “And they ought to trust you to deliver what they promise and what you can do for the Olympic movement. That’s why the mayor [Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti] and I have been pretty humble in our approach. Earning their respect and earning their trust is important.”
Olympics observers predict IOC members will place a premium on reliability in the race to host the 2024 Summer Games, having endured major local challenges leading up the Sochi 2014 Winter Games and the 2016 Rio Summer Games, and after struggling to find high-caliber cities to bid for the 2022 Winter Games.
Also, Wasserman said he’s confident that both Wasserman Media Group and the Los Angeles bid committee have procedures in place to prevent conflicts of interest. As bid campaigns mature, and especially if they win hosting rights, they generate extensive opportunities for outside media, event and marketing consulting work — the kind of work for which WMG would be a logical bidder.
WMG does work for the USOC.
“We’ve made disclosures to the IOC about any connectivity we have with the Olympic movement, and they’re very comfortable with that, as are we,” he said.
John Fish, the Boston construction magnate who initially led that city’s aborted Olympic bid, pledged early on that his company, Suffolk Construction, would not seek Olympics-related work. Wasserman indicated his company would bid if appropriate.
“If we’re able to provide it better and more cost-effectively,” Wasserman said. “But we have a board of directors that can make those decisions, and every decision we’ve made in terms of all outside resources from the bid committee has been approved by the board. If there’s any conflicts from any perspective, the members would obviously recuse themselves. We’re comfortable with our process.”
Wasserman and Garcetti were both working the rooms at last week’s ANOC meeting, where more than 1,200 officials from 204 national Olympic committees were gathered. They were taking a very light touch, though — mostly “listening and learning,” Wasserman said. Representatives of their competitors in the 2024 race — Rome; Paris; Hamburg, Germany; and Budapest, Hungary — were also in attendance.
Wasserman said he’s diving into the Olympics bid because he wants to show off a “new L.A.”
“There’s cranes all over the city,” he said. “There’s construction, there’s opportunity, there are companies like SpaceX and Snapchat. L.A. has become a place where the traditional lens of Hollywood and movie stars is not what L.A. is. That’s a remarkable transformation, and we’d be very excited to show that off and really elevate L.A. on the world stage.”
He added that the committee is close to hiring a CEO to handle the day-to-day operations of the bid.
