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Rome’s exit boon for L.A.?

Veteran international sports marketer Patrick Nally called Rome’s departure from the race to host the 2024 Olympics good news for Los Angeles, because it underscores the profound challenges facing the International Olympic Committee and will remind voters of the need for a drama-free Games.

“My own instinct is that L.A. now clearly starts becoming by far the favorite, because it checks so many boxes to pacify a lot of the problems the IOC is facing,” said Nally, who has worked with the IOC, FIFA and numerous international federations since the 1970s.

Rome is now the third 2024 candidate to fail due to local opposition, along with Hamburg, Germany, and Boston. This follows the 2022 Winter Olympics race, when four strong European candidates dropped out.

The growing grassroots resistance to the Olympics in democracies is just one of several headaches plaguing the IOC, Nally said, along with doping and ticketing scandals, troubled relations with the World Anti-Doping Agency and challenges in preparations for the 2018 Games in South Korea. The body also just came off an especially difficult Rio Games. “The current IOC membership and certainly the executives would want to have some trouble-free years,” Nally said.

Both L.A. and Paris are framing their bids as low-risk because there’s so much infrastructure already in place in their cities, but Nally believes most observers give L.A. the nod in risk avoidance, in part because of the repeated terrorism attacks that have hit France.

The IOC will vote Sept. 13, 2017, in Lima, Peru.

LA ’24 changes plan

Los Angeles 2024 has made a series of changes to its venue plan for a proposed Olympics in Southern California, expanding its footprint to include Riviera Country Club, the Honda Center in Anaheim and two locations in Long Beach.

The venue changes shift the geography of an L.A. bid to the south, coming closer to Orange County, Riverside and San Bernardino residents. L.A. ’24 also said it will create four distinct “sports parks” — multisport festival grounds akin to the now-common central Olympic Park at other Games. The parks will be in downtown L.A., where swimming and track is planned; the South Bay; the Valley; and now Long Beach.

The changes do not affect proposed sites for swimming (USC’s Dedeaux Field), track and field, and the ceremonies (the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum), or gymnastics (Staples Center).

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