IOC 2024 Commission Shoots Hoops in LA

(ATR) Members of the IOC inspection team for the 2024 Olympic bid from Los Angeles take a turn on the basketball court.

IOC members as well as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and bid chairman Casey Wasserman opened day two of the visit by the IOC Evaluation Commission with 15 minutes of shooting hoops on the NBA basketball court at Staples Center.

The arena will be the host for basketball and wheelchair basketball in the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. Both the Lakers and Clippers NBA teams call the Staples Center home court.

The visit to the Staples Center was the first of the day for the IOC visitors as they made their way across the Los Angeles metropolitan area to visit all of the venues linked into the plan for the 2024 Games.

Given the spread of the venues from Pasadena to Long Beach, the 13 members of the IOC group split up into three delegations to be able to cover them all in one day.

For journalists covering the inspection, Staples Center was the first photo op of the day. Later in the morning the group posed at the entrance of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the site of ceremonies and track and field events for the 1932 and 1984 Summer Games. In the 2024 plan, the venue would again hold athletics but the ceremonies would take place in a new NFL stadium being built in an LA suburb.

For commission member Nawal El Moutawakel, the visit to the Coliseum came with some happy memories. In 1984, she became the first woman from an Arab nation to win a medal at the Olympics. Back then a university student at Iowa State University, she competed for her native Morocco in the 400m hurdles.

An IOC member since 1998, El Moutawakel led the IOC commission that evaluated the candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics. After Rio de Janeiro was chosen as the 2016 host she became the chair of the IOC Coordination Commission which oversaw preparations for the Games through the seven years from 2009.

Speaking briefly to Around the Rings, El Moutawakel would only say that she observes a "big difference" between the operation of the IOC inspection visits she was involved with 10 years ago and what it’s like now following the reforms of Olympic Agenda 2020.

Compared to the IOC visits conducted in the past, the trips planned for both Los Angeles and Paris, the other 2024 contender, are nearly a day shorter. Information about each bid has been refined and focused more clearly as a result of simplification of some operational requirements. The bid cities and the IOC are also engaging in more frequent and direct communications to help shape bids to meet the needs of the IOC with the resources of each particular bid city.

While the IOC and bid committee do their best to keep the press and the inspection team apart, this round of host city selection now includes press briefings at the end of each day from the IOC commission chair Patrick Baumann and IOC Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi.

Questions of the two were supposedly not permitted but that is obviously not the case, with several taken during the day one briefing Wednesday night.

The end of the day press conference for Thursday will come at sunset on Santa Monica Beach, the venue planned for beach volleyball.

The IOC commission will finish its work Friday morning in Los Angeles with in camera meetings with the bid committee. A closing press conference is scheduled for midday. The IOC commission travels Friday evening to Paris where it will launch its official visit on May 14.

Written and reported in Los Angeles by Ed Hula.

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