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  Courtney Stewart/Daily Bruin U.S. Olympic officials are greeted by Joe and Josephine Bruin as they get off a bus in front of the Los Angeles Tennis Center on Friday.

By Will Whitehorn

Daily Bruin Reporter

Members of the United States Olympic Committee visited UCLA last week, one of the final stops in an eight-city tour of prospective U.S. host candidates for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The tour, which began June 10 in Washington, D.C., concluded Saturday after a tour of sports facilities in Long Beach. The committee also visited potential suitor cities Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati, Tampa, New York and San Francisco before concluding its tour in Los Angeles.

The three-day tour of L.A. included stops on campus at the L.A. Tennis Center, which would be the primary site for Olympic tennis, and Pauley Pavilion, the gymnastics venue in 1984 and the alternate site for volleyball matches after the Great Western Forum.

The committee also visited De Neve and Rieber dorm facilities. Along with USC’s housing, UCLA dorms may serve as the Olympic Village.

“I think we have good housing to offer, by Olympic standards,” said David Simon, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Bid Committee, also known as LA2012.

“Unless there’s a city that’s planning to build a self-contained village, which is not cost-effective or practical, this is a good arrangement. The housing that is on the campus is pretty much within a half-mile radius (of the venues).” Simon said.

John C. Argue, chair of LA2012, said he’d love to see UCLA be part of the Olympics again.

“You’ve got a lot of improvements to the athletic facilities, and in addition, (it would be) a lot of fun showcasing UCLA to the world,” he said.

Los Angeles, which hosted the Olympics in 1932 and 1984 and seeks to become the first three-time host of the games, has a distinct economic advantage on their side in trying to re-acquire the event, according to Carol Head, a consultant to LA2012.

“There has not been a whole lot of Olympic Games that have turned a profit and returned money to the host city,” Head said, adding that there have only been three games when that did occur.

  Daily Bruin File Photo Athletes practice in Pauley Pavilion, the site of the 1984 Olympic gymnastics competition, the last time the games were held in L.A. “In 1984, L.A. returned over $200 million to the city,” she said. “We have a proven track record which those other cities, strong as they may be, don’t have.”

On Aug. 23, the committee surveyed several sites in Orange County, including Anaheim’s Arrowhead Pond Arena, possible home for basketball, and Edison Field, where softball would be held. The next day, the committee visited Staples Center, Los Angeles Coliseum and USC.

The Los Angeles offer lags behind several of the other cities’ offers in terms of financial and political support from the city, said Rich Perelman, technical director of LA2012 and author of the L.A. bid.

But this lack of support is not necessarily a negative reflection of the bid, Perelman said.

“The city of Los Angeles, based on the way we do things here, is not going to guarantee the games, just as they did not in 1984,” he said.

Perelman said that while other cities have city or state backing for any deficits or liabilities that may occur, L.A. would depend on private corporations and individuals to finance the games.

Jan Fambro, the committee’s media contact, said Los Angeles hasn’t spent much money because most of its venues are already built.

“When (other cities) propose a venue, they’ve got to give architectural renderings, they’ve got to do models, they’ve got to pay an architect, and that’s all very expensive. That really raised the cost of some of the (other) bids,” Fambro said.

The list of candidates for the games is scheduled to be cut to three of four cities by December, with the official decision made next fall.

The U.S. entry will then compete against the international entries until fall 2005, when the International Olympic Committee will make its ultimate selection.