Los Angeles to Bid for 2024 Summer Olympic Games

#LA2024 Announced As America’s Bid For The 2024 GamesICYMI: Watch highlights from the press conference as Team USA introduces #LA2024!

Posted by Team USA on Wednesday, September 2, 2015

It was announced this week that Los Angeles is the official U.S. candidate bidding for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Boston was the USOC’s initial selection, but the committee was forced to look for an alternative when Boston lost public support due to the impending high cost of hosting the Olympics.

Los Angeles is singing with confidence through experience, however, having hosted the Summer Olympics in both 1932 and 1984. “For those of us that are old enough to remember 1984 in Los Angeles, we have so many memories and so many great things took place. And so many of those great things because of those Olympics are still taking place in LA,” said television sportscaster Al Michaels in a recent press conference.

Paris, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg are also in the running as host city for the 2024 Olympic Games, and the International Olympic Committee will vote on their final selection in 2017. Los Angeles put its name in the hat for the 2016 Olympics, but Chicago was ultimately selected as the U.S. bid, which lost to Rio de Janeiro.

The U.S. eventing team has had good luck in Los Angeles. In 1984, Bruce Davidson, the late Karen Stives, Michael Plumb and Torrance Fleischmann (nee Watkins) won the team gold medal and Karen and Ben Arthur won individual silver. The three-man U.S. team of Earl Foster Thomson, Harry Chamberlin and Edwin Argo also won gold in 1932.

After the 1996 Atlanta Games, the Summer Olympics would not see a return to the Western Hemisphere until the next year’s Games in Rio. It is exciting to think there is a possibility of the Olympics returning to not only to the U.S., but to the “City of Angels.”

“We humbly seek the opportunity to return the Olympics here, in 2024, to a new Los Angeles and to a new America,” said LA Mayor Eric Garcetti. “Los Angeles is Olympics ready. The Olympics is in our DNA. We hope to return those Games back  home.”