(ATR) With less than five weeks to go to the Nov. 8 election, U.S. presidential candidates have yet to weigh-in on their support of the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Olympics.
Even the occasion of the Rio Olympics following the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions in July couldn’t draw either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to make a connection to the L.A. bid. And it’s yet to come up on the stump since then or in any of the debates.
In August Clinton did chide Trump in a speech mentioning the success of the U.S. team in Rio de Janeiro.
"I was thinking the other day when Donald Trump speaks, he speaks about fear, he speaks about such negative and such pessimism, and then I watch the Olympics and it is exactly the opposite," she said.
"You have young people going out doing their best every day to get prepared to compete and that is what we are going to do in America," said Clinton who called herself a "big Olympics fan".
Trump has not mentioned the Olympics, even on the Twitter account he uses as a mouthpiece.
L.A. organizers say they expect either Clinton or Trump will back the Olympic campaign. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a fervent booster of the bid, is considered one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party, but he’s avoided any partisan links to the L.A. campaign.
While no big infrastructure projects funded by the federal government are needed, significant support for security is customary from the feds for a U.S. Olympics. Already the U.S. Congress has passed resolutions supporting the Los Angeles bid.
Whoever is elected president will take on the role as cheerleader in chief for the bid following the inauguration next January. The IOC vote for 2024 takes place eight months later, providing the new president with an early test of his or her diplomatic persuasion.
Outgoing President Barack Obama says he’s not sure whether the White House has much influence on the IOC vote. In an article this week in New York magazine Mr. Obama recalls his experience in 2009, the first year of his presidency, when he traveled to the IOC session in Copenhagen to pitch the 2016 bid from his hometown of Chicago.
"A very effective committee had flown to Copenhagen to make their presentation, and Michelle had gone with them, and I got a call, I think before the thing had ended but on fairly short notice, that everybody thought that if I flew out there we had a good chance of getting it and it might be worth essentially just taking a one-day trip," Obama says.
"So we fly out there. Subsequently, I think we’ve learned that IOC’s decisions are similar to FIFA’s decisions: a little bit cooked. We didn’t even make the first cut, despite the fact that, by all the objective metrics, the American bid was the best," says the president.
Rio de Janeiro was the winner in the four city race that also included Tokyo and Madrid.
In the New York magazine article, Obama raised the episode of the Chicago bid as an example of how he faced a determined strategy by Republicans and conservatives to celebrate his failures.
"On the flight back, we already know that we haven’t got it, and when I land it turns out that there was big cheering by Rush Limbaugh and various Republican factions that America had lost the Olympic bid," Obama recalled.
Whether the U.S. president heads to Lima for the IOC Session depends on whether the IOC will allow any heads of state to come to Peru. While the government leaders have been part of past bid presentations, there’s still no determination from the IOC about this campaign. It’s widely acknowledged that keeping the heads of state from the IOC meeting simplifies matters from security to logistics, as well as lowering costs, all in keeping with Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms.
Paris, Budapest and Rome are the other bids for 2024, although the lack of official support from the mayor of Rome is expected to make it difficult for that bid to continue.
Written by Ed Hula.
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