Four thousand athletes are coming to Los Angeles, hoping for gold. Twice as many volunteers wait to serve them, recalling the magic of seven summers ago. Hundreds of thousands of tickets are in the hands of organizers eager to affirm the city's Olympic status and, maybe, bring the Games here again.
But what will Los Angeles itself make of the U.S. Olympic Festival? Will the event, a 13-year-old national amateur sports festival to be held at 29 sites around the area, create the same wonder as the cosmopolitan Olympic Games themselves?
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday June 26, 1991 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 3 Column 6 Metro Desk 1 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Olympic Festival--In an article in The Times on Sunday, the spokesman for the 1991 U.S. Olympic Festival was misidentified. His name is Jim Goyjer.
Organizers are holding their breath this week as they launch a modest promotional blitz for the 10-day festival, which begins July 12 with an Opening Ceremony in Dodger Stadium. Squeezed by publicity conflicts with the arts-oriented Los Angeles Festival and the Lakers' late-season success, they are scrambling to grab some attention in a sports-sated city.
By the time competition ends and the focus turns to San Antonio, the 1993 host, Los Angeles organizers hope to overcome an image of the festival as a sort of Olympics Lite with a torch relay and gold medals but no foreign athletes and less than a full complement of U.S. stars.
They are doing this by selling the festival as a tune-up for some established athletes and a celebration of future Olympians, not a pageant of current world record-holders. And they're doing the promoting and running the festival on a shoestring budget of $15 million--about 3% of what was spent on the '84 Summer Games.
"It has always been said these are our Olympic hopefuls," said Elizabeth (Eli) Primrose-Smith, president and executive director of the 1991 festival. "We have never said that these are the Olympic trials or these are our Olympic teams. They're not."
This is the 11th festival since the U.S. Olympic Committee created the event in 1978. Festivals are held each year in which there are no Olympic Games; they give younger athletes a chance to get used to the pressure and excitement of an Olympics-style event before competing in the Games themselves.
The national governing boards for some sports, such as boxing, use the festival to select a team for the Pan-American Games. But most--including such popular events as swimming and diving, track and field, and gymnastics--do not.
Some widely played sports, such as men's and women's basketball and baseball, specifically limit the festival to college underclassmen or high school seniors.
