City Pressing for Olympic Training Site

A final pitch to bring a $40-million U.S. Olympic training center to San Diego will be made this weekend, when members of the U.S. Olympic Committee site selection team arrive to hear the city’s proposal.

San Diego’s exclusive negotiating contract with the USOC to place a permanent training complex here expires at the end of April. A 12-member site selection committee will arrive Friday to view potential sites and to hear a final proposal from a committee of civic and business leaders.

No single site will be recommended for the multimillion-dollar training center, according to Bob Watkins, interim executive director for the local task force seeking the facility, which would be the largest and first warm-weather training site for U.S. Olympic athletes.

Selling Advantages

“We plan to sell the advantages of the San Diego area as a whole and show them a variety of typical sites” in a Saturday helicopter tour of the area, he said. “Our proposal, however, is not site-specific.”

Among the sites under consideration for the $40-million training center are three locations in South Bay, including Otay Lakes; one in North County, but not at Lake Hodges, where residents protested; two in east-central San Diego, and one in the far eastern reaches of the county.

Both Balboa Park and Mission Trails Regional Park have been ruled out as possible sites, Watkins said. UC San Diego, once the prime candidate for the Olympic facility, was dropped earlier because of UC administrators’ objections.

After the air tour, the USOC panelists will be given a 40-minute slide presentation of the local task force’s proposal, which includes a $10-million to $12-million local financial commitment within the next three to five years to build the first phase of the sports complex.

Larry McCollum, director of the training center program, said the Olympic site group will huddle Sunday behind closed doors to decide whether to recommend San Diego or to reject the local offer. The recommendation will be forwarded to the USOC executive committee, which will meet April 29 in Washington to consider the proposal.

18 Months in Works

The San Diego task force has worked for more than 18 months to come up with a site and a financial support plan which will lure the Olympic athletes to the area. San Diego Councilwoman Gloria McColl heads the task force and shopping center magnate Ernest Hahn is among the most active members of the group.

Watkins said that the Olympic training site would include dormitories, dining and recreational facilities for about 300 athletes. A multisports gymnasium and a variety of outdoor athletic fields also would be included in the first phase of the development.

Initially, the local task force was seeking a site of 40 to 50 acres--the size of the main Olympic training facilities in Colorado Springs. But, about eight months ago, USOC executives indicated that they would prefer a larger site that could handle all of the 40 or so Olympic sports categories, probably requiring 50 to 100 acres of property.

Watkins said that city, state and federal authorities have been contacted in attempts to locate property for the Olympic training center.

McCollum, spokesman for the Olympic group, said San Diego’s exclusive option to present a proposal for the Olympic site will expire April 30, and admitted that other cities have expressed an interest in becoming the USOC’s first year-round training site.

“We know that we have competition out there,” Watkins said, “but we feel that the (Olympic) committee will accept and recommend our proposal to the USOC executive board.”

The San Diego task force proposal calls for funds to be raised through corporate sponsorships and through joint city-USOC fund-raising ventures. The $10-million to $12-million local commitment is sufficient to finance construction of the first phase of the center over the next three to five years, Watson said.

All three of the present U.S. Olympic training centers--in Colorado, Lake Placid, N.Y., and Marquette, Mich.--are in cold-weather climes, McCollum explained, and U.S. athletes need a training ground where they can practice their skills year-round.

In a December interview, McCollum was upbeat about San Diego’s chances of becoming the fourth and largest USOC training site.

In announcing that a $75-million renovation program at Colorado Springs had been put on hold for the near future, he commented that, “I wouldn’t recommend to the USOC that we spend $75 million here . . . Everything you can do in Colorado Springs, you can do in San Diego, and there are a lot of things you can do in San Diego that you can’t do in Colorado Springs.”

McCollum said that he expected, over the next 10 to 20 years, that the governing bodies of the various Olympics sports “will migrate to the more attractive locales,” such as San Diego.