Atlanta’s Win Stalls L.A.’s Bid : Olympics: Committee will seek Games of 2008 or 2012, after hoping for those of 2004.

When the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta last month to organize the 1996 Summer Games, Los Angeles’ bid for 2004 also went south.

But Los Angeles lawyer John Argue, president of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, said this week that he remains optimistic the Summer Olympics will return to Los Angeles in the relatively near future.

“We’re not going to have the Olympics in 2004, but we’ll see about 2008 or 2012,” he said.

“There will have been only 12 years between the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and the 1996 Games in Atlanta, so it’s possible that they could come back to the United States another 12 years later in 2008.”

Even if the Games do not return to Los Angeles so soon, Argue said the SCCOG has patience. He said that the committee began its last campaign for the Summer Olympics 45 years before they actually came to Los Angeles.

“We’ve just reorganized the committee and put some younger people on it,” he said. “It’s a good thing we did because we’re going to need them to carry on.”

They will be faced with more competition than their predecessors. Los Angeles was the only city bidding for the 1984 Games. But in the two most recent IOC votes, in 1986 and 1990, Barcelona, Spain, and Atlanta each had to beat five cities. Barcelona will stage the 1992 Summer Olympics.

There also is substantial competition within the United States to earn the right to represent the U.S. Olympic Committee in the bidding.

The financial success of the L.A. Games, which had a profit of $222.7 million, revived interest worldwide in organizing the Olympics. Cities were reluctant to bid after Montreal lost $1 billion on the 1976 Summer Olympics.

Atlanta representatives at the IOC vote last month in Tokyo tried to distance themselves from the L.A. Olympics, primarily because of criticism that the 1984 Games were too commercial. But Argue said that he has heard no complaints from IOC members about the profit, much of which was distributed through the USOC to participating countries.

“The IOC felt we had a good Games, one that people are now modeling other Games after,” he said. “They also made a hell of a lot of money out of L.A., which the IOC needed and appreciated.

“Atlanta successfully positioned themselves as different from Los Angeles, but the IOC members, in the back of their minds, were thinking, ‘We’ll get all that money like we did in L.A.’ If we’d had a big deficit, the Games would not be going to Atlanta.”