Will L.A. Carry a Torch for Olympic Festival? : Sports: The event’s organizers have had trouble getting public’s attention. They expect more interest by opening day, July 12.

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?

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.

“Each national association has different priorities and agendas, and they’ll determine how they use the festival,” said Jan L. Palchikoff, the 1991 festival vice president in charge of operations. “Take swimming, for example. The kids who compete here you probably won’t see at Barcelona in ‘92, but you will see them (at the Atlanta Olympics) in ’96.”

Still, festival organizers point out that many Olympic gold medalists have given some of the best performances of their careers and gained their first national attention at Olympic Festivals--and that is what has made the festival, with ticket prices as low as $4, so popular in the past.

In 1979, for example, the festival--then known as the National Sports Festival--was where the United States selected the hockey team that upset the Soviets and then skated past Finland for the Olympic gold medal in 1980. At the same festival, diver Greg Louganis and gymnast Bart Conner won medals that foreshadowed their gold-medal performances in the 1984 Olympics.

The long list of medal winners who competed in other festivals includes basketball players Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley, runners Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, baseball players Will Clark and Mike Moore, and skaters Tai Babalonia and Bonnie Blair.

But those previous festivals were held in smaller cities, such as Syracuse, N.Y., and Baton Rouge, La., and it is not clear whether the promise of seeing the “next” James Worthy or the “future” Michael Jordan will work as well in Los Angeles, where fans can easily see the real things.

Festival organizers expect to sell out some events, such as the Opening Ceremony and volleyball finals, but rather than promote sales by threatening sellouts, they stress the opportunity to be introduced to new sports, support the Olympics movement and see some spirited competition.

“It’s a family event,” said Harry L. Usher, managing director of the Los Angeles Olympic Festival and a veteran of the 1984 Summer Olympics.

“We will just have to wait and see if people respond,” Palchikoff said. “If they do--if they’ll buy the tickets and walk through the door--they won’t be disappointed.”

Marketing consultant Ed Smith said it is too soon to tabulate ticket sales or estimate attendance because mail orders still are being processed. Schedules and order forms have been available since May 1 at Wells Fargo banks and Arco gas stations.

About 625,000 tickets are available for festival events, including such non-Olympic sports as racquetball and roller-skating. Primrose-Smith said she hopes to match the 1990 festival in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where 504,000 tickets were sold for $3.4 million--both records.

By comparison, the 1984 Summer Olympics, which had one-third fewer sports but twice as many athletes, sold more than 4.5 million tickets.

Primrose-Smith said the festival has made “significant” advance ticket sales to corporate sponsors and sports groups, but declined to be specific. She said the region’s rich ethnic mix has helped ticket sales for such events as tae kwon do, which is popular among Koreans.

At previous festivals, as at the 1984 Olympics, ticket sales have been slower than expected until competition actually starts. Primrose-Smith said she expects the same this year.

“We think there are going to be a lot of day-of-event sales,” Primrose-Smith said.

The difficulty of catching the spotlight in Los Angeles was noted by Mayor Tom Bradley at a balloon-strewn rally outside the festival’s headquarters recently. He lauded festival workers who labored for years while “hardly anybody in the public knew what you were doing.”

“Just as people waited until the last minute to get tickets to the Olympics in 1984,” the mayor added, “if they are not careful, they’ll have to scramble to get tickets to the Olympic Festival a month from now.”

For the comfort of athletes and the convenience of spectators, 21 of the festival’s 37 activity sites are within walking distance of the three athletes’ villages at USC, UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.

The largest concentration of venues, nine, is near USC. Badminton, baseball, diving, modern pentathlon, racquetball, swimming and synchronized swimming will be on campus, while fencing and roller skating will be across the street in the Shrine Auditorium Exposition Hall.

UCLA will host seven events, including many of the most popular sports: basketball, track and field, artistic and rhythmic gymnastics, team handball, tennis and weightlifting.

Loyola Marymount is the site of five events: boxing, canoeing and kayaking, field hockey, rowing and volleyball.

Other events are scattered from the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank to Petersen’s Prado Tiro Olympic Shooting Park in Chino to Cal State Long Beach. The San Fernando Valley, which shunned hosting Olympic events, has two festival events--archery and softball--at the Hjelte Sports Center in Encino.

Primrose-Smith said 87 corporate sponsors--a festival record--have donated more than $10 million in cash, staff time, supplies, office space and other goods and services.

Corporate sponsors also have been a large source of volunteers--the line judges, stadium ushers, greeters and office workers who will do most of the work. Nearly 9,500 volunteers, including 900 veterans of the 1984 Olympics, have signed up; Volunteer Coordinator Greg Cornell said he still needs specialists with experience in logistics and transportation.

Primrose-Smith said that besides sponsorships and ticket sales, the remainder of the festival’s $15-million expenses will come from souvenir and concession sales, and from $180,000 donated by 4,500 runners who are carrying a torch from the state Capitol to Dodger Stadium. The torch relay began last Sunday and is scheduled to end at the Opening Ceremony--boosting ticket sales along the way.

Broadcast rights, a substantial source of revenue for Olympic organizing committees, is not available. ESPN, the cable-television sports network, will broadcast 30 hours of festival events, but it bought the rights from the U.S. Olympic Committee, which will keep all the money. Locally, KTTV will telecast the Opening Ceremony, but will not pay for the rights because the station has already donated more than $450,000, said festival spokesman Dan Goyjer.

The festival is intended to break even, Primrose-Smith said, although in the past it has finished as much as $1 million in debt. Festivals have sought to make up the debt by soliciting additional contributions from corporate sponsors. Tax money will not be used for the festival in Los Angeles, Goyjer said.

Any surplus will go entirely to the USOC, Primrose-Smith said.

Festival organizers, many of whom are veterans of the 1984 Olympic Games, make no secret of their desire to try to recapture the remarkable spirit that swept over Los Angeles seven summers ago.

“The city can shine again, as it did in ‘84,” Usher said at a recent publicity event.

When the Los Angeles Sports Council bid for the festival in 1987, its goal was to use it to bring the Olympic Games back to Los Angeles in 2004, Usher said. But the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 1996 Games to Atlanta has modified that plan.

“Frankly, it would seem unlikely that the IOC would agree to come back to the U.S. within eight years,” Usher said.

Judging by the 12-year interlude between Los Angeles and Atlanta, he added, Los Angeles may think about bidding for the Games in 2008.

For now, organizers want the festival to rekindle the city’s Olympic spirit.

“If we don’t show support for this,” said Primrose-Smith, “it’s going to be awfully hard to get the Olympics back any time soon.”