LOS ANGELES — The United States Olympic Committee Site Evaluation Task Force found itself on familiar ground as it toured Los Angeles on Friday.
Former USOC vice president Evie Dennis beamed as she proudly pointed out the USC dorm she stayed at during the 1984 Olympics.
Task force chairman Charles H. Moore recalled how in 1952 he made the then-long and difficult trip from upstate New York to Los Angeles for the Olympic Trials in track and field, found a hotel room near the Coliseum only to oversleep on the morning of the 400-meter hurdles final.
Despite arriving with no time to warm up, Moore won the race. Moore barely had time to catch his breath before he was rushed to a local television studio to join Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in an Olympics fund-raising telethon.
"Coming back to Los Angeles is a very special treat," Moore said.
Yet while a clear sense of nostalgia and the city's rich Olympic history rode shotgun on the USOC's second day of touring proposed venues for a Los Angeles 2012 Olympic Summer Games, bid committee and local government officials emphasized Los Angeles' evolution into a 21st Century city.
"In 2012, Los Angeles will be on the cutting edge of everything," Los Angeles County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said.
"(The task force) saw a lot of familiar places," Los Angeles 2012 president David Simon said, "but they also saw how much has changed here in a brief time."
Los Angeles, 2012 bid committee officials said, would take the high-tech Olympics to another level.
Athletes, coaches, team officials and media would be provided with hand-held personal digital assistants and digital PCS telephones that would not only allow them to telephone anywhere in the world free of charge but allow them to call up up-to-the minute schedules and results using wireless Internet technologies.
A lunchtime presentation at Staples Center highlighted a $1-billion entertainment district near the arena and the $125 million Anschutz National Training Center in Carson, which would play host to soccer, track cycling and serve as a practice facility for other sports.
Exhibition Park, which is adjacent to the Coliseum, will undergo $500 million in improvements before 2012.
The privately financed Games would spend $30 million on improvements on the Coliseum.
Of that $30 million, $17 million would be spent on putting a track back in the Coliseum, which would be removed after the Games. The remainder would go to permanent improvements at the stadium.
Los Angeles 2012 and government officials also stressed that in contrast to some of the other seven cities bidding to represent the United States in IOC voting for the 2012 Games — in particular Dallas, the Bay Area and New York —bid committee officials and local government officials in Southern California are on the same page.
"We won't let you down because we don't know how to let you down," Los Angeles city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas told the task force.
"We're going to take you higher and to another level."
Still, despite all the talk about the state-of-the-art cyber optics in UCLA dorm rooms, the technology that will be used to return track and field to the Coliseum and the lavishness of the Anschutz training center, Los Angeles 2012 and government officials didn't totally ignore the city's Olympic past.
"Old, able, reliable Los Angeles," Yaroslavsky said, "delivers what we promise. No more, no less, something some Olympic cities in the past have not quite been able to do."