L.A. businesses take lead roles in Olympics preparation: Disney, Parsons and others help committee prepare bid.

THE summer of 2016 is still nearly a decade away and Los Angeles hasn't even been chosen to compete with the world's great cities for the right to host the Olympics.

But it's clear several of the city's major businesses are already carrying the torch, according to Barry Sanders, chairman of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games.

His group is spearheading the effort to bring L.A. its third Summer Games and recently submitted its formal bid to host the Games to the U.S. Olympic Committee. On April 14, that group will announce whether Chicago or L.A. will be given the go-ahead to pitch the International Olympic Committee. The IOC will make its final decision on the host city in 2009.

"We've never seen anything like the efforts of this consortium of Los Angeles companies," Sanders said of the firms, which chipped in to help with the materials and manpower for the bid and presentation.

They include Pasadena-based Parsons Corp., Latham & Watkins, Burbank-based Walt Disney Co., and local talent agencies Century City-based Creative Artists Agency and Beverly Hills-based William Morris Agency.

"Parsons put a top project manager in charge of compiling the bid book," said Sanders. "Burson-Marsteller made a prototype ad campaign and Disney already produced a video and now they are working with Jerry Bruckheimer."

If Sanders and the committee were looking for a gauge of the business community's interest in the Games, they had to be encouraged.

"We spent almost no cash," he said. "No one has told me no."

The bid will point out that L.A. would be able to take advantage of mostly existing structures and be able to keep a rein on construction costs. Several facilities, including the Staples Center and USC's Galen Center, have been added since L.A. last hosted the Games in 1984.

The bad news for the committee is that L.A.'s track record of hosting successful and self-supporting Games that year and in 1932 might actually work against it with the USOC.

That organization is said to be giving serious consideration to the fact that Chicago has never hosted an Olympics. While building new facilities would raise Chicago's construction costs, it would also leave that city with a lasting Olympic legacy, a selling point for the USOC.