A Rundown of Ideal Olympic Events for L.A. Summer Games

Oh, blah, blah, blah.

Can’t a big, rich, so-very-important national Olympic committee come up with an assessment that’s a little more insightful than this?

Los Angeles. What a nice place. What nice weather. What nice people.

Now, isn’t that nice?

Who’s in charge of this committee, Mr. Rogers?

And where do they think they are, Salt Lake City?

A team of the U.S. Olympic Committee just left town. This is one Olympic team that hands out the gold; it will decide what U.S. cities should be allowed to volunteer to host their precious Games. (Yes, of course it’s for the Summer Games; you can’t operate a bobsled event in this climate just on the icy looks that pass between Gray Davis and Kathleen Connell.)

These Olympic site evaluators spent four days looking over Los Angeles to grade its prospects for hosting the Olympics, and issued that simpering evaluation. “We work at identifying strengths, we don’t try to identify weaknesses,” said the committee’s Mr. Rogers, a fellow named Charles Moore.

Mr. Moore sounds a lot like my old Sunday school teacher. She kept saying bland, pleasant things about me until the day she showed her true colors and booted me out of the program for merely suggesting that the miracle of the Red Sea was really just low tide.

I cling to the hope that Mr. Moore and his committee are more broad-minded than that, but I have my doubts. Helene Elliott, in our sports pages, wrote that privately the committee is reciting the standard worry-bead rosary of cliches, about L.A. air (thick) and L.A. traffic (thicker). And they didn’t have the time--read didn’t bother--to take the subway, but they did hold their farewell news conference at the California Yacht Club in the Marina; maybe they believe that in L.A., the yacht is public transportation.

There are 27 other U.S. cities with Olympian yearnings for the year 2012. Has Mr. Moore taken in all of those yet? What about San Francisco? Traffic isn’t a problem there, it’s “Survivor” on radials. Houston? Read the front pages, Mr. Moore--its air is worse than Los Angeles’. The real death penalty in Texas is being sent to Houston to inhale.

2012--that’s 11 years from now. Two presidential elections away. Politicians don’t even start shaking hands in New Hampshire 11 years ahead of time. Gymnasts who will be competing in the 2012 Games haven’t even learned to tie their shoes yet.

And so there is time for adding to the enticements of Los Angeles. And I believe that local sport should be added to the itinerary of each Olympics. If chess is on deck to become an Olympic sport, and table tennis already is, then let us have a few exhibition sports tailored to each venue. The caber toss in Scotland, and Australian-rules football Down Under.

What such a local sport might be in Salt Lake City, I won’t speculate, except to say that it would involve teetotaling; the opposite, of course, would have been the case in Sydney.

In this, as in so many other matters, Los Angeles has so many alternatives:

* The Ballona Hop, Skip and Jump: By 2012, if developers have their way, teams of amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds that survive the bulldozers will be competing to maneuver through the condos and concrete to any last breeding and nesting places in the former coastal wetlands, now reduced to damp patches of soil among ornamental bedding plants.

* The Synchronous Driving Competition: Angelenos place and receive cell-phone calls while negotiating the four directions of the 405/101 interchange.

* The Film Shoot Sprint: Movie companies shove, jostle and slip C-notes to the right folks in their run to be first to line up the best neighborhoods in Hancock Park and the worst ones in downtown for location shoots.

* The Barneys Scramble: the twice-a-year spectacle of Angelenos stripping to their skivvies in an airport hangar to dive into a pool of black, heavily discounted clothes, to emerge on the other side dressed like Manhattanites.

* The Term Limits Biathlon: Politicians try to be public servants at the same time they position themselves for election to other, if not higher, office.

* The Valley Splits: Los Angeles tries to divide itself in two while keeping its smile, and its fiscal health.

* The Oscar Dodge: Black-tie gate crashing has become so common and so easy that judges have upped the medal standards, requiring winners to get onstage and on national TV, as if they were about to present or accept an award.

* The East Los Bout: Antonio Villaraigosa versus Xavier Becerra, one runoff, no TKOs.

Now you’re talking sport.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison

@latimes.com.