We're still five years away from hosting the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. But the city of Mission Viejo already has dreams of cashing in on the event. It hopes to lure international athletes to train in the city in the runup to the 2028 L.A. Games.
"It's sort of a concierge-level service that we intend to provide," said Mayor Brian Goodell, a former Olympic swimmer.
Convincing athletes to establish a base in Mission Viejo, a city of some 92,000 in inland south Orange County, is one of the city council's official strategic goals for the coming years. The city hopes these athletes, and the entourage of coaches, trainers, and medical personnel that often travel with them, will stimulate the local economy and spark civic pride.
"We don't have Disneyland, we don't have Knott's Berry Farm, we don't have a pier at the beach," Goodell said. "But we have great athletic facilities … and so sports tourism is a big economic driver for our city."
Still, it's a little unclear how much it would cost the city to mount the kind of concierge service Goodell envisions and how much the city stands to gain in return.
The city's 'Olympic tradition'
In addition to its Olympian mayor — Goodell won two Gold medals in the 1976 Montreal Olympics — Mission Viejo's ties to the games run deep. The city claims on its recently launched sports tourism website that 143 Olympic athletes have trained there in the past, including five-time medal winning diver Greg Louganis.
During the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the cycling road race started and finished in Mission Viejo. "It was one of the most exciting things you'd ever see. People were just on fire," Goodell said, "screaming, yelling, waving flags, and banners."
Goodell is especially proud of the Marguerite Aquatics Complex, home of the Nadadores swim team that his parents helped found in 1968. The city recently invested some $11 million in renovating the facilities, which include an Olympic-size competition pool and a new dive tower with double-wide platforms built for synchronized diving competitions.
When Goodell showed me around on a spring day, kids were practicing their dives into a foam pit and swimmers from as far away as New Zealand were warming up for a pro meet that was about to start.
Goodell pointed out that one of the images on Mission Viejo's seal is an Olympic torch. "So we believe in this," he said. "We're an Olympic city."
Let's talk economics
The mayor is already getting to experience some of that Olympic spirit again — the city council recently spent some $8,000 to send Goodell and a consultant to Australia to pitch Mission Viejo and its training facilities at a meeting of the Oceania National Olympic Committee.
Goodell said he'd also like to see the city hire someone to take charge of coordinating sports tourism efforts, akin to the visitors bureaus that exist in other O.C. cities, like Anaheim and Huntington Beach. Right now, he does some of this work himself, but much of it falls to the city's recreation director. "It's not really in his job description," Goodell said. "It's a whole nother job and a whole lot of work."
How much money does the city stand to make off of this venture? Goodell has said it's too early to know. But Mission Viejo has commissioned several economic studies of large events held in recent years at the Marguerite Aquatic Center.
One of them calculated that attendees at a 2019 U.S. Masters national swim meet spent a combined $471,269 in the city and generated close to $38,000 in sales tax. However, the authors also noted that some portion of that spending likely occurred outside Mission Viejo city limits.
The city has just four hotels, which Goodell said is a problem. "We end up exporting a lot of hotel room nights out to our neighboring cities and they love us for it," he said.
As for facilities, the city owns the Marguerite Aquatics Complex but the nonprofit Mission Viejo Nadadores Foundation runs the operation. According to tax filings, the foundation pays nothing to the city to rent the facility and any fees paid by outside groups to use the facilities for training and competitions goes to the Nadadores.
The aquatic center is generally not open to the public. There used to be an open swim time, but this year the city has been unable to find lifeguards to staff it, said Nadadores executive director Michele Mitchell.
Mitchell, who's a former Olympic diver, said the foundation and the city had a "symbiotic relationship." For example, she said, the Nadadores diving team recently raised $200,000 to add permanent bleachers alongside the diving pool and that that upgrade will become city property. She also said the foundation had contributed $1 million toward the recent renovations.
Mayor Goodell said, in the long term, the city's investment in promoting itself to Olympic athletes amounts to "pennies" compared to the economic and community benefits he expects to flow in.
"We have a lot of opportunities to use our facilities better, to create more opportunities for not only people to come here and enjoy this place, but also our residents to enjoy the feeling, the participation, and to come to watch some of the greatest athletes in the world compete."
Not everyone thinks this is a great idea
At the March City Council meeting, several residents spoke up against Goodell's lobbying trip to Australia. "This appears to be a taxpayer-funded joyride," said resident and former mayor Cathy Schlicht. Another resident called it a "boondoggle."
Councilmember Cynthia Vasquez voted in favor of paying for the trip, but she told LAist she's not yet convinced the city's Olympic recruiting venture should be a top priority. "I just want to be sure that we're being fiscally responsible and that there's not just that financial return, but also a return on the public good," she said.
An economist's viewpoint
Economists like Victor Matheson are often critical of the touted benefits of big events like the Olympics, largely because of the often huge initial cost of building stadiums and other infrastructure.
"So, for example, the Olympics need a 10,000-seat swimming facility that will never, ever be used except for the Olympics," said Matheson, a professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. That example is on the nose — for the L.A. games, the plan is to install a temporary pool in USC's Dedeaux baseball field to hold the diving and swimming events.
But the calculus is different, Matheson said, if the facilities already exist, which they do in Mission Viejo, and if they are, and will be, used by the community in the future.
The other, big thing to consider, he said, is the opportunity cost. "What would you have been doing otherwise with your facilities and your money," he said. For example, if hotels have empty rooms, then it's great if a team comes in to use them. If that team is taking up rooms that other guests would have otherwise booked then there's really no gain.
Goodell said bringing in Olympic athletes to train could temporarily displace some local sports teams and practices, "but we can be very flexible, too."
Mitchell from the Nadadores said foreign athletes generally come to train for only a few weeks, and that since the local swim and dive teams have access to the aquatic center around the clock, they can shift to accommodate more bodies.
What's the price of Olympic spirit?
Mission Viejo's plan to recruit Olympic athletes isn't all about money, it may be even more about stimulating the Olympic spirit and civic pride. Matheson said civic pride does have economic value, but not all that much.
"I think mayors get a little bit of stars in their eyes," he said of the Olympic pull. "I don't think it's a negative, but don't count on this making the L.A. suburbs wildly rich either."
Goodell and Mitchell, though, say the opportunity to have top athletes in the community is priceless. "It's a once in a 40-year opportunity to have the experience," Mitchell said, referring to the last time the Olympics were held in L.A., in 1984.
She noted that when she competed in the Olympics, in 1984 and 1988, she and other athletes visited hospitals, libraries, and elementary schools to meet with locals and talk about "Olympic ideals." She thinks it would also motivate kids to get "off the couch and off their phones and get involved in pick your sport."
Who's wooing whom?
Mission Viejo already has at least one team that seems sold on the idea of making the city its training base for the 2028 L.A. Games — and maybe longer. "Mission Viejo would be the perfect base for us," the New Zealand national swim team's Gary Francis told LAist.
"It gives us the opportunity to, you know, go down and swim in San Diego, go up and swim in San Francisco, Santa Clara," he said. "The fact that swimming is part of the culture around here, that's really good for us."
Francis said more than hotel stays, he'd like to arrange for homestays in Mission Viejo — for the cultural value, but also because it would be cheaper for his team. "Our federation [Swimming New Zealand] is really a pauper federation and a lot of our swimmers have to pay for everything themselves," he said, noting that travel expenses had doubled in recent years.
"It's always logistically hard for us," he said. Francis envisions an athlete exchange, where Southern California athletes might get the chance to visit and swim in New Zealand. "We have to make friends, he said. "What we can offer in return is a lot of hospitality."
