A 2024 today pledged to harness the growing global popularity and technology of eSports – competitive online video gaming – as a way of reinvigorating global youth’s connection to the Olympic Movement, after LA’s iconic Staples Center hosted the 2016 League of Legends World Championship Finals in front of a capacity crowd of 21,000 fans this past weekend.
The 2016 edition was the third time the League of Legends World Championship Finals has been staged in LA, as the city continues to cement its position as a global sports entertainment hub for the digital age. Staples Center – proposed venue for the men’s and women’s Olympic basketball competitions in 2024 – underlined its versatility and operational efficiency this week, with Saturday’s eSports sell-out followed by professional basketball and ice hockey matches for the LA Clippers and LA Kings in the space of just 72 hours.
LA 2024 Chairman Casey Wasserman said: "LA 2024 fully supports the IOC’s mission to get young people all over the world leading active, healthy lifestyles. We view eSports’ immense global popularity and continued advances in digital technologies as tremendous tools for reconnecting Millennials with the Olympic Movement. The 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles – a city always imagining what’s next, where sport, entertainment and technology mix like nowhere else – would enable the IOC to stay at the cutting-edge of digital youth engagement.
"LA 2024 will work to ensure technology enhances young people’s sports experiences, instead of replacing them, and becomes a platform for further popularizing Olympic and Paralympic sports. There are 100 million young people in the United States alone, and we regard hosting the summer Games for the first time in a generation as a unique opportunity to increase their enthusiasm for and participation in sport. Harnessing the power of new technologies like virtual and augmented reality to promote healthy lifestyles will be a key objective as we seek to create a new Games for a new era in 2024".
LA 2024 is committed to using California’s leadership in technology and innovation to deliver a low-risk, high-tech Games for the next generation. In May this year, LA 2024 sponsored the LA Hacks hackathon, a collaborative computer programming event where over 1,000 high school and college students were challenged to create hardware and software innovations for sports entertainment, youth engagement and fitness. On the eve of the Rio 2016 Games, LA 2024 released an emoji-keyboard app to stimulate engagement and conversation around the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The "LA 2024 Emojis" app was designed as an online tool for Angelenos and other LA 2024 supporters to show their support for the Olympic Movement and for bringing the Games to Los Angeles.
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