OPINION

By John Rogers

updated 4:58 a.m. ET April 14, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Flash forward to the summer of 2016. You’re at the Olympics and you’ve just finished watching a thrilling day of athletic competition.

You could top it off by lounging on the soft white sands of a Malibu beach before strolling up to a little seaside bar filled with tanned, toned movie star lookalikes.

Or you could step off the gritty brown rocks that pass for sand along the shores of Lake Michigan and be blown headfirst into the water. (They don’t call it The Windy City for nothing.)

Sure, Los Angeles has all the facilities needed for the world’s largest sports event. And it’s already played host to two Summer Games — 1932 and 1984.

But when the U.S. Olympic Committee on Saturday decides between Los Angeles and Chicago as its American candidate for the 2016 Games here’s what should really matter: perfect weather and beautiful people who know how to flaunt what they’ve got.

Famous people are everywhere in LA-LA Land, making movies, TV shows, recording albums, getting arrested, checking in and out of rehab (sometimes on the same day).

Cruise the streets of Los Angeles and you might run into Tom Cruise. Or, if you’re traveling by car, you might really run into Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Halle Berry, Haley Joel Osment or Matthew Perry, just a few of the famous who have had their share of fender-benders on this city’s streets in recent years.

There are so many celebrities here that even other celebs are impressed.

“(Quentin) Tarantino lives here! (Bob) Dylan lives here!” says Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, sounding far more excited than should a guy who’s sold 75 million records.

Stewart recently made a 7½-minute “Battle Olympia” film celebrating the eccentric charms of his adopted city. It’s being used to promote the city’s Olympic advantages, which are many.

When it comes time to host the games, for example, organizers likely will want some big, muscular guy in a toga to light the Olympic flame. They’ll need somebody who looks a lot like the guy who starred in those “Terminator” films.

No problem. That guy actually lives right here in town and doubles as the governor of California. Arnold Schwarzenegger is just one of the many quirky characters who make L.A. what it is: a place everybody in the world wants to check out.

“We even have Beckham now,” notes humorist Stan Freberg, a lifelong resident, referring to the soccer heartthrob. “You notice he didn’t move to Chicago.”

No, he didn’t, because practically everyone moves to L.A.

Britney Spears? Just a wide-eyed kid from Kentwood, La., before she moved here. Schwarzenegger? A bodybuilder from Thal, Austria. Frank Gehry, the city’s resident architectural genius? A former truck driver who, as a kid growing up in Canada, used to build little stick houses in his living room. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? Well, OK, they did come from L.A. But no reason to hold that against the city.

Los Angeles doesn’t get by on its celebrity cachet alone.

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Sports teams? The city has more than it’s share. Downtown there’s the Dodgers, whose general manager, Ned Colletti, entertained reporters during his first day on the job by reminiscing that his childhood memories of Chicago included his father getting up in the middle of the night to start his car to keep the engine from freezing.

There also are the Los Angeles Angels, who won the World Series in 2002. They play in Anaheim, which also is home to Disneyland.

Basketball fans have the Lakers and Clippers and UCLA, the greatest college basketball dynasty in history. In football, there’s USC, a perennial contender for the national championship.

Extreme sports? Skateboard champion Tony Hawk lives down the road in Carlsbad.

What’s more, this city already knows how to put on an Olympics. Remember the 1932 Games? Probably not. But how about 1984? Those were the Olympics that turned a profit, didn’t clog the freeways and sent everybody home with a smile.

That’s because they were held in a city of fantasy and wonder. And the Olympics, Stewart notes, are “like something from mythology days.”

So what better place to hold them than a place where myths are made?

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