"I can tell you that from our vantage point, we extolled the virtues of this great city," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said after a City Hall meeting with a USOC delegation.

    "This is the city where the world comes together, where we speak 130 languages, come from every corner of the Earth," he said. "We come here for the American dream."

    Los Angeles was home to the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and is now in the running with four other U.S. cities to host the 2016 Games.

    The USOC group visited Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston last week and is scheduled to visit San Francisco later in the day. If it chooses to make a bid, the USOC will make its selection in 2007, while the International Olympic Committee will choose the host city for the 2016 Games in 2009.

    Los Angeles made a bid to host the 2012 Olympics but was passed over as a U.S. candidate due to several weaknesses, some of which have been improved, according to Peter Ueberroth, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

    Ueberroth cautioned that it remains unclear whether the USOC will even submit a bid to host the Olympics in 2016. New York garnered only 13 votes from IOC in its bid to host the 2012 Olympics, eventually lost out to London.

    The last American city to host the Summer Olympics was Atlanta in 1996, while Los Angeles is the only American city that had hosted the Summer Olympics more than once.

    The fact that Los Angeles has already hosted the Summer Olympics twice could both help and hurt the city's bid, officials said.

    Ueberroth and Villaraigosa both noted that the bidding process would have to be a private, grass-roots effort so taxpayers would not be impacted.

    The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics turned a profit of 238 million dollars for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which was headed by Ueberroth. Enditem