Cleveland will vie to host the 2014 Gay Games, a sporting event with a global audience, and try to impress a lucrative demographic group that maybe knows little about Northeast Ohio.
Promoters of the city’s bid will fly to South Africa next week, where the Federation of Gay Games is holding its annual meeting, and begin to sell Cleveland as a diverse, tolerant city with good athletic venues.
Civic leaders stepped forward Wednesday to embrace the idea at a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Cleveland-Arcade.
“We look forward to putting our best foot forward,” said Ken Silliman, chief of staff to Mayor Frank Jackson.
The Euclid Corridor transit project will be finished, he said, new businesses will have opened on the marquee avenue, and the city should be ready to host games that drew 11,500 participants and tens of thousands of spectators to Chicago in 2006.
“It’s going to be a wonderful greeting environment for the athletes if we can manage to land this competition,” Silliman said.
The quadrennial games were founded in San Francisco in 1982 by Olympic decathlete Tom Waddell. They will unfold in Cologne, Germany, in 2010.
Cleveland’s bid is being led by Brian Tavolier and W. Douglas Anderson, organizers of North Coast Athletics Volleyball, a local 24-team league widely known in the gay community.
Both men have helped to organize past Cleveland Pride parades, which celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
They recently formed the Cleveland Synergy Foundation to lead the campaign for Gay Games IX. The name echoes one of the game’s primary goals, to create ties between the gay and mainstream communities.
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