CHICAGO, Oct 19: When nearly 700 amateur boxers gather here for the AIBA World Championships on Monday, they won’t be the only ones with Olympic hopes on the line. The tournament is Chicago’s chance to prove the American bid city for the 2016 Summer Games can stage an Olympic-style event. There will be little room for error and plenty of important people watching.

The head of the International Olympic Committee is expected to attend, as are about a dozen other members of the IOC, which will decide in 2009 whether Chicago or another city gets to host the games. And with boxing delegations from about 120 nations, including Russia, France, China and the former Soviet republics, word of Chicago’s performance is sure to spread quickly.

“If you’re bidding to host ... something as complicated as the Olympics, it certainly helps to show that you can organise something as simple as a world championship in one of the minor sports,” said IOC member Dick Pound of Canada.

For Chicago, that means a procession of athletes in the heart of the city, an athletes’ village at a posh downtown hotel and a shuttle-bus system to ferry boxers from their hotel to the competition venue — the same one that would be used if an Olympic Games were held here.

US Olympic Committee chairman Peter Ueberroth already has put Chicago on notice that it lags behind other international cities bidding for the games and needs to sell itself more to IOC members. One of Chicago’s chief rivals, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, showed off for IOC members this summer by successfully hosting the Pan American Games.

The boxing worlds also are a chance to shine a positive light on Chicago and the US Olympic movement after a couple recent rough patches. USOC officials apologized to athletes around the world in the wake of runner Marion Jones’ recent doping admissions. And the city was stung by bad publicity after unseasonably hot weather forced the early cancellation of the Chicago Marathon because hundreds of runners fell ill or collapsed.

Officials say the marathon mess won’t hurt Chicago’s Olympic bid because a race with mostly recreational runners doesn’t compare to an event with elite athletes. But the very public disgrace of Jones, once the most celebrated female athlete in the world, is a different story.

“Everything that happens in the country that’s bidding is a factor. ... It’s certainly an important factor that we’re cognizant of,” Ueberroth has said.

After all the attention on the Jones scandal, the Chicago worlds is a chance for the United States to show off that side of amateur sports where people play fair, said Bill Scherr, chairman of World Sport Chicago, one of the local host groups for the championships.

“We are a great sporting country and our athletes, for the most part, are clean and playing by the rules,” said Scherr, a former Olympic wrestler.

The boxing championship is a qualifier for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the IOC is focused on it because officials have pushed for reforms in the sport, including in its scoring and judging. An IOC member was elected head of the boxing association last year.

“This world championship really signals the rebirth of Olympic-style boxing,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said.

The United States only got the boxing championships because boxing officials said the federation in Russia, the original host, had failed to fulfill some commitments. Chicago was selected in May as the host city after it beat out Los Angeles to be the American bidder for the 2016 Games.

That didn’t allow much time to plan for a world-class event. But organizers aren’t worried, and the city has a reputation for staging large events, from the Democratic National Convention in 1996 to Major League Baseball’s 2003 All-Star Game.

Boxers have started to arrive, and the athletes’ procession and opening ceremonies are Monday at a downtown theater. Competition starts on Tuesday and ends with the finals and awards ceremony on Nov 3.

The venue, the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion, has room for 4,000 to 5,000 spectators and some bouts are expected to sell out, Scherr said.

While the boxing worlds pale in size to an Olympics — about 10,000 athletes at a Summer Games compared to about 700 here — they’re a good practice run because they share many of the same requirements, from athlete housing and transportation to a top-notch venue.—AP