Overturning public perception, as well as that of International Olympic Committee members, was and remains the biggest obstacle for L.A. bid officials. The fact that Los Angeles has hosted the Olympics twice before, most recently in 1984, came up repeatedly during the team’s two-day visit.

Bob Ctvrtlik, the evaluation commission’s chairman, said that the topic has been broached in “direct conversations” with about 100 IOC members. He also said the USOC will have its own polling done to assess public sentiment about the Games.

David Simon, president of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, spelled out exactly how he confronted the third-time issue when quizzed about it by evaluators in closed-door meetings.

“I said, ‘Carl Lewis won gold medals in four consecutive Olympic Games in the long jump,’ ” Simon told The Times. “No one told Carl after the first two times he couldn’t try for the third. They didn’t give him the gold medal either.

“But he was given the chance to show he could be the best. That’s all we’re asking. Be open-minded enough to look at our plan and say whether it can be the best. I don’t see how that can be disqualifying. When the IOC members say, ‘Why give it three times?’ I think the answer is: ‘Are you willing to look at the plan before you reject it?’ “

USOC chief executive Jim Scherr gave Los Angeles strong marks, saying he had “no doubt” it could play host to the Olympics. But a hint of the difficult call — deciding between U.S. bid city finalists Los Angeles or Chicago — came from Ctvrtlik, who is also an IOC member.

The USOC will make its choice on April 14.

“You can walk into them,” Ctvrtlik said of Los Angeles’ venues. “You can touch them. It’s easy to envision how they’ll perform. Is that something that will push them over the top? We’ll just have to see. As we go into Chicago, we’ll carefully study their plans as well. Potentially, there could be more risks.”

Los Angeles could almost hold the Olympics now, with its venues nearly all in place. Chicago’s plans are largely on paper and in computers and thereby harder to grasp.

Tim Leiweke of AEG touted Los Angeles’ readiness.

“It shouldn’t be about debt, having to spend billions of dollars,” he said, adding that 2012 host London “is in a position where suddenly their budget has spiraled to a number that’s become very controversial. That should not be what 2016 is about. That’s a huge asset for Los Angeles.”

Chicago has touted its lakefront and compact nature of the venues, which will be highlighted when the commission conducts a similar visit there next week. Here, it took about 35 minutes to get from Beverly Hills to the Home Depot Center and another 15 from Carson to downtown Long Beach. Long Beach’s part in the bid effort is significant, as it includes venues for 11 sports, and could potentially provide another lasting legacy.

Architect Jay Flood showed plans for a permanent pool, a diving well, water park and health club, which would be built in the parking lot next to Long Beach Arena. The site was used for the successful U.S. Olympic swimming trials in 2004, but the pools were temporary ones.

The cost would range from $30 million to $40 million, said Phil Hester, Long Beach’s director of Parks, Recreation and Marine. Hester said the development would be a public-private project. City officials and council members have been briefed, but the exact nature of the plan will depend on the April 14 vote.

“Either way, the city is intent on building a facility downtown,” he said.

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lisa.dillman@latimes.com

Jaimie Rubio, who is 54 years old, does the heavy lifting for One Rincon Hill, the $290 million project that will be the tallest residential building in the West when it is completed next year.

Rubio is one of two tower-crane operators working for Bovis Lend Lease, the principal contractor at One Rincon. He works in a tiny enclosed cab, smaller than an office workstation, at the top of the crane, virtually at the top of San Francisco.

His blue-and-yellow crane stands next to the One Rincon tower and above it, like a giant mechanical bird hovering over the steel and concrete construction site.

The One Rincon tower is more than 500 feet high now, counting the concrete core that was built first. When it is finished, the top of the 60-story building will be 641 feet high. It will be a landmark tower, right next to the Bay Bridge, and a monument to the men and women who built it.

Julie Ann Linsley, who runs one of the elevators — called hoists — says she can see the tower from her home in Oakland. “It looks cool,” she says. “It looks exhilarating. There’s a lot of energy on this job.”

To get to his workplace, Rubio rides a hoist attached to the outside of the building. He gets off at the 30th floor, then climbs over some piping and crosses to a plank a dozen feet long to the open steel frame of the crane. A series of ladders leads straight up.

Then he climbs, hand over hand, up 24 rungs of a steel ladder, to a platform. There are seven more platforms, 192 rungs on the ladders in all. At the top is a shorter ladder leading to the spot where the crane’s arm pivots. Here the operator must scramble up over the steel pivoting mechanism to the top, to the crane’s arm and control cab. Below is nothing but air and the cold wind of late winter. The view is breathtaking.

The city is at his feet. The towers of the Bay Bridge, 526 feet above the bay surface, look like scale models. The other high-rises of San Francisco are off to the north. He can almost look the massive, dark brown Bank of America building in the eye. The Transamerica Pyramid is higher at 853 feet, but every other building north of Los Angeles is lower.

Up here, the world is bounded on the east by Mount Diablo, capped with snow, and the Farallon Islands, 27 miles out in the Pacific. From his perch, 659 feet above the top of Rincon Hill, 759 feet above sea level, Rubio can see the curvature of the Earth.

“Don’t look down at the top of the tower, whatever you do,” he tells a visitor to his aerie, nodding toward the tallest part of the building under construction, nearly a hundred feet below his perch. “It’ll scare the s — out of you.”

The top of the tower, now about 540 feet above First Street, is what he’s there for. The crane’s job is to move steel and concrete forms from the ground up to the top of the tower, where the work is going on. The crane operator essentially runs a winch that pulls a cable traveling on a trolley arrangement over a long arm.

The whole arm can swivel; there is hook at the end of the cable to pick up loads, a winch and a motor at the other end with a counterweight.

This crane has a capacity of 31,000 pounds at the tip of the crane arm, 35,800 pounds with the load positioned closer to the center of the crane.

The crane can be jacked up as high as is necessary — as the building moves higher, the crane moves up with it. These cranes were invented in Germany in 1949; the technical name for them in German is turmdrehkran.

One man, guided via radio by workers stationed below, runs the whole rig.

It takes timing, skill and experience to run the crane. Every operator has to be certified by the state; the candidate has to take a course in operating the crane, then pass a written test. “You have to develop an experience with loads and how to handle them,” Rubio says, “but it is more about experience than knowing the physics of it.” You have to have a feel, he says, you have to know what you are doing.

It is a key job: Bay Area crane operators belong to Local 3 of the Operating Engineers, who say minium pay scale is about $38 an hour, plus overtime and benefits. Good crane operators are much sought-after, and some are paid over scale.

Rubio deflects questions about pay. “It’s a living,” he says.

He points to the men working below — a group of iron workers setting up re-enforcing steel bars to receive a pour of concrete. The ironworkers, who climb on the steel like circus acrobats, are called “rod busters.”

Rubio moves the crane slowly, swinging it so the arm moves counterclockwise, swinging concrete forms onto the top of the tower and moving them into place. He operates the crane from a high-backed leather swivel chair, using two joysticks.

“They are the ones who do all the work,” Rubio says, nodding at the workers far below. “I just pull the joystick. I follow their orders.”

That might be true, but others say the crane operator has a big role. “Everything rotates around them,” says Gary De Renzi, one of the business agents for Local 3. “There’s no break up there.”

The operator is paid an hour of travel time — half an hour up the ladder and half an hour down. There is no latrine high in the sky; bottles do the job.

Rubio has no one looking over his shoulder, so he wears a Giants T-shirt and moccasins instead of the steel-toe shoes common on construction jobs. A small wooden shelf is built into a corner of the tiny cab, where he keeps a newspaper to read during slow parts of the day. It is like the nest of an eagle up there.

“Comfort is the name of the game,” he says.

The main problem is wind. “Nothing stops me but the wind,” he says. State rules say tower cranes can’t be operated in steady wind of more than 35 mph, and Rubio says he had something like that on Tuesday, with rain. One gust, he says, got up to 59.6 mph on his wind gauge. “As soon as I landed the load, I rolled it up and called down. I said, “See ya.”

There is always danger moving heavy loads with mechanical equipment. Rubio hasn’t had an accident on the One Rincon job, but when he was working a tower crane building the W hotel at Third and Howard streets in 1998, he had a bad accident.

“I had 19,300 pounds on the load, and as I was moving it up, I heard this big loud pop — POW! — and it started to go down.”

The axle on the winch had broken, and the cable was uncontrollable. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’ You know the expression, you see your whole life go before your eyes? Well, it’s true.”

The load, the whole 19,300 pounds, roared down, hit the roof of the firehouse next door and went right through into the sleeping quarters of the firehouse. “I thought I’d wiped out a whole company of firemen.” Rubio says. As it turned out, the firehouse was empty. Nobody was hurt.

But Rubio still sees that ruined firehouse — “a mark like a cookie-cutter in the roof,” he says, and hears the crack of the winch breaking.

“Want to see what the winch looks like?” he asked a visitor, then leads him out of the cab, onto a steel mesh catwalk 650 feet above First and Harrison streets.

“Don’t look down,” he says.

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One in an occasional series on the construction of a high-rise on San Francisco’s Rincon Hill. For additional photos and previous stories about One Rincon, go to sfgate.com/Rincon.

E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.