A $7-billion budget, over 15,000 athletes and 51 sports, all for 45 days of Olympic and Paralympic competition at the world’s largest sporting event.
Sounds like a lot to take on for the City of Los Angeles – and it is – but the LA28 Committee has been preparing since 2017, when L.A. was formally announced as the host city for the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games.
With an estimated 200 National Olympic Committees competing, tens of thousands of volunteers and millions of live fans, there’s a lot of moving parts to pulling off LA28 on the global stage.
The Olympics’ impact goes beyond the field or court, though, permeating culture and society.
“You learn a lot about people and cultures through athletes and through sports, through sort of the common playing field,” Director of International Affairs at USC Glenn Osaki said. “And I think that’s what makes the Olympics so significant.”
It is also a time of peace.
The United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution of the Olympic Truce every two years before each Summer and Winter Olympics. Beginning one week before the Games until one week after, there is a halt to all wars for the protection of the athletes and the competition. It’s one of the oldest Olympic traditions, dating back a thousand years before the modern Games were established in 1896.
But the Games aren’t just a world stage. And the impact isn’t just for a few weeks. The Games impact millions of host city residents in the years leading up to and after medals are won.
“Olympic Games always get this reputation for being something that is good for people that are coming into the city, but not for the residents,” Osaki said.
A multi-billion-dollar budget sounds like enough to cover a month-long event, but the Olympics are expensive. The last under-budget Olympics was LA 1984, and five of the past six have exceeded their caps by over 100 percent, according to Ivey.
Jonny Coleman is an organizer for NOlympics LA – a group working to expose the local impact of the Games – and he believes that LA28 did not utilize its bargaining power that resulted from other potential cities withdrawing their bids.
“LA taxpayers are on the hook for any overages, unlike LA 84, where if they had gone over, which they didn’t, the IOC would have paid for the overages,: Coleman said. “They negotiated a better deal.”
Now, he says, the extra costs fall on LA residents.
“LA[28] negotiated a really poor contract,” he said. “There wasn’t real meaningful public input. There wasn’t a vote. Some cities are allowed to vote. We [at NOlympics] feel like it’s just highly undemocratic, the whole process.”
LA2028 will be a “no-new-build Games,” meaning the Games will utilize existing structures surrounding the city. To make it happen financially, LA28 Chairman and President, Casey Wasserman, announced the first-ever venue naming rights program in Olympic history.
“These groundbreaking partnerships with Comcast and Honda, along with additional partners to come, will not only generate critical revenue for LA28 but will introduce a new commercial model to benefit the entire Movement,” he said in August on LA28.org.
There will be over 40 venues across the LA area and in Oklahoma City (for canoe slalom and softball) for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
This will be the third Olympics that LA has hosted, but it’s the first time the city is hosting the Paralympics.
“I think a lot of people are paying attention, myself included, to what this will do for the Paralympic movement in the US,” Fernando Hurtado, an adjunct instructor of Annenberg’s Multiplatform Olympic and Paralympic Storytelling, said. “Adaptive sports is something that still has so much territory to chart in the United States … I think having events in our time zone, for prime time for the Paralympics, will help a lot.”
The first Paralympics were held in 1960, but the movement has gained recent awareness due to increasing media coverage and humanizing stories.
“[LA28] is really important for Los Angeles,” Oksai says, “because I think that the Paralympics does even more to talk about the human spirit, and about what it means to compete, and to be inclusive.”