When Robert Tanaka competed at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, he noticed raised yellow tiles built into the city’s sidewalks to help guide people who use white canes.
“We don’t really have those here in the U.S.,” said Tanaka, a former USC student who competed in judo for Team USA. Tanaka was born with albinism and can see only about 5 feet in front of him.
Los Angeles will host its third Olympics in 2028, but this will be the city’s first Paralympic Games. About 4,400 athletes are expected to compete in 22 sports, and the USC Sports Center will host wheelchair rugby and Para badminton, according to the LA28 organizing committee.
Tanaka said Los Angeles has expanded its rail system in recent years, but it is still far less accessible than a city like Tokyo. Several projects meant to be finished before 2028 have also faced construction delays, Annenberg Media reported.
“L.A. is pretty much a driving city,” said Tanaka, who relies on public transportation because of his condition. “In Tokyo, the way that they have their public transportation set up, sometimes it’s faster to take the train from one end of the city to the other.”
Tanaka hopes the 2028 Paralympic Games will raise disability awareness and leave behind better facilities long term.
In Tanaka’s experience, many Los Angeles crosswalks lack audible signals that tell blind pedestrians when to cross, and some areas lack ramps for wheelchair users.
In 2015, the city settled Willits v. City of Los Angeles, a class-action lawsuit brought by disabled residents, and agreed to spend nearly $1.4 billion over 30 years to repair sidewalks and install curb ramps, according to LAist.
The city’s sidewalk program repairs about 15 miles of sidewalk and installs about 50 curb ramps a year, Natalie Sparrow, the city’s Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator, said in a 2025 presentation.
The next phase of the city’s sidewalk and curb ramp assessment will focus on areas around Olympic and Paralympic venues, Streetsblog LA reported.
Tanaka said public awareness is as big a problem as infrastructure. Many people with disabilities don’t know there are sports for them at every level, he said.
“You kind of have to know somebody that’s already in it to get introduced to those sports,” he said.
Adults with disabilities are nearly twice as likely to be physically inactive as adults without disabilities, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis.
Liam O’Conner, a USC sophomore studying international relations who hopes to attend the Paralympic Games, said access to coverage is another barrier.
“Part of the Paralympics problem is it’s hard if you don’t have a streaming service or something,” he said. “It’s hard to watch a lot of it.”
At USC, students said campus is easier to get around than the rest of the city, but still has problems.
USC Recreational Sports has held two seated workout classes for wheelchair users at the request of the Viterbi School of Engineering, said Scott Teves, Rec Sports’ senior fitness programs advisor. Some participants had little experience training in a wheelchair, Teves wrote in an email to Annenberg Media.
“The class allowed them to learn exercises they may do on their own and begin their fitness journey,” he wrote. Rec Sports plans to expand the program.
All three Rec Sports facilities have wheelchair-accessible cable and cardio machines, and the pools have equipment to help wheelchair users transfer into the water, Teves said.
Expanding adaptive programming is difficult because students have different needs, and it takes staff training, equipment, space and ongoing funding, said Andy Black, director of Recreational Sports.
Black said he hopes the Paralympics “will spark curiosity and a willingness among students and staff to consider ideas they may not have considered before.”
Tanaka said hosting the Games in the U.S. could help close the awareness gap, so people in the disability community “can see that that option is out there if they want to pursue an athletic career.”
Edited by Andriana Yatsyshyn and Lindsay Augustine.