Los Angeles 2028: What will the next Olympic Games be like?

Paris. The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are closing in on Los Angeles, with its beaches, hills and cinema, which will surely be at the service of an event that will set the bar high after the French event.

Following London (1908, 1948, 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924, 2024), Los Angeles will become the third city to host the Summer Olympics three times, after hosting them in 1932 and 1984. The new event is scheduled for July 14-30, 2028.

The Coliseum in the Californian city will be the link between all the eras. This stadium will host the event, as it did in 1932 and 1984, and will be the venue for the athletics events, which will be held in the first part of the Olympic Games.

The schedule change will give time to SoFi Stadium, which is home to the Rams and Chargers, to become “Inglewood Stadium,” a massive aquatic venue (seating 38,000) where Katie Ledecky and Leon Marchand could add to their Olympic glory.

How will Los Angeles compete with the postcard imagery that Paris has achieved with its world-renowned monuments? The mission will not be easy, but in the city of film and audiovisual filming there will surely be no shortage of ideas.

“Good luck, Los Angeles, if you want to do better than Paris,” writes the American magazine Sports Illustrated, which believes that the American city has already “lost” this match.

“How can a city compete with Paris? Los Angeles could host swimming in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s pool and it still wouldn’t be up to par,” he said.

“Magnificent surroundings”

“These will be Los Angeles and California Games,” LA28 head Casey Wasserman told AFP before the Paris Games.

“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower, but we do have the Hollywood letters. We have incredible competition venues and a magnificent environment,” Wasserman added at a press conference on Saturday.

The pressure will be on for Los Angeles, eleven years after it was chosen as host city at the same time as Paris in 2017.

The capital of cinema will certainly try to make the most of the aura of its stars to create a great show. American rapper Snoop Dogg, NBC commentator and unofficial “mascot” of the Paris Games for social networks, has toured the competition venues in the French capital and was able to give a taste of what awaits him in 2028 with other big names in cinema and music.

Attention to transport

In terms of organization, Los Angeles already has major challenges ahead.

The main one seems to be transportation.

Mayor Karen Bass promised in Paris on Saturday that they would seek “a Games without cars,” a formula that may bring a smile to the faces of those who know Los Angeles, a city where personal vehicles are the norm and traffic jams waste a lot of time on the giant highways that connect the points of a XXL-sized city.

“These car-free Games will mean that public transport will have to be used to get to all the venues,” Bass said. “Public transport” means buses, to compensate for a metro network made up of five and a half lines, which only covers a limited amount of possible journeys.

The mayor also indicated that the aim is to “rehouse” and “remove from the streets” homeless people, whose number is estimated at 75,500 in Los Angeles, a city where inflation and the cost of the real estate market are also an insurmountable obstacle for a sector of the population.

In terms of sport, breaking is leaving the programme after its debut in Paris 2024, while five new sports will be included compared to those of the Olympic Games that close this Sunday: baseball/softball, cricket, squash, flag football (or non-contact American football) and lacrosse, a team sport derived from Amerindian cultures.