After Tom Cruise plunged into the Stade de France on Sunday, Paris officially handed over the Olympics to the Hollywood state of California. Here’s all you need to know about the next Games in Los Angeles 2028:
Sports
For the first time since 1900, cricket will be played at the Games in its T20 format. Lacrosse is also making a comeback after more than a century. A new format will be introduced in 2028 with teams of six, rather than 10. The traditional US fanbase is also catered for too, with the return of baseball for men and softball for women after it was omitted in Paris in 2024. Sports making debuts at the Games include squash, after years of campaigning; flag football, a non-contact version of American football with smaller teams; and a new Paralympic discipline, paraclimbing.
Surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing, recently introduced to the Games, will also continue alongside the core sports, but breaking, which debuted at Paris, is dropped.
The biggest uncertainty over the coming years will be around boxing, which descended further into crisis following the gender row in Paris. The International Olympic Committee has not included the sport on the LA 2028 program yet and has urged national boxing federations to create a new global boxing body or risk missing out. More than 50 Olympic and Paralympic sports will be contested across more than 800 events.
Venues
LA joins Paris and London as a three-time host city, but the plan is to follow the French capital’s example in using as much existing infrastructure as possible. The Coliseum, which previously hosted in 1932 and 1984, and the brand new SoFi Stadium, a 70,200-seater home of the NFL’s Rams and Chargers, will be the most prominently used venues. Other existing sites earmarked for use include LA Galaxy’s football home. Long Beach waterfront will also be a popular draw for some of the outdoor water-based sports. SoFi Stadium, in the suburb of Inglewood, will be converted to host the swimming races, with a resplendent pool added. Basketball will take over the new Intuit Dome arena opening this month; and events will be held in the San Fernando Valley for the first time with the BMX, skateboarding and archery competitions. The athletes’ village, meanwhile, will be based in student housing at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Transport
LA has been promising a “car-free” Games since it won the bid in 2017. Since then, however, plans for a major rail upgrade have been shelved. Organisers are now plotting to flood the city with buses to ferry people around a relatively large footprint of venues.
LA mayor Karen Bass insisted on Saturday that the Games can go carless amid the city’s notoriously bad traffic. “We’re already working to create jobs by expanding our public transportation system in order for us to have a no-car Games,” she said. “And that’s a feat for Los Angeles, as we’ve always been in love with our cars. We’re working to ensure that we can build a greener Los Angeles.”
Public transportation will be the only way to access the city’s Olympic venues. Bass’s plan to address traffic includes using 3,000 buses borrowed from other US cities, and asking businesses to allow their employees to work from home during the Games. Tom Bradley, who was mayor of Los Angeles in 1984, had local businesses stagger their workforce hours to reduce the number of cars on the road.
Team GB base
As Team GB embark on what they hope will be a fifth successive 60-plus medal haul, there is huge excitement that they have secured the “world-class surroundings” of Stanford University. The base is around five and a half hours’ drive north-west of LA, but the British Olympic Association believes the state-of-the-art facilities will make extra travelling worthwhile.
Around 300 GB athletes are set to train there prior to and during the Games, with specific facilities for archery, athletics, aquatics, badminton, boxing, cricket, fencing, football, gymnastics, hockey, judo, lacrosse, rugby sevens, squash, table tennis and weightlifting.
“We pride ourselves in providing the best possible preparation for our athletes at the Olympic Games and in securing Stanford University’s facilities I can quite honestly say that we will have access to the very best preparation camp facilities that Team GB could wish to have in the United States,” says Team GB CEO Andy Anson.
Stars
Keely Hodgkinson, who secured gold in the women’s 800m in Paris, will be 26 and her coaching team believe she has world-record times in her sights over the coming years. Sky Brown, twice an Olympic bronze medallist, will only be 20 by 2028 and is tipped to win big either on a skateboard or surfing in LA. We can also expect France’s Léon Marchand to again take the pool by storm, having secured four golds in Paris.
Noah Lyles, the 100m champion, will also see LA 2028 as his crowning moment as he attempts to emulate US compatriot Carl Lewis by defending the Olympic titles. At 31, it will probably be his last Games at the top.
Overall, for Team GB there is a changing of the guard. Some of the best British Olympians − Adam Peaty, Tom Daley, Max Whitlock and Helen Glover − have all signalled that they will not be back.
Business uncertainty
The most recent budget forecasts predict expenditure of £5.5 billion. Such estimates come with a pinch of salt. London 2012 cost a total of £8.77 billion − three times the original budget of £2.4 billion − although there was a lot more work required than in LA. The 1984 Games was one of the few in history to turn a profit, but some local groups are pessimistic that LA 2028 can be so financially viable. NOlympics LA, a group formed in 2017, points out that every Olympic host city since 1960 has spent more than planned, often leaving them with the bill for cost overruns. “We will try to mitigate whatever harm comes as a result of this bid, such as displacement, destruction and no accountability,” said Steven Louis, an organiser with NOlympics LA and a resident of West LA. “We believe there can be a movement to get LA out of this.”
However, LA tourism chiefs insist costs will be worthwhile, pointing to sports now generating 10 per cent of the world’s expenditure on tourism, with an estimated growth rate of 17.5 per cent in recent years.
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