Summary:
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Los Angeles will host the 2028 Olympics, featuring a larger scale, broader sports program, and utilizing existing facilities.
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The Games will showcase California landmarks, combine traditional venues with outdoor events, and introduce new sports to the program.
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LA28 aims to connect the Games to LA’s sports history, physical identity, and diverse sports audience, creating a familiar yet unique experience.
Los Angeles has hosted the Olympic Games twice before, but the version returning to Southern California in 2028 will bear little resemblance to the Games the city welcomed in 1932 or 1984.
The scale is larger. The sports program is broader. The footprint stretches across a region that has spent decades building one of the deepest collections of professional and collegiate sports facilities in the country.
And increasingly, the plan for 2028 looks less like bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles and more like building the Olympics around Los Angeles.
That has been a central theme of the organizing effort led by LA28 Chairperson and President Casey Wasserman. With less than two years remaining before the Opening Ceremony, the strategy is becoming considerably easier to see.
More than six million Olympic tickets have already been sold through the first two rounds of sales, organizers announced in August. The Games will feature a record 353 medal events, with flag football and squash making their Olympic debuts and baseball, softball, cricket and lacrosse returning to the program.
The numbers point to substantial interest in an event that will make Los Angeles only the third city to host the Summer Olympics three times.
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But the character of these Games may be just as significant as their size.
An Olympics Built Around California Landmarks
Olympic host cities have traditionally been associated with ambitious construction projects, new stadiums and purpose-built Olympic districts.
LA28 is taking another route.
The organizing committee’s venue strategy relies heavily on stadiums, arenas and other facilities that are already part of Southern California’s sporting landscape. LA28 has estimated that revisions to the venue plan designed to make greater use of existing facilities will produce more than $150 million in combined savings and additional revenue.
For Wasserman, that existing infrastructure has been one of Los Angeles’ greatest advantages.
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The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which played a central role in both the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, will become the first stadium to host events during three Olympic Games. In Inglewood, the stadium normally associated with NFL football will be converted into a swimming venue with approximately 38,000 seats, making it the largest swimming venue in Olympic history.
The contrast captures much of what LA28 is attempting to accomplish.
One venue connects the Games to nearly a century of Los Angeles sports history. Another represents the enormous investment in sports and entertainment infrastructure that has reshaped parts of Southern California in recent years.
LA28 plans to use both.
The City Becomes the Backdrop
Some of the most distinctly Californian elements of the Games will happen outside traditional stadiums.
The Olympic cycling road races will travel through Los Angeles before finishing at Griffith Observatory. Triathlon will be staged at Venice Beach. Surfing will take place at Trestles Beach in San Clemente, while beach volleyball will bring Olympic competition to the waterfront in Long Beach.
The result will be an Olympics in which the surrounding geography is frequently part of the event itself.
That fits naturally with Los Angeles, where sports, entertainment and the city’s physical identity have long overlapped.
Even the Opening Ceremony will depart from convention. The 2028 Games will use both the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the stadium in Inglewood as ceremony locations, linking one of the city’s oldest major sports venues with one of its newest.
The arrangement also reflects a broader philosophy that has developed under Wasserman’s leadership: LA28 does not need a single newly constructed Olympic centerpiece if Southern California can provide an entire collection of them.
Familiar Sports Join the Olympic Program
The sports themselves will also give the Los Angeles Games a different feel.
Flag football will make its Olympic debut in 2028, an addition with obvious significance in the United States. Baseball and softball will return after being absent from the Paris 2024 program, while cricket and lacrosse are also coming back to the Games. Squash will make its Olympic debut.
Those additions contribute to what will be the largest Olympic medal program to date, with 353 medal events compared with 329 in Paris.
They also give LA28 an opportunity to connect the Olympics with sports audiences that may not traditionally organize their summers around track and field, gymnastics or swimming.
Baseball at Dodger Stadium and flag football on an Olympic stage could make parts of the 2028 program feel more immediately familiar to American spectators.
At the same time, the traditional Olympic events will remain at the center of the Games.
That mix could prove particularly important as LA28 attempts to turn broad curiosity into sustained interest across more than two weeks of competition.
Six Million Tickets and Counting
There is already evidence that spectators are responding.
LA28 said in August that ticket sales had crossed the six-million mark after the first two sales phases. Most of the available inventory from those rounds was purchased.
The next public release is scheduled for 2027 and will operate differently. Rather than another ticket draw, seats will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, with additional inventory expected across the Olympic sports program. Paralympic tickets will also go on sale for the first time.
The strong early sales give organizers an important measure of momentum well before the Olympic flame arrives.
Earlier signs of demand were similarly strong. When registration for the LA28 ticket draw opened in January, more than 1.5 million registrations were recorded in the first 24 hours from fans in more than 150 countries.
For Wasserman and LA28, the challenge over the next two years will be converting that interest into a successful experience for the people who ultimately fill those seats.
A Different Model for Los Angeles’ Third Olympics
Los Angeles has an unusual relationship with the Olympic movement.
The 1932 Games arrived during the Great Depression and helped establish the city as an international sports destination. The 1984 Games became closely associated with a commercially driven model of Olympic organization and made extensive use of existing facilities.
The 2028 Games will inherit pieces of both legacies while operating on a much larger scale.
LA28 expects the Olympic and Paralympic Games to encompass roughly 800 events, more than 40 sports and more than 3,000 hours of live competition, with approximately 15,000 athletes participating.
Managing an event of that size across Southern California will require far more than a collection of recognizable venues. Transportation, temporary facilities, spectator movement and coordination across communities will all become increasingly important as the Games approach.
But the underlying concept is now clear.
Under Wasserman’s leadership, LA28 has spent years arguing that Los Angeles does not need to reinvent itself to host the Olympics. Its stadiums, arenas, beaches, entertainment facilities and sports culture already provide much of what an Olympic host requires.
The next two years will be about putting those pieces together.
When the Olympic flame returns to Los Angeles in July 2028, the city will be hosting the Games for the third time. This time, however, Wasserman and LA28 are preparing an Olympics designed to look unmistakably like Los Angeles.
