After Paris Olympics Come To A Close, Here's How Los Angeles Is Preparing For The 2028 Summer Games

Paris Olympics 2024: The Paris Games have officially been closed now. With over 10,000 athletes stationed in the French Capital for over two weeks, the recently concluded Summer Games was a spectacle to behold. With COVID-19 making its way into the Olympics and athletes sleeping in parks due to the absence of air conditioners in the Olympic village, the 33rd Summer Games will certainly go down as one of the controversial Olympics of all time.

The Olympics returned to Paris after a long wait of 100 years. Before the 2024 edition, Paris hosted the Summer Games in 1900 and  1924. The organizers of the Paris Games wanted to make it the 'greenest Olympics' ever, but their plan backfired and athletes complained of poor living conditions and also about the low quality of food that was served in the Games Village.

English swimmer Adam Peaty in particular was extremely vocal about the standard of food served to the athletes. Peaty did not mince his words, went ahead and said that the athletes even found worms in the fish served to them. It is now Los Angeles' turn to carry the baton of Olympics forward as they are the hosts of the games scheduled to be played in 2028. After London and Paris, Los Angeles becomes the third city to host the Olympics thrice (1932, 1984 and 2024).

LA’s Olympic Trilogy

Los Angeles got the 2028 games as a consolation prize when Paris was picked for 2024.

Back in 1932, LA hosted its first Olympics. The city was the only bidder for the games at a time marred by the Great Depression and the absence of several nations. Yet memorable sport moments came from athletes including American athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who won golds in the new women’s events of javelin and hurdles.

Financial and cultural success gave 1984 a reputation as the “good” Olympics” which made seemingly every major world city want their own.

Emphasizing both the modern and the classical with a hand from Hollywood, the games opened with decathlon champion Rafer Johnson lighting the torch, a guy in a jetpack descending into the Memorial Coliseum and theme music by “Star Wars” maestro John Williams.

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Venues Old And New, Plus A Swimming Stadium

Amid a stadium-and-arena boom, LA will polish existing structures rather than erect new ones.

“It’s a no-build games,” Evans said.

After Paris’ innovative opening ceremony on the Seine River, LA plans to open with a traditional, stadium-based approach at SoFi Stadium in neighboring Inglewood that also incorporates the century-old Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles itself.

Home to two NFL teams, SoFi has hosted a Super Bowl and several Taylor Swift concerts since opening in 2020. It will become what organizers say is the largest Olympic swimming venue ever. Its opening ceremony role means swimming will come after track and field for the first time since 1972.

Intuit Dome, the soon-to-open Inglewood home of the NBA’s Clippers, would be the games’ newest major venue and is the planned home for Olympic basketball. The Lakers’ downtown Crypto.com Arena will host gymnastics.

The toxicity of swimming in the Seine became a serious issue in Paris. That could put renewed focus on the Long Beach area waterfront when it hosts marathon swimming and triathlon races. Its cleanliness history is mixed but its ocean waters got consistently high marks in a 2023 analysis by nonprofit Heal the Bay.

The Long Beach shore was home to the pre-recorded performances during Sunday’s ceremony of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, though it was easy to mistake for LA’s Venice Beach, where the journey of the flag begun by Cruise was shown ending moments earlier.

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Trains, Buses and Traffic

A city that’s notoriously hard to traverse may seem like an odd fit for the Olympics, but it can work.

Bass said she plans to emulate the tactics of Tom Bradley, the mayor in 1984, whose traffic mitigations had some saying it was better than at non-Olympic times. They include asking local businesses to stagger workforce hours to reduce the number of cars on the road and allow work from home during the 17-day games.

Landing the Olympics under then-Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2017 gave the city an unusually long lead time for planning.

While it’s no Paris Metro, LA has built a subway since its last Olympics, with lines running past major venues.

In 2018, the city planned an ambitious slate of 28 bus and rail projects to transform public transit. Some were scrapped but others moved forward, including the extension of a subway line to connect downtown Los Angeles with UCLA, the planned home of the Olympic Village.

Another high-profile project is the Inglewood People Mover, an automated, three-stop rail line past major Olympic venues. It initially received a commitment of $1 billion in federal funding, but opposition from Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters led to a $200 million reduction, the Los Angeles Times reported. It’s unclear whether the line will be completed by 2028.

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Crime, Safety And Perception

While crime rates were considerably higher in 1984 than today, the countdown to 2028 comes as the issue has gotten increased attention and cast a social-media-amplified shadow.

The Olympics are designated as a national special security event, which makes the U.S. Secret Service the lead agency tasked with developing a security plan, supported by significant federal resources.

LA city and county law enforcement sent officers to Paris to observe, learn and assist as they prepare for their own 2028 games.

There are many more encampments on city streets than there were in 1984, and it’s unlikely LA will have solved its homeless crisis in the next four years. As the Paris games ended, California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to withhold funding from cities unable to clear encampments.

Ahead of the Games in Paris, organizers relocated thousands of unhoused people, a practice also used for the 2016 Rio de Janiero games and criticized by activists as “social cleansing.”

(With AP Inputs)