If you hate the Olympics, does that make you a spoilsport? It’s a serious question, more or less. The quadrennial brouhaha of the Games—the hyperventilating announcers; the niche competitions; the faintly (or not so faintly) Riefenstahl-esque choreography of the opening ceremonies; the now-only-occasionally amateur athletes, most of them doomed to a uniquely fleeting species of fame which, after years of strenuous effort, all but demands the most mercenary selling-out simply to break even; the show of global camaraderie, ringing more and more depressingly hollow with every passing invasion and drone strike and foundering migrant flotilla—all of it, set to soaring John Williams fanfare, is so easy to dislike that it seems almost facile to do anything but embrace it. Like Christmas, or dogs in funny outfits, your opinion doesn’t really count for much anyway. There will just be more of them.
Even if you do like the Olympics (such people exist, evidently), certain unpleasant realities must be confronted. “Former host cities still struggle with the debts they incurred,” the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a 2021 report, pointing to a contemporaneous Oxford study which found “an average cost overrun of 252 percent for each Summer Olympics since 1976.” At this late date, such figures should no longer come as a surprise: The vast upfront expenses for the construction of elaborate new sports facilities, plus the provision of housing and infrastructure and security for athletes and attendees, make the Games a dicey fiscal proposition at best for most urban centers; the ongoing headaches of redeploying and maintaining new facilities, to say nothing of the potential spillover effects from resident displacement and expanded police powers, make for more trouble still. For decades, civic leaders seemed content to ignore the grim statistics, trotting out ever-grander proposals in order to win favor with the International Olympics Committee—in a couple of instances going so far as to bribe IOC commissioners, as Salt Lake City was accused of doing ahead of its 2002 Winter Games. More recently, however, city fathers and mothers have begun to catch wise. After the applicant pool in 2017 shrank to just two entrants, Paris and Los Angeles, the IOC was obliged to select both of them faute de mieux, with the former stepping up this summer and the latter coming on four years after that.
All of which brings us to the present, peculiar impasse in LA. Just past the temporal halfway point between the IOC announcement and the event itself, the 2028 Olympics appear to have taken up a bizarre place in the popular imagination of the Southern California metropole: On the one hand, they’re too far away for most people to really be thinking about them; on the other hand, they’re coming up so fast that nothing, it is presumed, can be done to stop them at this point. Strangely, this almost spiritual state of whatcha-gonna-do-ness—Games será, será, as Hollywood’s own Doris Day might have put it—appears to afflict even those who are nominally in charge of the whole undertaking. “We’ve missed out on five years, asking the wrong people for permission,” says Will Wright, director of Government and Public Affairs for the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which submitted an open letter in September to the LA28 organizing group that described the Olympic nonprofit’s consistent stonewalling of any efforts at broader involvement from the local design community. As Wright concedes, the group behind the Games has quite enough to do without trying to make 2028 the “show-case for the diversity of our neighborhoods” that the city’s architects and urban planners believe it should be; then again, LA28’s unresponsiveness can’t have been helped by the rate of turnover in its staff, with both its CEO (the second to hold the role) and its chief business officer having departed in December.
With an estimated 15,000 participants and hundreds of thousands more visitors descending on the city for the great sport spectacle, and with long-simmering social and infrastructural crises threatening both the viability of the Olympics and its prospective urban legacy, the deer-in-headlights attitude is a little worrisome, to say the least. A collision, if it occurs, might not be fatal. But nobody can say they didn’t see it coming.
IN A GRAND GESTURE intended at sidestepping the most obvious pitfall of Olympics past, the forces behind Los Angeles’s original bid—above all, former mayor Eric Garcetti, now the Biden administration’s ambassador to India—announced at the start that theirs would be a “no-build” endeavor. “I think we’ll make at least a billion dollars,” said Garcetti, speaking in 2019 and banking on what sounded like a can’t-lose bit of cost-cutting: Over the past decade, greater Los Angeles has seen a bumper crop of new, privately financed sports facilities, chief among them SoFi Stadium in Inglewood (at $5.5 billion, the most expensive in the world) and the nearby, hardly less impressive Intuit Dome (expected to wrap up work later this year). These glittering palaestrae only add to the city’s embarrassment of athletic riches, with the legacy Dodger Stadium still bestriding Chavez Ravine as well as the grand old Coliseum, the focal point of LA’s first Olympics, in 1932, not to mention its most recent outing, in 1984. Surely, with all these existing venues on hand, the city could save a bundle by using what it already has.
The ancillary benefits of this approach— no carbon glut from a vast ocean of concrete; no clunky white elephants cluttering up the landscape afterward—are complemented by the notional political advantages. In Rio de Janeiro in 2017, the working-class community of Vila Autódromo was plowed under to make way for Olympics-related development, leading to both national and international outcry; Athens had done much the same thing the previous decade, mostly targeting the local Roma population. For Los Angeles, already the site of repeated traumas from twentieth-century freeway building and urban renewal schemes, fears of displacement seem well-founded. Alongside a vow to “end street homelessness” by the time the torch is lit (a more ominous statement than perhaps he intended), Garcetti’s no-new-stadiums promise was intended to allay such concerns.
And yet not building for the Games themselves is not quite the same thing as not building anything. On the infrastructure front, the city’s Metro transit authority had pledged to complete “Twenty-eight by ’28,” an ambitious slate of public transportation initiatives that will be necessary to move visitors around the scatter-site program of the Olympics. At LAX, a $6 billion capital program is presently underway, aimed at relieving congestion at the chronically overcrowded airport while providing a suitably grand port of entry for the international crowds four years hence. The city’s freeways—emblems, to some, of the worst mistakes of planners past—may also get a glow-up, with proposed improvements to the dank overpasses where the 110 cuts through Downtown.
The mere appearance of real coordination—between LA28 and its would-be collaborators; between LA city hall and its neighboring governments; between almost any of the above and the leadership of LA County, which has been conspicuous in its absence—could be salutary in itself, a sign that Things Can Still Get Done Around Here.
In LA, almost any new infrastructure might be considered a good thing. But there’s a critical flaw in the city’s overarching planning strategy—which is that there isn’t one. “ I feel like LA is still figuring out what it wants these Olympics to be,” says landscape architect Chris Torres, who has been tracking the preparation process while trying to move forward his own idea for an “Olympic Festival Trail,” a car-free corridor connecting all the projected venues; thus far, despite a “no-car” promise to go with the “no-build” one, the city and the organizers both have been mostly noncommittal. The lack of comprehensive thinking is evident in some of the individual infrastructure proposals that are being deliberated, even as Torres and others wait on the sidelines: At SoFi (whose developers exploited a legal loophole that freed them from transit-related mandates), the city is now contemplating a Disney-style people mover to ferry visitors from the Downtown Inglewood train station two miles away, an idea that carries a $1.8 billion price tag and questionable future utility; at Dodger Stadium, local real estate magnate and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has been rallying support for a fanciful sky gondola to whisk Metro passengers up to the Chavez parking lots, conveniently owned by McCourt himself and already served by a free shuttle bus during the regular season. As even its proponents have admitted, at least some of the airborne tram’s roughly $400 million projected cost may come from public subsidies, while the lower support tower would effectively “destroy a park that people fought like hell to create,” as one Chinatown resident, referring to Los Angeles State Historic Park, warned. At the very least, the fact that such ad hoc projects are still being considered, with so little time left to consider them, is not suggestive of an overly organized organizational process.
THE AURA OF DISARRAY marks a striking contrast with Los Angeles’s 2017 stablemate overseas. In the years since it got the nod from the IOC, Paris has undergone nothing short of a total makeover, with new cycling paths, new playgrounds, and new energy-saving windows on public buildings—3,200 of them—all ready to go in anticipation of the Games this summer. “These projects are not more numerous [than in past years], but they are more substantial,” one Parisian official told Agence France-Presse, casting the city’s Olympic efforts as only one big-ticket item on a long list of urban upgrades. Compare that, if you can, with LA, where LA28’s own website does not have any formal explanatory materials or media assets to share with the public. As AIA Los Angeles’s September letter pointed out, the Olympics thus far have “no unique graphic identity”: no visual guidelines for the streetscape or participating venues, no maps, no apprehensible idea of what the Games are actually going to look like. Even modest interventions like the overpass improvement scheme (part of a still-speculative 2028 Olympics Legacy Improvement Plan funded by Caltrans) exist only as crude digital watercolors. The promise of no-build has become a de facto alibi for inaction: Why worry, if all the pools and velodromes and javelin sectors are already bought and paid for? “There’s not a lot of capital investment that needs to be done,” says Zev Yaroslavsky, a former member of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and a prime figure behind the 1984 Games. “I was much more skeptical then than I am now.”
While expressing confidence in the abilities of LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman and his staff, Yaroslavskly does see pitfalls that he would scarcely have considered forty years ago. “War, natural disasters,” he says. “We just don’t know what this country is going to be like in 2028.” In view of the near train wreck endured by Tokyo (which was obliged to postpone its summer 2020 Games to the following spring due to the Covid-19 pandemic), the Los Angeles organizers have made public pledges (as per their website) to secure “contingency [plans] and substantial insurance packages.” Recent reporting from the Los Angeles Times suggests that such insurance policies are now in place, though any details regarding premiums or coverage levels have evidently not been disclosed. Then again, very little has: Representatives of LA28 have been generally close-lipped with other media outlets and declined to speak on record for this article. (So, for that matter, did a lot of people, including public agencies.)
“It’s been a communications vacuum,” says Aaron Paley, head of cultural advocacy group Community Arts Resources. Since the announcement of the upcoming Games, Paley and his organization have been actively trying to expand the potential positive impact of the Olympics on the everyday civic life of Angelenos—“to create things that persist,” as he puts it. The success of past Olympics (Olympoi?) bears out his point: For the Depression-era edition, the city embarked on a campaign of palm tree planting that gussied the place up a bit for visitors while employing thousands who were out of work; half a century later, organizers put together an elaborate bus system that got guests and competitors to and from the various events, giving the city a little foretaste of a robust public transit system. “Our sense of community is so much greater now than it was in 1984,” says Paley. “We should be looking for ways to celebrate and uplift all the communities we have here.” Yet to date, LA28 has not articulated a vision that reflects the diversity and vitality of the twenty-first-century city.
In this connection, the LA of 1984 might actually have been ahead of the game, so to speak: That year also saw the debut of the two-month-long LA Olympics Arts Festival, which piggybacked on the excitement of the upcoming Games and brought programming and engagement to venues all across the metropolitan area. Along with the celebrated Olympics graphics scheme from designer Deborah Sussman, the festival acted as an instrument to bind the metropolis together, lending a new (if fleeting) cogency to its infamous patchwork of independently administered cities and citadel-like enclaves. Surely in the 2020s, when divisions of place and politics seem starker than ever before, something similar is called for. The mere appearance of real coordination—between LA28 and its would-be collaborators; between LA city hall and its neighboring governments; between almost any of the above and the leadership of LA County, which has been conspicuous in its absence—could be salutary in itself, a sign that Things Can Still Get Done Around Here.
PERHAPS THE MOST GROTESQUE FACT of Los Angeles life today that the Olympics appear to be dead set on ignoring is the near-catastrophic housing crunch across the region. As in ’84, athletes and press in ’28 will be put up in university residence halls, at UCLA and USC in particular, with other attendees lodged at a growing number of hotels around town, many more of which are expected to open just in time for the Games. This solution stands in sharp contrast with Barcelona—whose former Vila Olímpica is now home to some 10,000 residents—and with Tokyo—where public and private entities constructed some 4,000 apartments for its Olympic Village—or London, which turned its Olympics housing into the new town of East Village, right atop a high-speed rail line. In Los Angeles, the current population living on the streets stands at almost 50,000. The number underscores the most obvious, most confounding paradox of the no-build pledge: The one thing that the city could surely use more of, housing, is among the things the public sector has sworn not to build. Mayor Garcetti did, at one point, advocate for Olympics-related housing on the site of a large freight rail yard northeast of Downtown; that scheme failed amid debates over its cost and affordability, confirmation that any such proposal would succumb to similar municipal squabbling.
But then plenty of squabbling is happening anyway. NOlympics, the most prominent and organized opposition initiative, is pursuing an uncompromising goal of stopping the Games in their tracks, even as 2028 comes barreling into the not-yet-completed station. “Canceling the Olympics only happened once before,” notes Eric Sheehan, an organizer with the group, about Denver’s late-in-the-day withdrawal in 1972. “But everyone we talk to in LA, as soon as they understand how the Olympics brings all these problems, folks are on board.” The NOlympics campaign’s entirely reasonable argument against the Games—that they will drain the public coffers; that their leadership, in the form of the IOC, is riddled with corruption; that they will probably entail the brutalization of the drug-addicted and the homeless—is only somewhat undermined by an indisposition toward most alternatives: specifically, toward what the Olympics could be, if they tried being something else. “It’s not our job to fix the Olympics,” says Sheehan, adding that it might be better to focus on “sports in our own communities” rather than on athletics events that span the globe. The show, according to this view, must not go on.
In Los Angeles, the current population living on the streets stands at almost 50,000. The number underscores the most obvious, most confounding paradox of the no-build pledge: The one thing that the city could surely use more of, housing, is among the things the public sector has sworn not to build.
For those of us who do not much care who takes the silver for dressage in Paris, this is not an overly depressing idea. Yet neither is it a very gratifying one. Unless one is a fan of such purely suits-at-a-big-table, chafing-dish-lunch-break outfits as the International Civil Aviation Organization (and to be clear, the ICAO has done some astonishingly important work), the Olympics represent indisputably the most significant and enduring instance of internationalism in action that humankind has ever known. There are plenty of other models the Games could yet adopt, in particular the regional system of the World Cup, that would spread out the risks of hosting while giving the spotlight to great athletes from every country and bringing them together in a spirit of goodwill and good sportsmanship—a tiny glimpse, however brief and silly, of a world not dead set on destroying itself. With its pickings already slim, the IOC could change tack in the future by viewing prospective host nations as clients rather than courtiers, pitching explicit, tailor-made ways to address actual on-the-ground problems using the money and attention that the Games bring with them. For LA28, the clock is ticking. But it’s not too late to show a little hustle.