How a 'no-build' Olympics could cut costs as LA prepares to host in 2028
LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- When the Olympic flag arrived in Los Angeles Monday after the Paris closing ceremony, it was the clearest sign yet that in four years it will be the City of Angels' turn to host the Summer Games.
So how will Los Angeles pull off the 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games?
Thirty-six sports will be featured - the most ever - and the event will welcome approximately 10,500 Olympians, 6,000 Paralympians and thousands of visitors from around the world.
"For 17 days, this will be the most important event in the world that billions of people will watch. And it's incumbent upon us to make sure we as a city, and really as a country, are at our best," said Casey Wasserman, the chair for LA2028, the organizing committee bringing the games to the city.
Can L.A. dramatically reduce homelessness by 2028?
"We need our city to be so much cleaner. We obviously need to deal with homelessness. I would love to see the graffiti changed into murals," L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said. "So I think about the world coming here, and I think about the challenges in the business community and especially our smaller businesses that struggled with COVID."
The Olympic events will take place across L.A. County, which has an estimated homeless population of more than 70,000 people. Former L.A. City Councilmember Mike Bonin is concerned L.A. will follow Paris and move the homeless outside the city during the Games.
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"Paris moved people into Bordeaux, to other cities around the country. Here, we're at great risk of that same thing happening," Bonin said. "There's going to be intense pressure from some of the civic elites and the folks behind LA28 to just move everybody out of all of Los Angeles.
"They're not going to want people internationally to actually see homelessness in Los Angeles. There is no chance, no chance at all that the modernization of LAX would be done by 2028 if it weren't for the Olympics. So if we can do it for LAX, we can certainly do it for homelessness."
Bass said the city needs to put its focus on housing Angelenos.
"I don't know what the numbers are in Paris, but you can't hide 70,000 people," Bass said.
A no-build Olympics
Leaders see the Games as a way to address those issues and leave a legacy that will benefit Los Angeles for decades to come.
"We are not changing our city to fit the Olympics. The Olympics are changing to fit our city," said Janet Evans, four-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming and chief athlete officer for LA28.
What that means is LA28 is a no-build Olympics. Existing facilities will be used to house the athletes and host competitions. Some temporary venues will be constructed, but nothing from scratch. Two events, softball and canoe slalom, will take place more than 1,000 miles away in Oklahoma City.
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"What we're going to do down in Long Beach and take advantage of that waterfront that most Olympic cities don't have," Wasserman said. "In Paris, sailing is in Marseille because that's the closest place to sail. We have a 30-minute drive to sailing. They have a two-hour flight to sailing.
"L.A. is truly unique in that way. When you have to privately fund, and the expectation is to at worst break even at a Games, you can't go build venues for a sport for two weeks. It's illogical. It feels weird to move an event to Oklahoma City, I think for some people, but when you realize it's a two-hour plane flight just like Marseille, you have to think outside the box. You take an event like canoe kayak to Oklahoma City or softball, those are sports people love there. They may get lost in a place like L.A."
SoFi Stadium in Inglewood will host swimming and will be able to hold 38,000 fans - 20,000 more than the Paris Games. It will be the largest swimming venue in Olympic history.
Basketball will also take place in Inglewood at the brand new Intuit Dome. Gymnastics will be held at Crypto.com Arena in downtown and track and field return to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which will host its third Olympic games.
Skateboarding, BMX freestyle and BMX racing events will be held in the Sepulveda Basin. Equestrian will take place in Temecula. Cycling and tennis will be in Carson, to name a few.
Some critics say a no-build Olympics is good in theory, but Paris also aimed to be a no-build Games and its budget doubled.
"The average Olympics goes over by 172%, so if you look at estimates of what it would take to host Olympics in Los Angeles, I think the initial budget was around $5 billion, which history would tell us would probably get up to 7, 8, 9 billion," said Adam Beissel, who studies Olympic Games and is an associate professor of sport leadership and management at Miami University.
"However, a lot of those cost overruns are attributable to facility construction, which in a no-build Olympics you're not going to have," Beissel said. "I'm somewhat optimistic you're not going to have the level of cost overruns we've seen previously. It is, at least in my opinion, a step in the right direction toward a more sustainable and socially conscious hosting of the Games."
"When the city of Los Angeles agreed to take on the Olympics, we agreed that we would assume the costs. Everybody said there won't be any costs. It's going to be no-build, we'll have no sponsorships," Bonin said. "We have seen since we approved this that a lot of the security decisions are going to be made by a sort of multi-jurisdictional apparatus that really doesn't care about what Los Angeles' budgetary bottom line is."
"I'm worried, too. I have to make sure that the Games do not hurt us financially," Bass said.
According to Wasserman, the Olympic host committee is right where it needs to be financially.
"We are in as strong of a position an organizing committee has ever been four years before an Olympic Game financially and that's subject to two things. One: we have the best sports economy in the world, the United States, and we have benefited from that," Wasserman said. "We sit here today with more contracted revenue than Paris will have in total, and we haven't even thought about selling a ticket yet, let alone sold a ticket. And we're not done selling lots of other things - haven't sold a T-shirt.
"The city of L.A. is not giving us any money. The state of California is not giving us any money. Our budget actually reimburses the city for all incremental expenses as opposed to a normal day in L.A. versus the Olympics."
