Tokyo’s Olympic Games might be the weirdest in the modern history of the extravaganza, but the athletes now have center stage instead of the suits. Thus, medals, great performances and star quality are beginning to shove their way into our collective consciousness past empty seats, positive COVID-19 tests and blowhard pronouncements from politicians and IOC leaders.
That should be a reminder of the power of the Olympic brand, as tone-deaf and avaricious as it often seems.
And it should also be a reminder that it will be Los Angeles’ turn again in seven years. There’s already a sense that Southern California, which resuscitated the Games in 1984, could again be a transformative host in 2028.
If, in fact, that process hasn’t already begun.
L.A. is one of the few U.S. cities that has continued to bid for the Olympics, over and over. It lost out in the USOC’s competition for an American candidate for the 2012 and 2016 games (to New York and Chicago, respectively), passed on 2020 and was the lone U.S. city standing for ’24 after Boston dropped out.
But the number of interested cities worldwide has dwindled and the IOC has dramatically changed its selection process, going away from a vote of the membership. It accommodated both remaining bidders in September of 2017, giving Paris the ’24 Olympics and L.A. the 2028 Games. And it announced last week that Brisbane, Australia, would be the 2032 host.
“Many bids kind of fell by the wayside before the final round” in 2017, said Ann Owens, an associate professor of sociology at USC. “It’s gone from a bidding process where cities were spending millions of dollars in some cases just on the bid, which I think everyone – well, not everyone, but (most) people agreed was extreme – to sort of a non-competitive process. So there’s probably a middle ground that we may return to.”
Owens, who acknowledges she’s a big fan of the Olympics, researched L.A.’s pursuit of a third Games and chronicled the process in “Bringing the Olympics Back to Los Angeles: A History of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, 1984 to 2014,” with an introduction by former SCOOG chairman Barry Sanders. It will soon be available as an eBook through Amazon.
The IOC awarded the Paris/L.A. twofer because it was frightened by the dwindling number of cities interested and the possibility that there wouldn’t be a bidder for ’28 if the ’24 loser backed away.
“They never articulated it that way,” Sanders said. “But that’s certainly what they were thinking.”
The result is a streamlined, if less democratic, selection method. The old way involved large bids, grandiose promises and sometimes a little something on the side slipped to influential people to help sway the vote. When it was a seller’s market the IOC dictated terms, demanding legacy construction projects and insisting that host cities alone would be on the hook for financial shortfalls.
Los Angeles and the SCOOG, which has existed since 1939, have been stubborn in their pursuit of a third Games. L.A. hosted in 1932, during the Depression, and in 1984. In each case the city was the only bidder, and in each case the Games made money rather than running a deficit.
The 1932 Games drew 1.25 million spectators and made $1 million, amazingly. In 1984, L.A. was the only bidder left when Tehran pulled out, used its own leverage to extract financial concessions from the IOC and wound up staging a cost-effective, corporate-funded spectacle that, despite an Eastern Bloc boycott, transformed the Olympics’ business model and turned a $232.5 million profit. To this day, the LA84 Foundation has used that windfall to support youth sports organizations and activities in Southern California.
(Not only that, but the freeways ran smoothly during those two weeks. Maybe that’s why organizing committee president Peter Ueberroth got a standing ovation at that year’s Closing Ceremony.)
L.A. comes in again at a similar point in the Olympic timeline and with a similar philosophy, though the city didn’t get that waiver of the financial guarantee this time. (The city and state will share in any liability, and the current projected budget is $6.2 billion. Tokyo’s original budget was $7 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the budget is now $15.4 billion and Japanese government auditors have said total spending is more than $20 billion.)
The 2028 Games will be held primarily in existing venues, as they were in ’84 – and consider that since then Staples Center, USC’s Galen Center, Anaheim’s Honda Center, a pair of MLS stadiums and Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium have all come online, while the Coliseum and Pauley Pavilion have been renovated. By ’28 the Clippers’ new arena in Inglewood should also be open. Similarly, a Metro rail system that didn’t exist in ’84 will have been expanded.
Owens’ work notes that the 1984 concept of twin athletes’ villages at UCLA and USC was a non-starter this time. There was some pressure to build a full Olympic Village on an alternate site and the Piggyback Yard, along the L.A. River, was suggested as a possibility. But Sanders confirmed that the village in ’28 will be at UCLA.
There’s often some conflict over whether the Olympics are a sports event or a city development event, Owens said. In Los Angeles and Southern California, where venues are not only already in place but in many instances privately built, that’s not an issue.
“I’m sure L.A. ’28 will be a successful, well-organized Games with a surplus, and that’s because we’re a very low-build bid,” she said. “We’re not building a bunch of stadiums. All of the public works, things that were happening like Metro and transit and things like that, were already in the works.
“The legacy of the Games could be taken as this is a really attractive thing and it’s going to bring more cities into the bidding process. But my hope is that the legacy of the L.A. ’28 Games for the movement is, let’s prioritize these low-build bids where cities have the infrastructure to handle the event and not make it this elaborate competition of who can outdo who in building things that really don’t have a purpose after the Games.”
After all, how many times can you expect L.A. to bail out the Olympic movement?
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter
