LA28: Alert to Adversities – and Opportunities

The greater Los Angeles region has turned its attention to its 2028 Olympic venue and development as those Games inch nearer on the calendar. Fortunately, the City is maximizing the lessons learned through the experience of other triple-time Olympic host cities, including London (1908, 1948, and 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924, and 2024). Data and strategies developed and captured during those more recent mega-events are informing the planning and decisions of the LA Olympic committee, making their job both easier, because they can avoid known problems, and more challenging, because they still face concerns unique to the LA area.

One area in which they are determined to get things right is developing an affordable, efficient infrastructure that both supports the Games as well as provides valuable assets to the region for years to come.

Big Party. Big Mess?

The LA28 Olympics promise up to 15,000 athletes and more than a million visitors arriving for the games, all of whom will need lodging, food, and transportation during their stay in LA. The upcoming demand for those services is exponentially bigger than LA’s current metrics indicate, so the bulk of the LA28 infrastructure investment will develop those specific resources.

One thing LA does not want to do is repeat the mistakes of past Olympic organizers. From massive overspending to criminally caused tragedies, previous Olympic Games provide many lessons on how not to host a globally significant sporting extravaganza.

Underplanning and Overspending

Many Olympic host cities seriously underbudgeted their Games, primarily because construction of new Olympic-purposed facilities almost always ballooned far beyond their predictions. As examples:

• In 1994, Lillehammer Norway’s $3.4 billion expenditure was 277% more than it had budgeted for the event.
• Sochi Russia’s $28.9 billion (the most ever spent on one Olympic Games) was 289% over budget, while
• In 2016, Rio de Janeiro’s $23.6 billion was 352% more than it had intended to spend.

Adding more angst to the situation, almost all of those new facilities fell into disuse very quickly after the games concluded.

• The 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Canada, left the City with a $1.5 billion debt that took decades to pay off. The stadium built for those events remains in action, although it’s not used often, and its maintenance costs millions of dollars per year.
• Athens, Greece, also struggles with the dilapidated event sites that were developed for the 2004 Summer Olympics. With no need for the specialized nature of those Olympic-centered facilities, the arenas, fields, and fan locations now stand abandoned and are uniformly identified as ‘white elephants.’
• Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Games also left a legacy of unused, unwanted sports facilities; its iconic Maracanã soccer stadium has been vandalized, and its power shut off due to non-payment.

In many cases, maintaining these urban eyesores continues to cost the host city millions each year; in some cases, they’ve been removed altogether. LA intends to avoid overspending by not constructing any new facilities. Instead, it will refurbish and restore existing assets for the Olympic purpose.

Avoiding Inadequate Transportation Systems

Transportation is a particularly sticky challenge. No matter how new passage capacities are designed and built, they will certainly disrupt existing systems and locations. Previous Olympic Games offer several lessons on what not to do while squiring millions of people across thousands of miles of roads and rails to widely dispersed event sites:

• The 1996 Atlanta Games revealed the challenges that arise when transport systems aren’t clearly thought through. In some cases, there was no available transport to get athletes to their competition. In other cases, the City’s public rail system was in danger of collapsing as it strained to move up to 500,000 people per day, triple its typical usage.
• In Sochi, Russia, a 31-mile rail line connected the airport in the City of Adler, on the Black Sea coast, to Krasnaya Polyana, the ski resort town hosting several of the winter sports, to shuttle visitors back and forth to those venues. The rail line was the highest-priced asset developed for those games at $8.7 billion (almost the entire cost of Canada’s 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, B.C.). However, with little or no demand for its use after the Games concluded, the route quickly went dormant, and within a year, the government suspended train travel from the airport, leaving the system almost unusable.
• More recently, at the Paris 2024 Summer Games, arsonists attacked that City’s high-speed rail system just hours before the commencement of the opening ceremonies. Explosive-triggered fires closed several rail lines outside the City, effectively leaving 800,000+ sports fans without access to the events of their choice.

With these lessons front and center, LA intends to avoid the challenges other Hosts experienced because of poor planning and insufficient safety precautions. Most notably, in March 2024, the City of LA announced its receipt of almost $900 million specifically to expand its Metro Rail system in preparation for the Games, including adding support for the East San Fernando Valley Light Rail Transit Project and sections two and three of the D Line (Purple) Subway Extension Project.

Avoiding Security Lapses

Perhaps the biggest concern for any Olympic development group is maintaining adequate security for attendees, and those concerns are legitimate.

• In 1972, eight members of the Palestine Liberation Organization broke into Munich, Germany’s Olympic Village, and kidnapped and then killed 11 Israeli athletes. By the end of the siege, five of the militants were also dead, as was a West German police officer.
• In 1996, two people died as a result of a pipe bombing that occurred at the site of the Atlanta GA Games.
• See Paris 2024, above.

While those acts of physical violence are still concerning, the bigger threat these days at any major event, including the Olympics, is driven by technology. True to its nature, LA is positioning its Olympics as “a new Games for a new era” and is already in an advanced stage of development of its technical infrastructure. Early on, the City partnered with Deloitte, precisely because of that company’s long history with the Olympics and other mega events.

Since 2017, when LA was officially tapped as the 2024 Summer Games host city, the data and analysis agency has been involved in designing both inquiry outreach – connecting and communicating with stakeholders – and transformative strategies to capture and act on consensus agreements. Together with the LA Olympic development team, they’ve developed a technology vision that encompasses both existing and emerging tech resources to coordinate the many platforms that will be the infrastructure of the games. A consequent ‘roadmap’ that includes data governance, integration, digital engagement, enterprise functions, and more provides LA28 team members with the parameters they need to achieve their next steps, their intermediate accomplishments, and their ultimate goal of a safe, efficient, financially successful 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

LA28 – the 2028 Summer Olympics hosted by the City of Los Angeles – will be a trendsetter in many ways. Learning from past experiences and embracing the possibilities of the future, the Games’ leadership is intent on creating a sporting extravaganza that will delight Olympics attendees while also providing LA with a plethora of upgraded public transport and hospitality assets for use years in the future.