The Paris 2024 Olympic Games The curtain comes down and the baton is passed to Los Angeles, with its beaches, its hills and its cinema, which will surely be at the service of an event that will set the bar high after the French event.
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Following London (1908, 1948, 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924, 2024), Los Angeles will become the third city to host the Summer Olympics three times, after hosting them in 1932 and 1984. The new date is scheduled for July 14-30, 2028.
Los Angeles 2028
The Coliseum in the Californian city will be the link between all the eras. This stadium will host the event, as it did in 1932 and 1984, and will be the venue for the athletics events, which will be held in the first part of the Olympic Games.
Alysha Newman
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The schedule change will give time to the Rams and Chargers’ SoFi Stadium to become “Inglewood Stadium,” a massive aquatic venue (seating 38,000) where Katie Ledecky and Leon Marchand could add to their Olympic glory.
How will Los Angeles compete with the postcard imagery that Paris has achieved with its world-renowned landmarks? The mission will not be easy, but in the city of film and audiovisual industries there will certainly be no shortage of ideas. “Good luck, Los Angeles, if you want to do better than Paris,” writes the American magazine Sports Illustrated, which believes that the American city has already “lost” this match.
“How can a city compete with Paris? Los Angeles could host swimming in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s pool and it still wouldn’t be up to par,” he said.
‘Magnificent surroundings’
Ammirati, in competition.
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“These will be Los Angeles and California Games,” LA28 head Casey Wasserman told AFP before the Paris Games.
“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower, but we do have the Hollywood letters. We have incredible competition venues and a magnificent environment,” Wasserman added at a press conference on Saturday.
The pressure will be on Los Angeles, eleven years after it was chosen as the host city at the same time as Paris in 2017. The film capital will certainly try to capitalise on the aura of its stars to put on a great show. American rapper Snoop Dogg, NBC commentator and unofficial “mascot” of the Paris Games on social media, has toured the competition venues in the French capital and was able to give a taste of what awaits him in 2028 with other big names in film and music.
Attention to transport
In terms of organisation, Los Angeles already has major challenges ahead of it. The main one seems to be transport. Mayor Karen Bass promised on Saturday in Paris that they would seek “a Games without cars”, a formula that may bring a smile to those who know Los Angeles, a city where personal vehicles are the norm and traffic jams waste a lot of time for its inhabitants on the giant motorways that connect the points of a XXL-sized city.
Queen Saray Villegas Serna reacts while competing in the Women’s Cycling BMX Freestyle Park Final during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
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“These car-free Games will mean that public transport will have to be used to get to all the venues,” Bass said. “Public transport” means buses, to compensate for a metro network made up of five and a half lines, which covers only a limited amount of possible journeys. The mayor also indicated that the aim is to “rehouse” and “get off the streets” the homeless, whose number is estimated at 75,500 in Los Angeles, a city where inflation and the cost of the real estate market are also an insurmountable obstacle for a section of the population.
In terms of sport, breaking is leaving the programme after its debut in Paris 2024, while five new sports will be included compared to those of the Olympic Games that close this Sunday: baseball/softball, cricket, squash, flag football (or non-contact American football) and lacrosse, a team sport derived from Amerindian cultures.
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