Los Angeles Will Host 2028 Summer Olympics

For those of you sports fans who like to plan ahead, keep late July and early August of 2028 open on your calendar. Los Angeles, Paris, and the International Olympic Committee have reached a deal where Paris will host the 2024 games and Los Angeles the 2028 games. Here is L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti proudly announcing the honor.

It will be the third time L.A. has hosted the Olympics, doing so in 1932 and 1984. Paris will also be hosting for the third time, but you have to go back a long time for those games. The City of Lights last hosted in 1924, and in its first time was the 1900 games. That 100 year gap in hosting still is eight years short of the gap between Chicago Cubs World Series championships (1908, 2016). Tokyo will host the 2020 games.

With fewer cities willing to put up the money to host what invariably turns out to be an event drowning in red ink, the IOC decided to try something different. Usually, the games are awarded to a host about seven years in advance, which is the case with Paris in 2024, but they decided to go ahead and award the 2028 games to L.A. at the same time. These were the only two cities left in the running anyway. In Los Angeles’ case, the city and southern California have plenty of existing sports venue and hotel rooms (athletes will probably be housed in university dorms) so building infrastructure will be much less than for most cities. Building what is necessary from the ground up has become cost prohibitive in many cases for the summer games, so going with locales that have a lot of that in place already is the wave of the future.

This will be the first time the U.S. has hosted a summer games since 1996 in Atlanta. The last Olympics of any kind in the U.S. were the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Here’s some vintage footage of the Women’s 4 X 100 relay, where the U.S. team won gold: