Creativity, timing and perseverance: How L.A. got the 2028 Olympics
The afternoon had turned uncomfortably hot in Qatar as the two men stepped outside, away from the crowds at an international sports assembly. They needed to speak in private.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and his companion on that November day in 2016 — Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee — took off their jackets to walk along the edge of the Persian Gulf.
Los Angeles was competing with Paris for the right to host the 2024 Summer Games, and Garcetti recalls Bach telling him the race would be tough.
This wasn’t exactly news. Word had spread that some IOC members considered Paris a sentimental favorite, if only because the French capital had lost in several previous bid attempts.
There was also the matter of President-elect Donald Trump — the IOC membership, composed of officials around the world, had grumbled about the newly elected leader’s “America First” platform.
“There seemed to be this really strong feeling they couldn’t say no to France,” Garcetti said.
L.A. bid leaders had already grown worried enough to focus on an unusual way to emerge victorious. In dinners and small meetings with Olympic leaders, they quietly pushed the IOC to name two winners, giving 2024 to one city and 2028 to the other.
Now, ducking away from the assembly in Qatar’s capital city of Doha, Garcetti and Bach discussed the idea further.
“He needed to assess the political landscape,” Garcetti said of the IOC president. “And we needed to do that without any press, any of our own staff, without anything being leaked.”
As the men concluded their initial chat and stepped back inside an air-conditioned hotel, they faced months of secret offers and counter-offers, ultimatums and backroom bargains.
On Wednesday, the IOC formally awarded the 2028 Summer Games to L.A., concluding a bid campaign that had almost disintegrated before it began.
In the winter of 2015, LA 2024 — as the private bid committee was known then — had to compete against Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to be selected as the sole U.S. candidate.
Many close to the situation, including key U.S. Olympic Committee staff members, considered L.A. the favorite.
The city’s $5.3-billion plan had drawn praise for using existing venues such as the Coliseum and Staples Center. Instead of building an expensive Olympic village, LA 2024 would eventually decide to house athletes at UCLA. Bid leaders promised to cover all costs through revenues from broadcast rights, sponsorships, ticket sales and other sources.
But when the USOC board met in Denver in January 2015 for what was described as a “spirited discussion and more than one round of voting,” Boston emerged the winner.
After a polite but terse conversation with the USOC, Garcetti commiserated with bid chairman Casey Wasserman. The mayor’s office had ordered banners for the victory news conference and now had to return them to the printer.
In public, bid leaders vowed to support Boston. It was a different story in private.
Wasserman, whose sports agency represented numerous Olympic athletes, had reason to stay in touch with USOC officials. As the weeks passed, he kept reminding them: L.A. can step back in if anything goes wrong.
The wait would be short.
By summer, Boston’s campaign was crumbling under public concerns about the city being left with a huge debt from the Games. A USOC official called to make sure L.A. was still interested. “He was checking our temperature,” Wasserman said.
When Boston withdrew a few weeks later, in late summer 2015, a resurrected LA 2024 finally held its celebratory news conference on Santa Monica State Beach.
That night, bid leaders boarded a red-eye flight to meet with Bach at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. After months of planning, and a bump in the road, LA 2024 was ready to fight for the Games.
Timing was a problem.
The city had hosted the Summer Games twice before, most recently in 1984, a blink of the eye in Olympic years. Reusing venues such as the Coliseum and Pauley Pavilion made economic sense but heightened the sense of “been there, done that.”
This predicament joined a growing list of concerns that soon included the IOC’s warm feelings for Paris, which had last hosted in 1924, and hesitancy over Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee. All of it began to weigh on Garcetti and Wasserman in mid-2016.
The men spoke about potentially losing and mounting another bid — they knew the IOC looked kindly upon cities that tried again — but it would mean returning to private donors who had given them almost $60 million for the current campaign.
“There was no way we could pull together the resources to do it again,” Wasserman said.
So they kept going back to the idea of two winners. It made sense not just for them, but also for the IOC.
The Olympic movement had been struggling to attract hosts in recent years, with too many cities scared away by the risk of staging a multibillion-dollar sporting event.
Four candidates had backed out for the 2022 Winter Games. As the 2024 bid cycle progressed, Rome and Hamburg, Germany, withdrew.
Wasserman knew he could not just go to the IOC and say, “Hey, end the process and give it to two cities.” So he called upon people who were knowledgeable and influential in the Olympic movement.
There were discussions with American television executive Dick Ebersol and British businessman Martin Sorrell. He had dinner in Sapporo, Japan, with John Coates, the IOC vice president from Australia.
“It was this idea that was floated around and expressed in the media,” recalled Christophe Dubi, the Olympic Games executive director for the IOC. “And it took off from there.”