Can’t borrow Eiffel Tower, but L.A. 2028 Olympics can learn from Paris 2024
PARIS – At Sunday’s Closing Ceremonies, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo passed the Olympic flag to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass – and with it, the pressure to welcome and wow the world.
Some proud Parisians have been taunting Los Angeles on social media, sharing majestic images of this summer’s competition sites – the glass-roofed Grand Palais for fencing, the Palace of Versailles for equestrian, the Eiffel Tower for beach volleyball – alongside less picturesque views of southern California.
To be sure, the dense city center of Paris presented different opportunities, and difficulties, than the sprawling expanse of Los Angeles will in the summer of 2028.
But L.A. officials say they know how to put on a show – and can do it cheaper than Paris 2024.
“We don’t have an Eiffel Tower,” said Casey Wasserman, the chairman of LA28, but “we have a Hollywood sign, we have incredible venues.”
City officials, senior police officers and members of the LA28 organizing committee were in Paris over the past two weeks to watch how it all played out.
At a news conference on Saturday, Bass said that, similar to Paris, her goal is “a no-car Games.” That would be no small feat in Los Angeles, where “we’ve always been in love with our cars,” she acknowledged.
Bass cited Paris 2024’s “Games Wide Open” approach as an example for how Los Angeles could open events to the broader public, saying that it will be crucial “for the Games to be felt by the entire city.”
Los Angeles can already claim credit for an Olympic rarity: a profitable Summer Games, when L.A. hosted in 1984. Budgets have ballooned since then. But L.A. organizers say they can do 2028 with a budget of $6.88 billion – compared with an estimated $9.7 billion for the Paris Olympics – by avoiding the construction of so many temporary event spaces and by using the mini-metropolis of UCLA as the athletes’ village.
French officials caution that their American counterparts may have to adjust to some realities over the next four years.
“It always feels like it’s far away,” said Pierre Rabadan, the deputy Paris mayor in charge of the Olympics. “But four years pass very quickly when you organize the biggest event in the world. And that’s the challenge Los Angeles will have to face.”
The Olympic transportation challengeWhen L.A. officials began bidding for the Olympics, they promised a big boost for public transportation in a city that’s synonymous with traffic and has the worst ozone pollution in the United States.
But Paris showed how grand plans for transportation can come up short.
One of the pillars of the Paris Games was supposed to be the Grand Paris Express, a massive new metro network first proposed in 2007. Almost two decades later, few sections are finished and construction is expected to continue until at least 2030.
Los Angeles is counting on a subway extension to link downtown and UCLA’s campus starting in 2027. That would create a 30-minute train ride between the two locales and make the Olympic Village plan more feasible.
But the city will be far from reaching the ambitious initial target of 28 major transportation infrastructure projects for the 2028 Olympics.
There have also been doubts about L.A.’s car-free pledge. The LA28 organizers have been using the phrase “public transportation first,” while suggesting that some venues might be accessible by car. But Bass doubled down this weekend, saying “you will have to take public transportation to get to all of the venues.”
With only four years left, that may mean minor upgrades and temporary solutions. Bass said that officials may ask companies to have employees work remotely. Organizers also plan to borrow a large fleet of buses, copying what Salt Lake City did in 2002.
The mayor said transportation concerns are unwarranted. She cited the Games of 1984, when Los Angeles residents were “terrified that we were going to have terrible, terrible traffic. And we were shocked that we didn’t.”
The Olympic sustainability challenge
Hidalgo and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote in a joint op-ed in 2017 that with the privilege of hosting the Olympics “comes a great responsibility, to make hosting the Games concretely sustainable.”
Paris has since demonstrated that the money and momentum of Olympic preparations can help advance green initiatives, but some sustainability promises are hard to keep.
While expanded bike lanes and bike sharing programs were embraced by Olympics visitors, millions of plane flights were difficult to offset. Organizers dropped an early claim that the 2024 Olympics would be the first carbon-neutral Summer Games, and even the modified goal to halve the carbon footprint of London 2012 and Rio 2016 proved difficult.
Organizers planned to forgo air conditioning in the Olympic Village and to double the amount of plant-based food being served at the Games. But some teams brought their own ACs, while others demanded more meat.
Rabadan said this shouldn’t deter Los Angeles. “I would like them to be inspired by some of the things we managed to do in Paris,” he said, citing “more responsible” Games.
Bass said Saturday that she’s committed to “making lasting environmental” improvements throughout Los Angeles.
The Olympic security challenge
L.A. organizers had said they were especially keen to see how the Paris Opening Ceremonies worked out. Bass told the Washington Post in March that she was intrigued to see “how you secure hundreds of thousands of people watching a parade of boats.” But she doesn’t seem keen to invite those security risks. Los Angeles will be holding its Opening Ceremonies in a more conventional stadium setting.
Rabadan acknowledged that the criticism prompted some internal doubts, leading organizers to “re-examine our ambition and ability to hold these Games adequately.”
Ultimately, Paris reduced the number of people that could watch the Opening Ceremonies from the banks of the Seine, and tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers and police officers were deployed in the city.
“You can feel the security here, and you see the military on the streets and the police on every corner,” Reynold Hoover, the chief executive of LA28 and a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, said in an interview.
LA28 was designated a National Special Security Event in June, the earliest-ever such designation, making the Secret Service the lead federal agency in charge of securing the Games.
“People will feel safe and secure in L.A.,” Hoover said, but people shouldn’t expect to see security personnel “carrying machine guns in the streets.”
The Olympic inclusion challenge
Among the goals of Paris 2024 was to host “more inclusive” and “more equal” Games. A mixed record on that score may hold lessons for Los Angeles.
French officials managed to use the Olympics to help address inequality by situating the Olympic Village so that it crossed three underserved communities – Île-Saint-Denis, Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen. Local mayors say they appreciated the influx of funding and the unprecedented attention. After the Games, the athletes’ apartments are supposed to be turned into mixed-income housing.
But officials’ social commitments were thrown into doubt by a rise in evictions and removals of unhoused people from the city center and from around Olympic venues. More than 12,500 people – many of them migrants – were evicted or removed in the Paris region between May 2023 and April 2024, according to a collective of organizations. French officials maintain that the evictions and removals were unrelated to the Olympics.
There will be even greater scrutiny of how Los Angeles addresses homelessness ahead of the Olympics. About 30,000 people are unsheltered in Los Angeles, compared with more than 3,500 people in Paris, a figure that does not include people living in squats and in the wider Paris region.
Speaking on Saturday, Bass vowed “to get Angelinos housed,” and added that “Los Angeles County has 88 cities in it and across all of those cities we’re working together.”
She previously said that homelessness is “absolutely solvable.” Her response has centered on clearing encampments, providing people with immediate access to temporary shelters and speeding up approvals for affordable housing projects.
Unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles has dropped 10 percent since last year, while the number of people in shelter has increased by around 18 percent, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. But moving people from temporary into permanent housing could prove more challenging.
Washington Post’s Les Carpenter contributed to this report.