The life cycle of an Olympic organizing committee is utterly predictable. Here in SoCal, it’s five-plus years to go until the opening ceremony in July 2028. Thus came the tone and tenor of the inane question directed at a Thursday news conference at LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman, which carried the grievance-laced, fix-this-now hallmark that attends these sorts of queries at this point, Olympics organizers somehow expected to fix every problem under the sun when the job description is delivering a Games on time and under budget.
In a startling fit of obviousness, a local NPR reporter noted that Los Angeles has a homelessness problem. He asked: “So what’s your response right now?” Then, after some remarks from the head table, this follow-up: “Are you prepared to put policies on the table or to put remedies on the table …”
Is an Olympic organizing committee a government entity? No. Is the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, the state of California — are all these entities wrestling with the maddening complexities of this issue? Yes. Has there been a long-running lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles over this exact matter worth literally billions of dollars? Yes.
And yet an Olympic organizing committee is supposed to wave the five rings in the air or something, and summon a magical fix? What next? Solve climate change? Cure cancer? Achieve a breakthrough in cold fusion?
At Thursday’s news conference at UCLA: Christophe Dubi, IOC Games executive director; Nicole Hoevertsz, IOC member from Aruba and LA28 coordination commission chair; Casey Wasserman, LA28 chairman
What’s nonetheless also predictable, as our friend from NPR also said in an explication he delivered Thursday as part of his queries, is that the homelessness issue and, as well, the cost of living in Los Angeles, will keep coming up and up — and LA28 will be expected by some, especially its more vocal critics, to have answers, for those two issues and, doubtlessly, many more.
To Wasserman’s credit, he broke with the pattern. He said, “Clearly prepared for it. I just have a different perspective. You know, if we just closed up shop and went away today, those two things still exist and they will still exist in 2028. And no one should be confused about that.”
Just to show you how truly idiotic this pattern is — having seen it now for 24, almost 25 years — a question popped up at Thursday’s news conference that did nonetheless break new ground.
California, someone began, is in the midst of a water crisis. So, what about the effects of that crisis on water sports?
Wasserman could not help himself. He said LA28 is “fortunate that we have this thing in the Pacific Ocean,” and from a Games standpoint “we are focused on the ocean.”
This pattern, really, is so predictable. What would be great is if LA28 broke significantly with this pattern because it’s of little to no use. Yes, there can be a useful politesse to the Olympic dance. But hasn’t the time come to be upfront about what an Olympic organizing committee legitimately can, and cannot, do?
Los Angeles has a way of making Olympic history; it did so in any number of ways in 1984 and 1932. Wasserman’s answers Thursday suggest that, perhaps, here is another way LA28 can break from the pack.
Traditionally, the emotionality that goes with the life cycle of an Olympic organizing committee looks like the capital letter U.
Start at the top left of the U.
This is the moment the city wins the Games. For LA, this was five years ago this week, when it and Paris won the historic double allocation, Paris for 2024, LA 28.
That top left is all euphoria. We won!
From then until about now, it’s all typically downhill. For LA28, it’s just now about at the bottom of the trough — the point at which Seb Coe, now the head of the international track and field federation, the guy who ran the London 2012 Games, has alternately called the “persecution” or the “vilification” of “the innocent.”
Wasserman and Janet Evans, the LA28 chief athlete officer
By which he meant:
There’s a problem? No matter what? No matter who did it? Doesn’t matter. You know who’s at fault? The Olympics.
The tide begins to turn upward — that is, onto the right side of the U — when the Games before the Games at issue finally takes place. For LA, that means Paris. In London, that meant Beijing. It helps, a lot, if the home team does well in that prior Games. The British team did very well in 2008, raising excitement and expectation. Same here — if Team USA does well in Paris, as it should, that will raise excitement in the United States for LA28.
Plus, there will be details about branding, the torch relay, speculation about the lighting of the cauldron, all that kind of stuff.
It all culminates in the Games, which in 2028 in Los Angeles — barring some unforeseen disaster — will, like 1984, be an enormous success.
That is because the LA model is unlike anywhere else in the world: privately funded, no permanent construction.
Those 1984 Games yielded a surplus of $232.5 million. The current mayor, Eric Garcetti, is on record as saying the 2028 Games ought to yield a surplus north of $1 billion.
Indeed, that is likely the ultimate benchmark of these 2028 Games.
Don’t believe it? How are the 1984 Games typically remembered? Awesome SoCal traffic, Rafer Johnson, crazy medal count for the U.S. team, $232.5 million surplus.
Looking out from 2022 toward 2028:
Inflation is upon us; mortgage rates in the United States have climbed to 6%. How to think, for real, of LA28? As Wasserman also said Thursday from the head table, “We’re an organizing committee but we’re a commercial organization. And we have our finger very clearly focused on revenue generation, and I can assure you that our job is to align those expenses with the revenue we think and we’re going to generate …”
Assuming all goes to plan, there’s one more element to the life cycle of an organizing committee.
Let’s say the $1 billion surplus target gets met. Or even some astonishing amount of millions.
Then come late summer of 2028 and beyond, it’s congrats all around. But not only for Wasserman and team. Oh, no. As Sandy Hollway, chief executive of the Sydney 2000 Games, has put it — the “glorification of the uninvolved.”