Should L.A. pull the plug on the 2028 Olympics?

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Earlier this summer, in the space of about two weeks, a pair of longtime and highly regarded Los Angeles journalists, Joe Mathews of Zócalo Public Square (among other outlets) and Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times, published columns arguing that the city should cancel its plans to host the 2028 Summer Olympics. Both writers worry that the Games will become a stage set for Donald Trump’s authoritarian fantasies and efforts to crush dissent in blue cities. 

You can understand why. Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops in June to patrol Los Angeles, joining the masked ICE agents already roaming the streets. In a June 10 speech at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, Trump called Los Angeles “a trash heap,” promised that armed federal forces would “liberate” the city, and described protestors marching in its streets as “animals” and “a foreign enemy.” In recent weeks he’s demanded a $1-billion payment from UCLA, on whose campus the 2028 Olympic Village is supposed to be located, as part of his ongoing pressure campaign against leading American universities.

Add that to the catastrophic damage wrought by January’s Eaton and Palisades fires and a deepening budget crisis in L.A., and it’s the notion of proceeding as if it’s entirely business as usual for Olympic prep—rather than the prospect of canceling the Games or moving them to another city—that begins to sound unreasonable. A final straw for many Angelenos was watching Casey Wasserman, chair of the LA28 organizing group, visit the White House on August 5, less than two months removed from the “trash heap” speech, where he made a show of presenting Trump with medals from the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, smiled as the president signed an executive order installing himself as the chair of a new Olympic task force, and laughed heartily as Trump made a joke about autopens and Joe Biden.

While it’s undoubtedly true that Wasserman, whose day job is running a sports-marketing and talent agency, finds himself in a tough spot politically, given how much federal funding and coordination will be required to pull off a successful Summer Games, even some of his defenders found the D.C. performance embarrassingly fawning. A Hollywood Reporter profile that dropped this week—in which he posed for a portrait whose caption read, in part, “Zegna suit, shirt, tie; Oliver Peoples glasses; Rolex watch”—didn’t do much to ease concerns that Wasserman is out of touch. The only on-the-record character witnesses he could muster were retired Bulls star Derrick Rose and NBA commissioner Adam Silver, neither of whom has any meaningful connection with Los Angeles. (LA28 did not respond to a request for comment.)

Let’s say you find the arguments from Mathews and Arellano persuasive—as I do, despite having worked a bit on Olympic planning while I was serving in the Mayor’s Office as L.A.’s Chief Design Officer, from 2018 to 2022. There is still a long list of practical and political questions that unspool from there. What would it mean for Los Angeles to bow out? How precisely might it happen? What can we learn from the examples of Denver and Boston, the two U.S. cities that in years past have publicly rejected an Olympic Games?

To explore these and related questions, I invited Mathews and Arellano, along with Alissa Walker, whose Torched newsletter on the 2028 Games and other L.A. mega-events has become a must-read, to join me for a roundtable conversation by Zoom. What follows has been edited for length and clarity. 

Christopher Hawthorne: As you all know, there’s been local opposition to the Olympics in L.A. for some time, in the form of NOlympics and other groups, and there are certain academics, like Jules Boykoff, who have made a career of opposing the Games. But theirs have tended to be complaints that could be applied to almost any Olympics, in almost any city. It seems clear that something fundamental has changed over the last month in how Los Angeles itself is thinking about these Olympics—in response, of course, to ongoing immigration raids and Trump sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, and in the wake of January’s fires. Joe and Gustavo, when and how did you decide to write your pieces?

Joe Mathews: It started for me at a city council hearing [on June 10], where the chief of police, Jim McDonnell, was being pressed by members of the council about why he was continuing to work with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. And he continued to call them “partners,” even though they’re behaving like secret police and abducting people off the streets. And that led me to realize that the Trump people are leveraging the Olympics against us, in a moment when we’re literally under attack, under siege, where we’re losing our neighbors. The more I looked at it, and maybe I should have looked at it sooner, it seems incredibly dangerous—and potentially much more so with an ICE that’s twice as large by 2028, and Trump maybe running for an unconstitutional third term. Maybe that’s great television for the rest of the world, but we have to live here.

Gustavo Arellano: Look, I am the biggest Olympic hypocrite of anyone. I love the Olympics, unconditionally, even though I've been reading Alissa’s Torched almost from the beginning, even though I've been reading Dave Zirin. For years, I’ve thought, well, it’s L.A., the powers that be want it to happen, it’s going to happen, so what can one do? But during the White House event, you know what it was? It was the entire press conference. It wasn’t just Trump signing his executive order. It wasn’t just him gloating and Casey Wasserman slavishly giving him those medals. Trump is there, and he’s announcing his four horsemen, the ghouls of the apocalypse when it comes to Los Angeles. It’s like, shout out Kristi Noem, shout out J.D. Vance. Shout out Steven Miller, who of course is the worst of them all in action, and actually from L.A. He wasn't on stage, but Trump called him an “MVP candidate.” And the fourth person, of course, is Trump himself. I wanted to go to SoFi Stadium’s huge Olympic pool, because my wife was a swimmer in high school. We were excited to do that. But after seeing that press conference, it’s like, no, no, I’ve got to write something about it. I’ve got to be very upfront about where I’m coming from.

Hawthorne: Thanks for owning up to your own Olympic fandom. I feel the same way. I went to Paris last summer to see some of the Olympics there and the urban-design improvements that Mayor Anne Hidalgo has made to the city. And during my years in L.A. I wrote a lot about, and organized public events to explore, the design legacy of the two earlier L.A. Olympics, 1932 and 1984. Now, though, what seems clear, what friends in L.A. are telling me, is that we should also be talking about 1936, the Berlin Olympics. That might be the better comparison.

Alissa Walker: For me, it came really during the budget negotiations, hearing from city employees. You can read the public comment that city employees were making. As the city was trying to climb out of this billion-dollar budget hole, they’re shouting from the inside, there is no plan here! And seeing Connie Rice’s letter. [On July 17, prominent civil rights attorney Connie Rice sent a six-page letter to L.A. Mayor Karen Bass summarizing concerns she’d been hearing from city employees about the Games.] When I talked to Connie Rice the other day, she had been called by the same city employees, and they were trying to find somebody who would be that person, that civic leader, who would start to speak reasonably about this. Her letter wasn’t saying we should cancel the Olympics, but that these are grave concerns that need to be addressed. 

Hawthorne: The L.A. Times published a reported piece earlier this week, pretty clearly in response to Joe’s and Gustavo’s columns. To me, as somebody who worked at the Times for many years, it seemed obvious that it had been assigned from on high, and it had an oddly defensive and definitive headline: “It’s too late for buyer’s remorse. Why L.A. can’t back out of hosting 2028 Olympics.” It argued that only the I.O.C. can cancel the agreement that the city signed for 2028, not the city itself—and while that may be true in strictly legal terms, in political ones it may be a different story. Alissa, what did you make of that piece? It seemed to me to represent a kind of establishment hope of completely shutting down any talk of pulling out of the Games—an effort to circle the wagons.

Walker: The piece did have some really good historical examples, which I think both Joe and Gustavo brought up in their columns as well. Denver is such a good one, because we’re in almost the exact same timeframe. Just to recap, Denver was awarded the Winter Olympics for 1976, and a few years before that Dick Lamm, who was a young legislator at the state level [and would go on to become a three-term Colorado governor], just started to put the math together. It was just one person at first, and it ended up being a public referendum. And it wasn’t just saying, should we have the Games or not. It was about taking the financing tools away. We are in a very similar situation if you look at who is on the hook, money-wise. I think that’s one pretty good example of how the Olympics in L.A. is not really a done deal, especially as there are a whole set of agreements that still need to be signed, in October of this year. [This is a reference to the so-called Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement, which as Walker has written “needs to be settled by October.”] We could just say that as a city we can’t possibly make a deal with these different entities.

Hawthorne: Gustavo, Joe, what do you make of that idea that was front and center in the Times piece, that only the I.O.C. can cancel the deal with L.A.? And therefore that your argument that the city should bow out is a non-starter?

Arellano: Alissa mentioned Denver. There’s also Colombia. Colombia was supposed to host the 1986 World Cup, but because of all the violence that was happening in Colombia in the early 1980s—and also just the fact that because of that the Colombian government could not possibly afford it—FIFA said, alright, we’re not going to do it. Let’s send it over to Mexico. And I remember, I was a kid at the time, I would have been 7 years old, I just remember people wondering, is Mexico going to be be able to pull this off? And the answer, of course, was a resounding yes. The idea that the I.O.C. or Trump can basically force, by the barrel of a gun, L.A. into going forward with these Olympics should send a chill down the spine of every Angeleno.

Mathews: Again, the idea that the Olympics comes before the city, that’s really problematic. There are holes in the contract [with the I.O.C] that I think actually present an opening for L.A. to get out. And that is the language that says that you can withdraw the Games from a host city if it’s in a state of war, civil disorder—

Hawthorne: Isn't there also a phrase, Joe, about the safety of athletes and visitors?

Mathews: Yes. And here’s a case where we could use Trump’s own words that we’re in an insurrection, that we we’re rioting, against him. Casey Wasserman loves to say that this will be the largest peacetime gathering in the history of the world. But it ain’t peacetime! 

Hawthorne: Is there any recent polling about how Angelenos are feeling about the Games?

Walker: NOlympics just did a poll. It’s a very limited poll, but it showed that support is declining, particularly among younger people. The most important detail is that people think that wildfire recovery is more important than the Games to focus on. But we don’t have regular polling on it. In Boston, before they decided to pull their bid [for 2024], WBUR was polling every month, to try to get a sense of what people thought. And we just don’t have that happening here.

Hawthorne: So let’s play this out into next year, when there may be a mayoral rematch between Karen Bass and Rick Caruso. It remains to be seen if there will be a challenge to Bass from the left. Let’s assume that city and county leaders continue to express unwavering support for the Olympics, and let’s say that popular opposition continues to grow. What happens then?

Arellano: Karen is not going to back down. She can’t back down. She now views this as part of her legacy. Caruso, anyone to the right of her, of course they’re not going to say, “We need to scale down the Olympics,” or “We need to get more concessions from the Trump administration.” It would have to come from a D.S.A. member, or someone else coming from the left. The raids, they’re only promising to escalate, but the Olympics still seem like something opaque. Maybe on the city council, you might get some people looking to get some traction there. But as a mayoral issue, I just don’t see it.

Mathews: It’s our own Bridge on the River Kwai: We have to build this thing, even though it’s going to hurt us. I think Gustavo is right, they’re going to put more money into the raids. And now Washington, D.C., is being militarized. To the extent that we look like a country where certain cities are under martial law, I think the question is going to keep coming up. That’s why I think it would be really great to get out as soon as possible, and, as Alissa suggests, take advantage of this opportunity in October. It will be a sigh of relief.

Arellano: Alissa, who is the most prominent politician in L.A., or in Southern California, to come out in opposition to the Olympics?

Walker: Probably Hugo Soto-Martinez, councilmember and former NOlympics member. He was on [former councilmember] Mike Bonin’s podcast, and there was a clip that got picked up by a lot of outlets. Hugo kind of hinted, about the Olympics, “Well, it’s not really a sure thing, is it?”

Mathews: I’m wondering about UCLA. I mean, they need UCLA to have the Olympics. That’s where the Olympic Village is. And the Trump people have decided to try to destroy UCLA financially. Gustavo, you’re a Bruin, right?

Arellano: Go Bruins!

Mathews: It strikes me that UCLA wouldn’t want to be supporting a Trump Games, a federal Games, after this. I mean, they’re picking on so many entities and institutions, in Southern California and across the state. At some point, there are lots of people who might decide, “Why are we going to have an Olympics with these folks who are attacking us?”

Arellano: Look, this is the scariest part. Trump not only wants the Olympics, he wants the Olympics to happen in Los Angeles. That’s another point I made in my columna: that he wants to show the world a subdued Los Angeles. He wants to show the rest of the country that this is what happens when you cross me. And I think that’s something that all politicians need to ask themselves. Three years from now, if Trump gets his way on his immigration policies, and specifically deportation policies, how different is L.A. going to look? Is it going to be the L.A. that we all love? How will your soul rest, knowing that you had an opportunity to pull Los Angeles out of this, and now are just going to have to grin and bear it right next to Trump as he proclaims his conquest of Los Angeles?

Hawthorne: Alissa and Joe, what do you think about this idea, that maybe Trump is, as Gustavo put it, determined to hold the Games in L.A. at any cost? 

Mathews: Since Roman emperors, holding big events has been a way to consolidate tyranny, to consolidate dictatorship. It’s not a great leap to see this as the 21st-century answer to the Berlin Games. Imagine Trump sitting there at the Coliseum or at SoFi with Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro, if he gets out of his Brazilian jail, or Rodrigo Duterte during a break in his trial at the International Criminal Court. Do we really want to be the host of this fascist festival? Why would we do it? Is the notion of getting sued by the I.O.C. really scarier or worse than—

Walker: I do not think that the I.O.C. would sue L.A. I think that is the worst optics possible. We already bailed them out multiple times and made them look really good. We have tons of leverage in this situation. I think the more likely scenario is a forced-to-carry-this-to-term situation, where we actually decide we don’t want it, and we are not allowed to get rid of it. As Joe said, they’ll hold it at gunpoint, literally. Or we could have the Games with no spectators, which is what happened [in Tokyo] during the pandemic. They could just say, “We need to hold the events to broadcast them, so the sponsors are happy.”

Arellano: Everyone's mentioning 1936. What about ’68, Mexico City, the Tlatelolco Massacre? Heaven forbid anything like that happen here, but the reason the Mexican government did that was because they wanted no dissent. It was before the Olympics actually happened, and they did a great job of covering it up.

Hawthorne: Continuing with this presumption—that Trump is unlikely to support moving the Games to another city, because he wants the spectacle, as messy or violent as it might be—how should Angelenos respond? Should they be lobbying the I.O.C. directly, to try to get them to step in and move it?

Mathews: We should pick at it right away. There should be a public campaign. It’d be interesting to have a referendum on next year’s ballot. At least that would create a format to actually discuss these things. I mean, the powers that be don’t want this conversation to be happening. I never hear Olympics questions get asked at any of these candidate forums. Even in our congressional elections, this should be part of what we are asking these candidates. Just relentlessly—what is their stance? They should have the answers.

Arellano: I agree. Be loud. A ballot initiative would be great, just to put it out there. And the Olympics isn’t just a city thing—this is a Southern California thing. It’s going to be in Long Beach. It’s going to be in Orange County.

Hawthorne: I want to talk a little bit about Casey Wasserman and LA28. Part of what we’re seeing, I think, is some chickens coming home to roost in terms of how little public support the group has built in L.A. in grassroots terms. It would be vastly understating the case to say that they have pursued corporate relationships at the expense of community ones.

Walker: Oh, there’s so much to say! One thing that was very interesting was that at the recent state hearing, where you had Reynold Hoover, the new-ish CEO of LA28, and Paul Krekorian, who is now the city’s mega-event czar, saying that LA28 could not do any outreach in the community until the venues for 2028 were set. Which seems like the most backwards way to run a community event! So now, apparently, you’re going to start seeing them doing that neighborhood outreach. We don’t even know their basic goals, or what their vision is for how to produce these Games in a way that is in alignment with our values as a city. 

Mathews: I’m a youth sports person, youth sports coach, and I really believe in international exchange. I spent two weeks—and I can't believe I survived it—taking 14-year-olds, 17 of them, from South Pasadena to play eight baseball games in Japan. Two of our former teammates had moved there. It was powerful stuff. It definitely strikes me that LA28 could do more—and, given the circumstances, would be wise to do more. The fact that we’re seeing Casey standing next to Trump is not a good thing for them.

Hawthorne: Looking ahead to 2028, whatever L.A. decides, it seems likely that there will be other countries that decide to boycott, right?

Arellano: I think that’s right. Why would athletes for any country that’s under a no-fly rule want to come to the United States?

Mathews: The state of the relationship between the U.S. administration and Brazil is, I think, the most toxic on planet Earth at the moment. I could see them not coming.

Walker: The LA28 argument, the I.O.C. argument, is that they’ll just fill it up with athletes from other countries. It’s the same thing they did to deal with the boycotts in ’84, right? They’ll just add a few more athletes from the friendly countries. They’ll kind of wave that away and say, “It happens, you know. That’s geopolitics!”

Hawthorne: Okay, speed round for the final question. What in your view is the percentage chance that the Olympics will take place in L.A. in 2028?

Arellano: One hundred percent, one way or another.

Walker: This conversation is making me think that maybe we can get them to delay it a year, like they did in Tokyo, if we say that there’s a risk to our health and safety. And then we’ll elect someone else as president, and then we can have it in 2029. I’m just thinking of new pathways now! I do think it's pretty close to one hundred percent, though, sadly.

Mathews: I think it's fifty-fifty that it’ll happen in L.A. I just think the reality about what’s happening, what the government is doing, has not quite fully seeped in. But it will. Things will get worse, and this conversation will not end.

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