The LA 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games Committee unveiled an updated venue plan on Friday that moves some competitions to the Los Angeles area and beyond.
The biggest change from the original plans, which were part of the 2017 proposal to bring the Olympics back to Los Angeles, is that softball and canoe slalom will be outsourced to Oklahoma City.
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The LA28 committee explained that there are no canoe slalom venues in the western United States, while the largest softball stadium in the LA area seats only 2,000, which is below Olympic seating standards. “Both the canoe slalom and softball venues in Oklahoma City are built to international competition standards, ensuring a high-quality experience for athletes and fans while allowing LA28 to realize cost savings and revenue gains to support its balanced budget,” the committee said. a statement.
“LA28 also recognizes that the Oklahoma City community has consistently supported top events for both sports and is confident they will do the same for these Olympic competitions.”
Oklahoma City annually hosts the Women’s College World Series. Although not explicitly mentioned due to the IOC’s policy of not using corporate names for stadiums and arenas during competition, Devon Park will be the home for Olympic softball. The 13,000-seat softball park has been renovated several times since it opened in 1987. Riversport OKC, the outdoor recreation park that hosted the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic trials for rowing and kayaking, will host canoe slalom.
According to committee chairman Casey Wasserman, moving some events to Oklahoma and using existing structures in and around LA “instead of building new permanent or temporary stadiums will provide more than $150 million in savings and new revenue to balance to help maintain the budget.”
Since London was awarded the 2012 Summer Olympics in 2005, the International Olympic Committee has approved bids in which cities build temporary structures or permanent venues that can be significantly reduced in size for long-term use by professional sports teams. These innovations would ideally reduce the cost of building infrastructure for the events while avoiding the fate of Olympic venues such as Athens, which still has a few ‘white elephants’ – venues that have lost ground in the twenty years since hosting the 2004 have been abandoned or underused. Games.
In addition, the IOC has encouraged organizers to use existing venues outside the host city. For example, for the upcoming Paris Games, football matches will be played across France, but surfing competitions will take place more than 15,000 kilometers away on the other side of the world, in Tahiti, an island nation still under French sovereignty.
Hosting Olympic events outside the host city is not a new phenomenon, and it is not even the first time this has happened for Los Angeles. In 1984, prep football games took place as far north as Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and as far east as Harvard University in Boston and at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
LA benefits from the vast array of old and new facilities in the metropolitan area. Track and field will take place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, making it the first stadium used for the sport during three separate Olympic Games. Basketball will be held at the soon-to-open Intuit Dome, which will be home to the NBA’s Clippers in late 2024. Gymnastics will take place in the Crypto.com Arena. And in an idea seemingly borrowed from the recent U.S. Swimming Trials at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, SoFi Stadium will host the swimming meets. (SoFi will also serve as the host stadium for the 2026 Men’s World Cup, which will be played in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.)
This isn’t the only sports connection between LA and Oklahoma State. For nearly a decade, the Dodgers’ top two minor league teams, the Triple-A Oklahoma City Baseball Club (nee Dodgers) and the Double-A Tulsa Drillers, have resided in the Sooner State.
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