Los Angeles 2028 Olympics Moving Some Events to Oklahoma City

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles on July 28, 1984. Steve Powell/Getty Images

While the 2024 Summer Olympics will take place almost entirely in either Paris or surrounding cities, the 2028 Summer Olympics will be a bit more spread out in terms of venue location. The 2028 Games will be held in Los Angeles, for the most part, although the International Olympic Committee announced that some events will not only be held outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, but also held entirely outside of the state of California.

The committee announced on June 21 that softball and canoe slalom will take place in Oklahoma City, which is roughly 1,300 miles east of Los Angeles. The types of venues that these sports are played in either don’t exist in Los Angeles, in the case of canoe slalom, or, for softball, aren’t up to seating capacity standards.

There are no canoe slalom venues in Southern California or anywhere in the western United States, necessitating the move to Oklahoma City. Riversport OKC, which hosted the 2024 Olympic trials for canoe slalom in April, will host the event at the 2028 Games. That venue has also hosted trials for rowing and kayaking for both this year’s Olympic Games and the 2024 Paralympic Games.

While the Los Angeles area has plenty of softball stadiums, none of them can seat more than 2,000 people, and the softball events in 2028 are expected to far exceed that capacity. Thus, softball will be contested at the home of the Women’s College World Series at Devon Park—a softball-specific stadium that seats 13,000.

Casey Wasserman, chairman and president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, said one of the goals of the committee was to leverage existing stadiums to reduce costs.

“LA28’s updated venue plan will provide the ideal Hollywood stage for the world’s top athletes, and choosing from spectacular, existing venues, wherever they are, rather than building new permanent or temporary stadiums, achieves more than USD 150 million in savings and new revenue to help maintain a balanced budget,” Mr. Wasserman said. “We look forward to partnering with these venues, and their experienced operators and workforce, to deliver an unparalleled experience for athletes and fans in 2028.”

With even the biggest of cities usually unable to accommodate venues for every sport competed at an Olympics, these places often construct either temporary venues or entirely new Olympic-specific venues. While they are of great use while the games are taking place, there’s often no use for the facilities afterward, and many become abandoned or demolished. The 2004 Olympic Games, which were held in Athens, Greece, constructed venues for the same two aforementioned sports—softball and canoe slalom. While they came in handy for the games, they were constructed specifically for the games, and neither facility is in use today.

The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee also announced the in-market venues to be used for various sports in 2028. Basketball will be held at the Intuit Dome, which is scheduled to open in August 2024 and will be the new $2 billion home of the Los Angeles Clippers, and will also host the 2026 NBA All-Star Game before 2028 rolls around.

The Clippers’ current home, as well as the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, in Crypto.com Arena will host the gymnastics events at the 2028 Summer Olympics. Formerly known as the Staples Center, the arena is in the midst of renovations scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2024.

SoFi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, and which is already hosting the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies, will also house the swimming competitions in 2028. The stadium will seat 38,000 for meets, making it the largest swimming venue in Olympic history.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which is where the University of Southern California Trojans play their home football games, will host the track and field athletics events, just as it did when the city hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics. That makes the L.A. Coliseum the only venue in Olympic history to host three track and field competitions.

While not every venue for every sport has been set, the Olympic Organizing Committee is making every effort to make the games as Los Angeles-centric as possible. When the city last hosted the Olympics in 1984, some events were also held outside of not only Southern California but also outside of the state. Soccer matches were contested at four venues, including the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and Stanford Stadium in Stanford, California. However, there were also matches played across the country at Harvard Stadium in Boston and the Navy–Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland, so venturing outside a geographic region is nothing new.

The 2028 Olympic Games are scheduled to start on July 14, and end on July 30. If those dates hold, it would make LA 2028 the fourth-ever Olympic Games to be completed before the start of August, and the first since the 1924 Olympics were held from July 5 through July 27.