August 11, 2024, 8:44 PM
August 11, 2024, 8:44 PM
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games close and pass the baton to Los Angeleswith its beaches, its hills and its cinema, which will certainly be at the service of an event that will set the bar high after the French event.
Following London (1908, 1948, 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924, 2024), Los Angeles will become the third city to host the Summer Olympics three times, after hosting them in 1932 and 1984. The new event is scheduled for July 14-30, 2028.
The Coliseum of the Californian city will be the link of all times. This stadium will host the event, as it did in 1932 and 1984, and will be the venue for the athletics events, which will be held in the first part of the Olympic Games for the first time.
With that change in the schedule, SoFi Stadium of the Rams and Chargers (American football teams) will be given time to become the “Inglewood Stadium”, a huge aquatic venue (for 38,000 spectators), where Katie Ledecky and Leon Marchand could increase their Olympic glory.
How will Los Angeles compete with the postcard imagery that Paris has achieved with its world-renowned landmarks? The mission will not be easy, But in the city of film shoots and the audiovisual industry there is certainly no shortage of ideas.
“Good luck, Los Angeles, if you want to do better than Paris,” writes the American magazine Sports Illustrated, which believes that the American city has already “lost” this match.
“How can a city compete with Paris? “Los Angeles could host Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s pool and it still wouldn’t be up to par,” he said.
“These will be Los Angeles and California Games,” LA28 head Casey Wasserman told AFP before the Paris Games.
“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower, but we do have the Hollywood letters. “We have amazing venues and a great environment,” Wasserman added at a news conference on Saturday.
The pressure will be on for Los Angeles, eleven years after it was chosen as host city at the same time as Paris in 2017.
The film capital will surely try to make the most of the aura of its stars to create a great show. American rapper Snoop Dogg, NBC commentator and ‘unofficial mascot’ of the Paris Games for social media, he has strolled through the competition venues in the French capital and has been able to give a preview of what awaits him in 2028 with other big names from cinema and music.
– Transportation attention –
In terms of organization, Los Angeles already has major challenges ahead. The main one seems to be transportation.
Mayor Karen Bass promised in Paris on Saturday that they would seek “a Games without cars,” a formula that may bring a smile to the faces of those who know Los Angeles, a city where personal vehicles are the norm and traffic jams waste a lot of time on the giant highways that connect the points of a XXL-sized city.
“These car-free Games will mean that public transport will have to be used. “to get to all the venues,” Bass said. “Public transport” means buses, to compensate for a metro network made up of five and a half lines, which only covers occasional journeys in a limited way.
The mayor also indicated that the aim is to “rehouse” and “remove from the streets” homeless people, whose number is estimated at 75,500 in Los Angeles, a city where inflation and the cost of the real estate market are also an insurmountable obstacle for a sector of the population.
On the sporting level, The breaking news leaves the program after its premiere in Paris 2024while five sports will be included as a novelty compared to those of the Olympic Games that close this Sunday: baseball/softball, cricket, squash, flag football (or non-contact American football) and lacrosse, a team sport derived from Amerindian cultures.
