2028 Olympic Games: An Event Heralded by Fire
The recent fires in Los Angeles have torn through parts of Southern California, leaving unrecognizable landscapes behind. Will the city be ready to host the Olympic Games by 2028?
Image from LA Memorial Coliseum
The Olympics Games are being hosted by Los Angeles in 2028—for now. The Palisades, Eaton, and concurrent fires have left Los Angeles fractured and residents questioning if the city is ready to handle a world event like the Olympic Games.
Hosting the Olympic Games is a huge ordeal for the host cities. It requires tons of infrastructure to host events, often necessitating construction of new arenas; space to house athletes; media facilities; adequate transportation for athletes, coaches, and trainers; and proper security measures to be put in place, among a number of behind-the-scenes procedures. In an ideal world, the games would bring press opportunities and revenue to a city and its locals. Instead, many countries are left economically worse off, and the lasting impact on native residents and the environment is anything but positive.
The 2016 Olympics Games in Rio cost the government and organizers at least $13 billion, according to the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.1 Over the entire length of the 2016 Games only $9 billion was generated as revenue, much of which the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pocketed. The disparity between the cost of the games and how much revenue was produced left Brazil in debt, with many infrastructure projects unfinished, and politically unstable. Moving forward, for the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles has proposed strategies to avoid lasting economic and environmental hardships—but can they pull it off?
Image from Curbed L.A. showing an AI-generated plan to convert USC’s baseball field into a swimming pool arena.
The City of Los Angeles hopes to achieve a net-zero carbon 2028 Olympic Games. L.A.’s focus is on transportation and energy grid resilience—they hope to electrify and diversify all forms of public transportation and invest in widespread grid upgrades to increase the city’s energy capacity and reliability. The planning committee has introduced the term “radical reuse” to describe their efforts in restructuring already existing infrastructure into event-specific arenas. Despite their stated efforts on energy and infrastructure, the planning committee has yet to propose specific climate targets—a mistake that has handicapped past host cities. Not only this, but the current state of Southern California is another issue: how do the fires play into this?
The Los Angeles fires completely tore through landscapes, whipping out houses, parks, and all kinds of infrastructure in its way. The Los Angeles Times estimated the total expected damage and economic losses to be between $250 and $275 billion dollars.2 The economic effects of the fires are only one facet of the multi-sided coin: tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents lost their homes and hundreds of thousands were forced to evacuate. This climate-related event has drastically reshaped the built and natural environment of Los Angeles as well as redefined what it means to live in the broader Los Angeles region. Fires are becoming increasingly common and even more destructive. With the Olympic Games only three years away, I cannot help but wonder if it’s right for Los Angeles to redirect efforts from rebuilding the city and providing relief, to prepping the city for an estimated influx of 15 million outsiders.
If Los Angeles pulls this off, it may become a world leader in urban development and can be known as the city that rose from the ashes. If Los Angeles crumbles under the economic pressure, its natives, infrastructure, and the surrounding natural environment could face consequences that affect life for decades to come. The upcoming games will define the trajectory of how the Olympics are perceived by the global community and structured to uplift the environment in the future.
The ways that the games are portrayed in the media will be another determining factor in the outcomes of the 2028 Olympic Games. Broadcasting the games’ successes and failures will influence public opinion, nationally and globally. Already the news is spotlighting the context in which the games are being held: fires, costs, and climate change, all which are shaping how the games are reported on and understood by the public.
Image from News.com.au
News and the media are a dynamic form of communication, expression, and are often representative of personal beliefs. What shapes news is the creator, message, intent, time, and audience. To go further into detail, we will reference the article I referenced to write this newsletter: For Los Angeles, Fires Ramp Up Difficulty of Hosting 2028 Summer Games by Adam Nagourney.3
Nagourney is a national political reporter for the New York Times who writes “accurate and fair” pieces. His perspectives, motivations, interests, and political biases shape what Nagourney chooses to report on; his pieces tend to be critical of conservative politics and more supportive of progressive ideals, though Nagourney does not take a personal stance on any of his covered topics. Intentional or not, it seems that there is a hint of bias seeping through Nagourney’s writing. In today’s highly politicized and divided world, it is difficult, I would argue impossible, to stay truly agnostic. It is even more difficult, in my opinion, to find truly unbiased sources of information. But maybe this isn’t a bad thing.
Alexa Delbosc is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University. Delbosc wrote an article in 2023 titled There Is No Such Thing As Unbiased Research – Is There Anything We Can Do About That?4 In her article she writes, “Every decision is touched by our subjective experience with the world, or our research positionality…” The questions that capture our interest, the lenses we use to analyze information, and how we interpret what we find are neutral consequences of our interactions with the world. The ways in which people critically interpret news is reliant on and subjective to our own biases, and these outlooks help us navigate the intricate propensities of public media.
Ultimately, the new outlets’ and media’s portrayal of these events will continue influencing public opinion and shaping how the world understands the complex challenges facing Los Angeles leading up to the Olympic Games. It makes me wonder, what legacy should these games leave behind? And how can the media, informed by our personal biases, help shape this legacy?
References:
Matheson, Victor, and Andrew Zimbalist. 2021. “Why Cities No Longer Clamor to Host the Olympic Games.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Georgetown University. April 19, 2021. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/04/19/why-cities-no-longer-clamor-to-host-the-olympic-games/.
Vincent, Roger. 2025. “Estimated Cost of Fire Damage Balloons to More than $250 Billion.” Los Angeles Times. January 24, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-01-24/estimated-cost-of-fire-damage-balloons-to-more-than-250-billion.
Nagourney, Adam. 2025. “L.A. Wildfires Ramp up Difficulty of Hosting 2028 Olympics.” The New York Times, January 13, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/2028-olympics-host-los-angeles-fire.html.
Delbosc, Alexa. 2022. “There Is No Such Thing as Unbiased Research – Is There Anything We Can Do about That?” Transport Reviews 43 (2): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2022.2146939.
I find how you link the ability for future events to help recover a city after past events to be particularly compelling. If LA can fully recover, the Olympics would be a great success and the city would be able to thrive for years after. The inclusion of the idea of media biases shaping the legacy left behind, by both the fires and the Olympics is very thought provoking, and leads me to consider how much of history has been altered by media narratives.
Great piece. Makes me wonder if L.A. (and CA and the U.S.A) could use the occasion of the Olympics to help not only rebuild L.A. after the fires, but also build out a sustainable kind of infrastructure that was more equitable. THAT would be the kind of enduring legacy L.A. natives need, the kind of model other cities and states could emulate, and other countries could follow. The U.S. and CA have the resources -- after all, the U.S. is the richest country in the world and CA is the fifth largest economy in the world. It's merely a matter or redistribution and reorganization. And media and politics could play a positive role in realizing that future.