The International Olympic Committee announced on Monday, July 31, 2017, that Los Angeles, California will be the host to the 2028 Summer Olympics. They are also the second city to be awarded the Olympics three times. London, which last hosted in 2012, also held the Olympics in 1908 and 1948. When Paris is given the official nod for 2020, the City of Lights will be the third city with the right to host three Olympiads.

The announcement on Monday was no surprise as the IOC has been quite public about its attempt to get Paris and LA to agree to hosting either 2024 and 2028. This allows the IOC to skip a (potentially painful) selection cycle that would have started in 2021. This deal buys the IOC time to persuade candidate cities in the future that the Olympics doesn’t have to be such a tremendous burden on the host nation.

What’s interesting about Los Angeles is that in all three cases – 1932, 1984, 2028 – they won the bid without competition.

Paris insisted on 2024, and explained that the land reserved for the new Olympic Village would not be available if they had to wait for 2028. LA would have 2028 if they wanted it. The IOC sweetened the pot financially, and LA willingly sunk their hands in it.

In 1978, two years removed from the financial debacle that was the Montreal Olympics, and only six years after the terror of the Munich Olympics, only two cities were in the hunt for 1984 – LA and Tehran. Tehran was likely feeling the rumbles of the Iranian Revolution, which exploded a year later, so pulled out of its bid, leaving Los Angeles as the only choice.

 

 

In 1932, it is said, that newly appointed IOC member representing the United States, William May Garland, attended the IOC’s twenty first session in Rome in 1923, and swept the committee off its feet. Garland was a wealthy Californian real estate magnate who saw the Olympics in Los Angeles as drama worthy of Hollywood. According to the book The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, by David Goldblatt, Garland “pitched” the Olympics like a movie script. Goldberg cites the Official Report to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as the kind of rhetoric that Garland may have used:

An excited whisper runs like a flash across the stadium.

And then hush.

A voice that fills every corner of the vast bowl breaks forth from the huge electoral announcer.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice-President of the United States is arriving to officially open the Games.’

The Vic-President arrives at his box and for the first time is clearly identified to the audience. He waves his hand to acknowledge a renewed outburst of cheers.

His gesture brings a hush to the babble of noises.

The time-table on the daily programme is hastily consulted. What comes next?

Garland sat at the intersection of realtors, oil companies and movie magnates, who, as Goldblatt writes, “in the early twentieth century, as the region’s great historian, Carey McWilliams, put it, ‘began to organize Southern California as one of the greatest promotions the world has ever known’, selling the California good life, the new Mediterranean, paradise on the Pacific. In his letters and interviews with the press, Garland often referred to the athletes as actors and the Olympics as a celebration or a show, the sport itself seemingly ancillary.”

Apparently Garland’s vision was so compelling that, according to the book, The Olympics – A History of the Modern Games, by Allen Guttman, “the members accepted the bid by acclamation.”