LOS ANGELES — With six years to go before Los Angeles hosts the Olympic Games for the third time, the International Olympic Committee and the organizing committee for the 2028 summer games in LA announced Thursday that planning is on track. 


What You Need To Know

  • LA28 announced the 2028 Summer Olympic Games will kick off July 14 and run through July 30

  • The Paralympics, which LA is hosting for the first time, will open Aug. 15 and run through Aug. 27

  • There will be 3,000 hours of live sports, 800 events, at least 75 venues and 40 Olympic and Paralympic sports

  • There are three main funding sponsors for the LA games: Delta Airlines, Salesforce and Comcast

“We are ready. We have our countdown clocks,” said Casey Wasserman, who chairs the LA28 committee in charge of bringing the world’s largest sporting event to the city. 

In July, LA28 announced the 2028 Summer Olympic Games will kick off July 14 and run through July 30. The Paralympics, which LA is hosting for the first time, will open Aug. 15 and run through Aug. 27. 

Over the course of 45 days, LA will host 15,000 athletes for the two events: a little over 10,000 Olympians and about 4,000 Paralympians, Wasserman said. 

There will be 3,000 hours of live sports, 800 events, at least 75 venues and 40 Olympic and Paralympic sports. Exactly which sports will be played during the events has not yet been determined. The IOC sets the core sports and their core disciplines and will approve LA’s sports roster in 2023.

The IOC awarded the summer games to Los Angeles five years ago, at the same time Paris won its bid to host in 2024. Part of LA’s winning bid was its pledge to use existing facilities.

While there will be some temporary venues, Wasserman said there will be no new permanent construction for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in LA. They will make use of SoFi Stadium, the Los Angeles Coliseum, Crypto.com Arena and the soon-to-be-completed Intuit Dome in Inglewood, as well as venues at the University of California-Los Angeles and University of Southern California campuses. UCLA will host the Olympic Village. 

“We’ve said from the beginning our model is very different,” Wasserman said. “We’re fortunate to have incredible venues, incredible facilities all over the city. We’re going to host the games by using those facilities and turn them back over to their owners and their operators so they can return to their existing use.”

LA is already in the events business, he said, hosting world-class events such as the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and sold-out concerts from globally renowned superstars like Kendrick Lamar, who sold out Crypto.com Arena Wednesday night.

“That’s what we do here. That’s why we are proceeding with such great excitement and confidence,” said Wasserman, who has been touring many of the Olympic venues with members of the International Olympic Committee this week.

“The commission members were very pleased, were very impressed with the progress, impressed with the optimism that is really so clear to sense, so we are very happy with what we saw these days and looking forward with great optimism,” said IOC Chair Nicole Hoevertsz. 

LA is a unique host city for the Olympics because it is entirely privately funded, she added. 

“There’s not one other city that could do that, and that’s what we’re benefiting from.”

Much like the IOC itself, which is privately funded with commercial partners, LA28 is privately funded through domestic sponsorships, licensing, hospitality, ticketing, philanthropy and the IOC, according to its website. 

There are three main funding sponsors for the LA games: Delta Air Lines, Salesforce and Comcast. LA28 also has deals with Nike, Ralph Lauren, Deloitte, Hershey and Fanatics. More partnerships will be announced in the fourth quarter, Wasserman said.

“The good thing is there’s lots of sports sponsorships being done,” he said. “The appetite for the games coming back to this country is very strong.”