Finally, dramatically, it has ended, the 2024 Paris Olympics finishing its last lap Sunday with incomparable enthusiasm, unbridled joy, and one last look at the gloriously intimidating tour Eiffel.
All of which means one thing.
We’ve got next.
Gulp.
How on earth can the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics surpass what the world just witnessed in a two-week burst of picturesque rejoicing from the Champ de Mars to the Palace of Versailles?
How can we match the overwhelming emotion from screaming fans and weeping athletes in a blockbuster Parisian party that was two weeks of pure Hollywood?
How can we clone Simon Biles?
The Paris Olympics are going to be the toughest act for this town to follow since the five-time champion Minneapolis Lakers moved here 64 years ago. We have to somehow take greatness and make it even greater, and we have to accomplish this without ample time or Jerry West.
At first glance, this task would seem as difficult as finding a new drone vendor for the Canadian women’s soccer team or appropriate undergarments for French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati.
This is going to be one tough canoe slalom.
An area that can’t logistically handle one sport in one venue — hello Dodger Stadium — must suddenly manage more than 40 sports in venues that should stretch from the Valley to Temecula.
A freeway system that can’t hack a Thursday night Rams game at SoFi must survive a two-week influx of millions of visitors who will be in gridlock before they leave LAX.
Public transportation? What’s that? The new Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh recently remarked that he was struck by the emptiness on the Metro train that runs above his El Segundo practice facility. You really think people around here are going to start using public transportation?
This week Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass reiterated her message of an earlier Times interview when she brazenly called for, “A no-car Games.”
Seriously? If true, that would pretty much be the same as a “no-Los Angeles Games” Good thing the LA28 organizing committee later clarified that, while public transit would be preferred, nobody will be told they cannot drive to a competition.
Traffic will only be one of our issues. If the past two weeks are any indication, four years from now the weather will be scorching, crime will be rising, and the entire Olympic footprint could smell like burnt toast.
This is going to be one tough speed climb.
That said …
This is the city of champions, a city whose sporting soul is rooted in resilience, a city whose fans urge greatness and whose stars supply magic.
This is a city that doesn’t flinch. Kobe Bryant never flinched.
This is a city that doesn’t scare. Kirk Gibson never feared.
This is a city where even the most insurmountable of sporting challenges are met, embraced, and summarily destroyed.
The Los Angeles Rams didn’t exist in 2015, yet won a Super Bowl six years later.
The Kings were plunked down in a place that hated the cold, yet they made ice cool and won two Stanley Cup championships.
The greatest basketball player in history works here. The greatest baseball player in history works here. The greatest hockey player in history once worked here. The great coaches in both pro and college basketball once worked here.
This town invented the high five, for Dusty’s sake.
Los Angeles knows sporting excellence, and we darn sure know how to throw a bash to celebrate it. This city has already held an Olympics twice, with 1984 being arguably the most successful Games ever, ask any of your neighbors who witnessed it or worked it, they’ll never forget it.
So, yeah, bring it on, forget four years, we can be ready for these Olympics in four days, we’re built for it, we’re meant for it, we’re perfect for it.
We can do this. We will do this.
There will be traffic but, like in 1984, here’s guessing enough people will leave town or work remotely to make it manageable.
There will be heat but, unlike in Paris, we actually have that strange new contraption called air conditioning.
It will be complicated, messy and endlessly frustrating. But if you stick around to buy tickets or volunteer, trust history, it will be wonderful.
Just listen to Steve Miller, a longtime Los Angeles basketball coach who has taught the game at various levels for 51 years yet will never forget those two weeks in 1984.
He was the volunteer who would choose the MVPs for the losing basketball teams at the Sports Arena and accompany them to the press conferences. He had a backstage look at effort and anguish and the sort of passion he has rarely seen since.
“It was a great, great experience for me,” Miller remembered Sunday. “Every single game felt like a game between Garfield and Roosevelt. Everybody diving on the floor, doing whatever it took. Every country, every player, it meant something special to all of them.”
Miller still has photos of his volunteer group hanging on a wall in his home. And he’s hoping to add to his collection.
He’ll be 83 in 2028, but he’s ready for an encore.
“If they’ll have me, I’m there,” he said. “There’s nothing like it.”
Agreed. I’ve covered 10 Olympics, and never once has an individual event failed to inspire and amaze.
It could be the first round of fencing. It could be the final moments in wrestling. No matter the stage of the competition, each of the competitors has devoted their lives to this moment in a way they’ve never done before, each of them fighting not for some professional team or college sweater or rich sponsor, but for their country.
Unlike in virtually every other major sporting event, the Olympics are all about patriotism, pure and simple and chilling. To see hundreds of athletes scrambling for a scrap of a flag or a hint of an anthem catches somewhere beyond the mere chants of, “USA, USA,” catches somewhere deep in the soul.
Hint: Buy tickets to a medal event, any medal event. In watching the ensuing podium ceremony, guaranteed, you will cry. Even if you’ve never heard of the winning athlete and are not particularly fond of their anthem, you will cry.
To see a lone figure triumphantly representing an entire country with their hand over their heart and the voice booming out words is one the coolest things in sports.
Now, to see it happen to an American in America? That’s worth rushing to la28.org and getting in line now.
The venues are historic. The venues are ready. The venues are perfect.
The gymnastics will be at Crypto.com Arena, a place where Kobe once climbed on a scorer’s table like it was a balance beam.
The track and field will be — where else? — at a Coliseum where folks are still talking about Rafer Johnson’s ascent into heaven in 1984.
The swimming will be at SoFi Stadium, and, really, how cool is that? The last time that place made national news, Aaron Donald was appropriately finishing off a Super Bowl championship with a swim move.
Dodger Stadium is, of course, a natural for baseball, maybe good enough to convince Major League Baseball to shut down for two weeks and allow its athletes to compete.
And while nobody yet knows what it’s like to watch basketball at the Intuit Dome, it is supposed to contain this wall of sound, which will make life hell for all the other countries.
In all, it should be an incredible ride, one which officially began Sunday with Tom Cruise theatrically dropping into the Stade de France and carrying the Olympic flag via plane and motorcycle across the world to Venice Beach. Once there, the star of these Olympics was among various local artists welcoming the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics with the brightest of hopes.
They’ll always have Paris.
But we’ll always have Snoop.
