2Ø2Ø NOlympics Timeline

2020 has been a year of reckonings, real and performative. Many things have emulated change, and some things actually have changed.

In this decade-long year our work has accelerated and taken on new dimensions as the material inequities around us have magnified and sharpened. NOlympics has continued to grow our coalition, membership, and base. We’ve formed new alliances locally and globally, and we’ve fortified long-standing ones, while taking part in teach-ins, strategic meetings, City and County sessions, actions, car caravans and protests. COVID has forced us all to take inventory, often of what’s lacking or been denied to us.

2020 is a year where our once-obscured targets have become more visible, disliked, and discredited city-wide. We heard our demands echoed by Angelenos protesting police brutality, Eric Garcetti, and City Council’s violent brand of neoliberalism and survival-by-lottery. Ideas that were once considered radical, like abolishing the police or canceling the Olympics, have become commonplace.

Our institutions have failed to meet the moment. Police continue to be actors of state violence—ripping residents from otherwise vacant homes, murdering with no accountability, and harming protestors. Billionaires continue to develop mega stadiums and hotels as if it’s a divine right. Speculators just invested $100B in Airbnb. Public housing continues not being built as hotels and luxury condos sit vacant. Schools and stadiums remain sites of displacement and policing. The local press—led by the LA Times—continues to perform stenography for police, developers, and sports billionaires. Even though its braintrust claims to have “reckoned” with racism, the LAT has failed to do anything material to change what it is and who it serves. Our electeds continue to serve capital interests, though some of them, maybe, possibly, are beginning to see the writing on the wall.

What has hopefully changed for the long term is that people are paying attention to our city and building deep pressure against its crumbling institutions. We’ve seen this manifested in the occupations and reclaiming of space from the Ritz Carlton to Echo Park Lake, Hollywood to El Sereno, UCLA to Venice Beach and beyond, in the deep organizing continuing and proliferating throughout the region, in outcomes at the local polls, and in the smaller moments of solidarity in our day-to-day lives. And though our most basic needs fail to be met by officials, we continue to do their work for them, for free and in full force.

The 2020 Olympics were the last major event to be postponed or canceled in the world. The drawn-out process only further laid bare IOC’s reckless quest for profit. People around the world have watched the IOC unequivocally compromise public health and flush away whatever goodwill the brand may have had. We’ve joined our allies in Japan and around the world in demanding the cancellation of the games.

Cancel them in Tokyo. Abolish them everywhere. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that Reform—whether reforming the Olympics, gentrification, or the police—is a nonstarter.

So here’s a look back at 2Ø2Ø from where we’re sitting.

January

February

  • Homes Not Hotels canvassing and organizing continues in Hollywood
  • Donald Trump and Chad Wolf travel to LA to join Casey Wasserman and the head of the USOPC for an LA28 press conference where Trump threatens to clean up LA’s immigrants and homeless
  • Artist and UCLA professor Judy Baca talks to NOlympics about her mural and the artistic legacy of the 1984 Olympics
  • Coalition rally at Echo Park Lake to stop evictions of unhoused residents
  • NOlympics joins Street Fight Radio to talk Tokyo and the Recovery Games
  • The pandemic hits Japan while government and Olympic officials try to downplay the crisis
  • LA Mayor Eric Garcetti appears on the TV show Blackish

March

  • Another Olympic bribery scandal erupts as Tokyo 2020 sponsor Dentsu is caught bribing for the bid
  • The NOlympics Anywhere transnational coalition publishes their Cancel—Not Postpone—the Olympics demands
  • Jackie Lacey’s husband pulls gun on BLM co-founder Melina Abdullah
  • Unhoused residents in El Sereno reclaim and occupy vacant state-owned homes
  • Push for Tokyo 2020 cancellation gains momentum
  • March 4 – LA declares State of Emergency
  • March 8 – Despite the pandemic, Garcetti and LA officials make sure the LA Marathon happens, helping COVID spread city-wide and across continents
  • March 13 – LA orders first “lockdown”
  • March 23 – LA City Council cancels several weeks’ worth of meetings, actions begin at Councilmembers’ homes and Garcetti’s mansion
  • March 24 – The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are (finally) postponed — embarrassingly, and only after worldwide pushback, they’re the last event of their scale to be canceled or postponed
  • Mitch Englander, LA28 Booster and Councilman who recently “stepped down” to pursue work with Oakview Group (LA28 partner), is charged with corruption related to development

April

  • Project Roomkey launches, promising hotels as shelter for 15,000 unhoused Angelenos (but will eventually fail miserably and only result in a few thousand people getting rooms)
  • Food Not Rent fund is established by the LA Tenants Union to support tenants on rent strike
  • USA gymnastics coach suspended for abuse
  • Protests erupt at City Council members’ homes as they fail to meet the bare minimum the moment requires; President Nury Martinez responds by telling cops to issue tickets to protestors
  • NOlympics’ holds first virtual teach-in “Who Wins and Who Loses When the Olympics Come to Town”
  • The head of Eric Garcetti’s The Mayor’s Fund “steps down” the day after the State of Qatar “donates” $5M to the Mayor’s Fund
  • No Vacancy CA launches with actions across LA and CA, demanding the seizure and occupancy of vacant hotels, featuring actions at hotels across LA (including the one Garcetti co-owns)
  • #LA28 booster Rick Caruso is elected to Trump’s economic advisory committee

May

  • No Vacancy CA organizers, including an unhoused resident of Echo Park Lake, occupy the heavily subsidized Ritz Carlton as demands for hotel commandeering intensify
  • NOlympics Transnational Teach-In Series begins
  • Jules Boykof’s new book, NOlympians, is published
  • May 25 – George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police; BLM protests happen throughout the city 
  • May 28 – UD Day report released by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, forecasting 365,000 LA household evictions in the upcoming crisis
  • May 30 – In response to uprisings, Garcetti deploys federal troops to enforce a curfew
  • In Australia, the spread of COVID is linked directly to the LA Marathon; the spread also halts work on 2032 Olympics bid
  • LA Times publishes another press release for the LA84 Foundation—a “non-profit” with significant ties to the LA Times: ad sales, media partners, the former LAT chief of staff is LA84’s current CEO—but scoffs when we bring up glaring conflicts of interest
  • NOlympics’ Anti-Olympic Summit Diary is published, detailing the first large scale transnational anti-Olympic gathering
  • NOlympics appears on Olympic booster podcast Around The Rings
  • Tokyo Olympic Committee goes after FCCJ for publishing coronavirus parody cover
  • The Olympics announce $800M COVID package (where $650M goes to the IOC)

June

  • Jackie Robinson Stadium, abandoned site of a killed VA housing project, is used as field jail for protestors
  • NOlympics Teach-In: Criminalization of homelessness in Tokyo & LA with Theo Henderson and Hangorin no Kai
  • NOlympics Teach-In: Environmental destruction in Pyeongchang with the Anti-Pyeongchang Olympics Alliance
  • NOlympics Teach-In: Organizing to abolish the Olympics in Paris with Non aux JO 2024
  • SoFi worker Juan Becerra, 37, from Brownsville, Texas dies after falling 110 feet due to unsafe working conditions. He is survived by a wife and three children.
  • California Facial Recognition Bill put on hold
  • Knock LA publishes an analysis of LA28’s high risk Olympic budget and a piece exploring who is considered disposable in Olympic host cities
  • NOlympics supports LITU and the tenants at Inglewood Garden who are now living in the shadow of SoFi Stadium and fighting the landlords trying to push them out

July

August

September

  • LA28 brand launch falls flat
  • LA Times coverage of launch is used in LA28 ads, proving it really can’t get more on the nose
  • NOlympics hosts a Trivia Night
  • LA Times’ Messy September: LA Times has to acknowledge its “summer of turmoil and scandals” and “reckons” with racism, while one of its reporters, David Wharton, tells NOlympics that LA media has intentionally written us out of its work
  • Garcetti compares unhoused people to horseshit then goes on record to say that, “In a good economy, homelessness goes up”
  • Actions online and IRL: NOlympians join members of LITU to protest the opening of SoFi Stadium while others take part in a tweet storm linking SoFi’s record of displacement and the Olympics #HomesNotGames
  • SoFi Stadium Death #3: Sergio Rojo, 25, was experiencing homelessness when he died of “sharp force injury” on the SoFi Stadium grounds.
  • IOC says Tokyo 2020 will happen whether or not a vaccine does, that the Tokyo Olympics will be “Games that conquered COVID”

October

November

  • Vancouver elites announce potential new 2030 bid as officials immediately push back, citing the harm incurred for Vancouver 2010
  • 2020 Election results in several wins for LA left as entrenched #LA28 boosters Herb Wesson and David Ryu are embarrassed, voters reject Jackie Lacey and pass Measure J
  • Kevin de Leon’s first night in office is commemorated by a Union de Vecinos Eastside local of LATU Dia de los Muertos action [photos]
  • NOlympics turns out to PLUM Committee to push back against whack-a-mole Airbnb loopholes which keep surfacing
  • NOlympics and Helltrap Nightmare spend Friday the 13th raising $11K for LATU’s #FoodNotRent rent strike fund
  • Thomas Bach confronted by Hangorin no Kai
  • Second wave of home reclaimings in El Sereno are met with police violence

December

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