Olympic Reform Efforts Are Setting Us Up for a Double Disaster
The Olympics have always been sold as temporary — a two-week spectacle of worldwide unity and athletic exceptionalism that brings honor (and infrastructure) to its rotating host city. With LA28 now less than 1,000 days away, the myth of Olympic legacy is breaking down, with reform campaigns multiplying and officials scrambling to make word salad slide decks on Olympic ideals and proposed legacy projects. The writing is on the wall: people don’t want the Olympics in their city. But for the people of Los Angeles, LA28 brings the possibility of something even more alarming. What if the Olympics never left?
This is the Forever Games, or a permanent state of mega-event hosting in our city. Several former host leaders, reeling from the disastrous effects of the Olympics visiting their communities, have spoken in favor of this idea. In Los Angeles, the Forever Games is being championed by Olympic chair Casey Wasserman and his LA Sports and Entertainment Commission. In tandem, local developers are setting their sights beyond new stadium and venue construction—plotting instead to develop large-scale “entertainment districts” that will more rapidly gentrify already-vulnerable communities. To understand this threat and learn from the history of failed Olympic reforms that surround it, we should take a look at the past few Summer Games. Here’s the track record:
London 2012
Londoners were promised Olympic legacies, like infrastructure and a long term investment in youth sports. However, over a decade removed, the only legacy is one of abject failure. Homelessness increased 122% in the years immediately following the London 2012 Olympics. Youth Sports participation also decreased. Reuters noted in 2017 that, “Five years after London Olympics, Games’ legacy is off-track for locals”, and a decade following the games, The Guardian summarized their Olympic legacy in the headline, “‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out”.
Rio 2016
Rio was sold an array of Olympic promises in the lead up to 2016. Take Gaunabara Bay in Rio, for example. Officials promised that the famously polluted body of water would be cleaned up for 2016. Instead of the state addressing the issue, they floundered on doing anything, and civil society has been waging a near decade struggle to detoxify it. A year after the Games, Olympic organizers promised, as they always do, to stay on budget. In 2017, Business Insider reported that “The Rio Olympics were a financial disaster and it keeps getting worse”. You can read more of how hollow Olympic promises in Rio were being tracked here.
Tokyo “2020”
Like all Olympic boosters, Shinzo Abe promised that Tokyo 2020 would be a boon for tourism. Instead, as it always does, it just displaced the usual tourism that the area experiences. “One journalist noted how ‘the Shinagawa neighborhood of Musashi-Koyama — a vibrant maze of tiny alleyways that once housed dozens of small eateries, tapas restaurants and bars — is now a virtual ghost town’”. Tokyo parks saw increased policing and storefronts shuttered one after another, victims of rising property prices and rents. Tokyo 2020 boosters also promised spending would be conservative. In the end, the Games went severely over budget (which they always do), to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, pandemic notwithstanding. And instead of delivering transparency, the Tokyo Games also featured a wide-sweeping bribery scandal.
And yet, despite these glaring problems caused by Tokyo 2020 and a broad movement against the Olympics across Japan to expose these issues, Olympic boosters capitalized on the immediate aftermath of Tokyo 2020 to push for an Olympic bid in Sapporo for 2030. That bid was ultimately defeated by the Olympic resistance movement, but only insofar as it’s being pushed back for a later date, 2034 or perhaps 2038 if necessary. The IOC is setting its sights on Japan, with the rationale that if you can get away with it once, why not again and again? LA faces the same dilemma.
LA 2028
To pick just two examples, LA’s own bid was sold as a “No Build” Olympics — an alleged Olympic reform, and the city is now in the midst of negotiating how many regulations can be elided for 2028 Olympic building projects. The LA28 bid was promised to be “car-free” — another alleged reform — which has now been downgraded to “transit first” and will feature an official provider of chartered helicopters.
Failed Reform of Athlete Abuse
The Olympics aren’t getting any better. But there is a lesson to learn from this long history of broken promises and failed negotiations: reform doesn’t work. Because the IOC operates above accountability, negotiating small tweaks to its civic commitments will never be an effective strategy. The IOC does whatever it wants, remaining unaccountable in the lead up to and delivery of the Games. Once the Games are over, there is nothing to compel them, or local officials, to follow through on anything they promised.
One clear example of this is SafeSport, a compromised oversight body created to supposedly curb rampant sexual abuse of Olympic athletes. By any objective measure SafeSport has consistently failed in its stated mission, and the Olympics remain unaccountable and opaque as ever.
The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the Olympics makes the prospect of a Forever Games even more frightening. The institutions, organizations, businesses, and individuals who either partner directly with LA28 or call for a “better Olympics” are helping to contribute to this dangerous idea, knowingly or not.
The Forever Games
Historically, the Olympics would wait a generation or two — enough time for the cultural memory of harm to fade — before attempting to return to a prospective host city. But with global bids dwindling, the Olympic machine is now circling back faster than ever. After Tokyo 2020, Japan immediately floated a 2030 bid for Sapporo.
Over the past decade, as Olympic popularity among potential host cities has nosedived, many pundits and boosters have suggested that the problem with the Olympics is the existing rotating city model. They’ve gone on to suggest that Los Angeles could be one of — or the sole — permanent home for the Games. And if LA28 is successful in whitewashing the harm that comes with them (their board members and boosters control a huge chunk of international and local media, after all), we will be setting ourselves up for a never-ending barrage of mega-events, and that’s a reality this extremely fragile city cannot bear.
For the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission, which Wasserman funds, the Forever Games is literally the plan. The LASEC “is dedicated to hosting the world’s leading sports and entertainment events in Los Angeles that drive lasting social and economic impact in our communities.”
When Casey takes off his LASEC hat and puts on his LA28 hat, the social and economic impact of hosting an event that invites federal immigration authorities and supercharges gentrification and displacement suddenly becomes unrelated to hosting mega-events. Homelessness is “not LA28s problem to solve… [It’s] everybody’s problem to solve”. If the LASEC gets their way, LA will be hosting mega-events every year, inviting ICE to terrorize Angelenos permanently.
This simply can’t happen, and we will continue to make this case to those who have ignored the entire history of failed Olympic reforms and insist that “this time, it’s different”.
No it isn’t.
Efforts to “make the best” of the Olympics — like the Fair Games campaign’s call for an “Olympic Wage” — will be used to demand more mega-events. But economic benefits for a small group of union workers are not worth the violent policing of marginalized non-union workers, the decimation of city budgets, and the deepening of this city’s orientation towards tourist desires over residents’ needs.
Fighting against LA28 isn’t just about what’s going to happen in 2028; it’s a much longer uphill battle to make LA prioritize its own people over pernicious corporate interests.
Pretending that a “no harm” version of the Olympics is possible is not only extremely naive. It’s dangerous for what happens to us after 2028.