Olympic Corruption Dashboard

This dashboard was inspired primarily by the fact that of the 12 city council members who voted in 2017 to bring the 2028 Olympics to LA, three have been indicted for corruption tied to real estate deals in the last four years. (If you don’t know, the Olympics always function as an excuse for land grabs.) Three indictments!!! That’s Jose Huizar, Mitch Englander, and Curren Price. (So that’s NOT including the indictment of Mark Ridley-Thomas, who advocated for bringing the Olympics to LA in his former role as County Supervisor before being indicted for corruption while he was a city council member.) The dashboard’s Who Gave Us the Games? ring shows us that of the 12 council members who voted on our LA 2028 Host City Contract, only three have avoided indictment, rejection at the ballot box, and/or getting caught on tape being extremely racist. The vote on the Host City Contract was always a rushed, undemocratic, and illegitimate rubber stamp. What we’ve since learned about the people who approved it only underscores why we should rip up that contract and cancel the Olympics.

The Corrupt Local Leaders ring provides more details on the council members caught up in corruption and racist, anti-tenant gerrymandering scandals. We hope we don’t have to update this box as more scandals emerge, but we won’t be surprised if we do.

Olympic corruption is as old as the modern Games themselves. But in our rings on IOC Member Corruption and Olympic Corruption Around the World, we’ve so far focused more on twenty-first century crimes to emphasize that Olympic corruption is also VERY. MUCH. ONGOING. These two lists are works-in-progress! So send us your suggestions for the people and incidents we should add, from breaking news about mega-event misdeeds to historical examples of five-ring fraud.

The final ring is LA28 Board Conflicts of Interest. We track the board members whose companies have been paid directly by LA28, board members whose companies stand to profit from LA hosting the Olympics, and board members whose business and political ties begin to show the myriad ways that networks of wealth and power are driving the real interests behind these “Games.” Y’ALL, did you know that LA28 paid one of LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman’s companies $2.91 million over five years? COME ONNNNN. All of this box’s figures come straight from LA28’s publicly available tax documents, and yet LA news media have barely blinked. If LA28 disagrees with the figures we’ve listed, we WELCOME them to show their version of the math 🙂 Again, we’ll be building out this list as we go, so send us tips and suggestions!

#CancelTheOlympics