By GRAHAM DUNBAR
PARIS (AP) — The Olympics will always have Paris as their city. Next up for the Summer Games: Los Angeles 2028.
The baton will be passed from one city hosting the Olympic Games for the third time to another at the closing ceremony on Sunday in Paris, and much will be different in four years.
New sports will make their Olympic debuts, selected by organizers in Los Angeles, who are also bringing back others that left the program more than 100 years ago.
While Paris had the Seine, Los Angeles had the Pacific Ocean and its beaches.
Paris’s incomparable historic buildings have given the city a cinematic feel. The streets of Los Angeles are a living history of film and television.
Here’s a look at some of the things that will be different at the upcoming Summer Games.
What sports will be new at the Los Angeles Olympics?
Flag football, squash and obstacle courses. Yes, American Ninja Warrior-style obstacle courses, to replace horses and boost the modern pentathlon.
Sports invited to the Olympic Games are usually played all over the world. In the modern Olympic Games, however, they must also be accepted by the host city.
Flag football is a good choice for Los Angeles organizers, who told IOC members before voting last year that it represents “the future and the spearhead of the international growth of American football.”
Squash will join tennis and badminton as racquet sports at the Games. Could padel or pickleball one day follow?
Squash has lost several previous campaigns and, like flag football, is now going from Games to Games with no guarantee of remaining for the Brisbane Olympics in 2032.
Modern pentathlon has been a staple of the Olympics since 1912, but it has often seemed on the verge of being ousted. Equestrian is now one of five Olympic disciplines, as the IOC requested after a horse was mistreated in Tokyo three years ago.
Obstacle course racing is coming to Los Angeles, with the aim of making the sport more accessible and approachable.
Gone for a century, back in Los Angeles
Lacrosse was last played at the Olympics in 1908, cricket has not been played since 1900.
Both will return in 2028 with the enthusiastic support of the Los Angeles organisers and in shorter, viewer-friendly formats; lacrosse in a six-a-side version, cricket in the aggressive, hard-hitting T20 version that doesn’t require five days per match.
Lacrosse pays homage to the sport’s Indigenous roots: “It’s really authentic to the land that we live on,” LA 2028 President Casey Wasserman said Saturday.
Cricket is coveted to connect especially with over 1.6 billion people in India and Pakistan.
“They’re going to be paying closer attention to the Olympics like never before,” Wasserman said. Cricket will surely be retained in 2032 by Brisbane, home to one of the sport’s most historic venues.
Baseball and softball may have the most unusual history of the modern Olympics: eliminated after the 2008 Beijing Games, back in Tokyo in 2021, back in Paris, back in Los Angeles. Finally, in Oklahoma City, in the case of softball.
Devon Park women’s softball stadium, which will host the Women’s College World Series annually through 2028, is approximately 1,300 miles from the Pacific Ocean.
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said he is open to allowing Major League Baseball players to participate in the Los Angeles Games, but significant challenges remain. Insurance policies for players like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, whose contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, could be the biggest sticking point.
Early opening, early closing
The next Summer Games will start two weeks earlier than these, with an opening ceremony on Friday, July 14.
There is no river in Los Angeles to match the parade of Parisian athletes on boats on the Seine, even though two stadiums will be used instead of one: SoFi Stadium and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will both compete.
The plan involves reversing the schedule of the modern Summer Games.
Track and field events are being held at the Coliseum, as they were in 1932 and 1984, and are now being held a week later, replacing swimming as the flagship sport. Indeed, So-Fi is to be transformed into a spectacular temporary venue for swimming with seating for 38,000 spectators. The races will be postponed until the second full week of action.
The July 30 end date in Los Angeles is the first time a Summer Games in the Northern Hemisphere will end so early since the 1924 Olympics ended July 27 in Paris.
What will the Los Angeles Olympics look like?
The Paris Olympics were often spectacular on screen. Los Angeles practically invented the look of modern film and television and is a creative center of music and fashion.
The message to Los Angeles is: Don’t try to copy Paris.
“Paris is the most beautiful city in the world,” Wasserman said Saturday. “The 2028 Games will be authentically Los Angeles.”
IOC Olympic broadcast director Yiannis Exarchos said Los Angeles “cannot remake a city (Paris) with a 500-year history. Los Angeles is about the future, about new frontiers, about technology.”
Road events such as marathons and cycling can show “where a lot of the mythology of the 20th century was created, because of Hollywood,” Exarchos said in an interview.
“That’s where I’m most intrigued. I find it interesting to see how we can recreate the television geography of Los Angeles.”
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