Cancel the Olympics
Olympic athletes and their host cities deserve better than the violence and corruption that the games dole out.
Every two years, NBC goes all in on American exceptionalism with the return of the Summer and Winter Olympics. And in the past decade in particular, the Olympics have brought some “lighthearted” relief from the endless rage-inducing churn of Trump-then-COVID-then-uprisings-then-insurrection-then-Joe-still-COVID-then-maybe-Trump-again.
As with any opportunity for disassociation from the grind of capitalism, it’s easy to get swept up in the production and online virality of it all — watching beach volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower, or seeing an underdog bring home the gold, or an athlete’s dream hoisted with his own pen-tard. But host cities can’t escape the damage that an Olympic presence is almost guaranteed to generate.
That is why a Los Angeles group called NOlympics LA is fighting its city’s bid for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, even though the bid was approved seven years ago. Working in coalition with dozens of local organizations in housing, policing, and racial justice, NOlympics LA argues that the Olympics accelerates inequality and militarization in its host cities, and exposes vulnerable people to a higher risk of displacement, deportation, detention, and even death. And the group is demanding that the LA City Council reverse what it calls an undemocratic process.
The coalition is in good company. Initially, the U.S. Olympic Committee had selected Boston to lead the country’s bid for the 2024 games, but Boston dropped out after six months thanks to the year-long opposition from groups like No Boston Olympics and No Boston 2024. Then on the international stage, Hamburg dropped out after 52% of residents voted against its bid. Rome’s mayor dropped their bid, citing the debts and concrete that Italians would have to shoulder. And Budapest dropped out after its residents gathered a quarter of a million signatures for a referendum on the bid. Left with only L.A. and Paris, the IOC locked in both bids for 2024 and 2028.
This week, Paris continues to host the 2024 Summer Paralympics Games. But after Paris passed the torch to Los Angeles at the close of the Olympic Games last month, I spoke with Steven Louis, a Los Angeles resident and member of NOlympics LA, about the group’s mission to cancel the 2028 bid. We talked about the fundamental issues of hosting the Olympics, the history of the games in L.A., and how the games hurts athletes, too.
“In every city, something has to give. You can't just wave a magic wand and cure the ails of late stage capitalism. And so we find that the Olympics are the exacerbator and accelerator of all of these issues,” Louis said. “It creates a drive for the city council and for the uber elite to hide it. As we firmly believe and as stats show, hiding it makes the problem worse.”
This interview has been edited and paraphrased for length and clarity.
Why did you join NOlympics LA?
Most people think that our coalition is very anti-sports, but I love sports. I have a background in sports and I have multiple tattoos for my favorite teams, [the] New York Knicks and Giants. Sports are one of the only unique senses of place and localized institutions that we have left. But I take exception to sports being used and manipulated for public risk and private gain.
A lot of LA’s challenges are deeply tied to housing, policing, all types of stuff which can be intentionally obtuse. I don't have a degree in public policy, but I damn sure know all the lines that owners use to screw the fans and shift responsibility onto the public, to make it look like they are taking a loss when they're making a profit.
When did NOlympics LA begin organizing?
Like most modern bids, the 2028 bid was not very desirable. And when some sort of democratic process is instituted, we find out that the average person doesn't know the arrangement, or doesn’t want this happening in their city. The bid came to Los Angeles, not by vote, not by ballot measure, not by a citizen referendum. It was just dropped on us.
The NOlympics LA coalition formed in 2017 as a response to the bid – to create some sort of backstop against a deeply undemocratic process decided by our city council and LA’s rich elites. Can we create something that represents a concerned citizen effort to fight back against the unanimous private support for something that never went to the public?
What problems of the Olympics are missing from the mainstream narrative about the games?
Every single Olympic Games since 1960 has gone over budget. The estimated budget for the L.A. Olympics has already increased at least twice. There is no enforcement against the International Olympic Committee [IOC] going over budget, and the public is on the hook every single time. And spending will continue to increase as the environment gets worse, as civil unrest continues in the U.S. and across the world.
Every major metropolis has intractable issues that won’t be solved with the coming of an Olympics. And host cities have the same playbook of hosting this party for the global elite: gentrify, clean out space for the Olympic Village, spectators, and events, and worry about everything after.
Citations and increased jailing of unhoused people are part and parcel of the project. In Atlanta in 1996 and in L.A. in 1984, cops had blank citations of "African-American” and “homeless" to lock up people just to get them off the street. In Brazil, homes in the favelas were completely razed. In London, rents doubled.
More people go to jail, and police are militarized in order to secure that. These are called “national special security events,” which means police departments get direct aid and cooperate with national agencies like ICE, the U.S. military, border patrol, and the DEA.
Costa-Hawkins is a California law that prohibits rent control on buildings built after a certain date, which gives developers a massive incentive to tear down old housing for new housing at market price. But for rent-controlled housing there’s the Ellis Act, which essentially allows for a building owner to evict people if it’s to get the housing off the market, in order to then convert it into something like a hotel.
The Olympics is an open invitation for developers to make more hotels and nicer housing, which won’t be their problem after the games end. But it will create evictions. These new developments were housing for almost exclusively Black, brown, and poor folks. Rents don't just magically rise. Rents rise because it’s open season for destroying housing in favor of luxury high rises and catering to the global elite.
We can trace a lot of L.A.’s problems back to the 1984 Olympics. There’s a direct line between Rodney King and the 1992 uprisings and the 1984 Games. Police chief Daryl Gates proudly said [the Games] would be the event to make the LAPD what we know it as today – the helicopters, the size and scope and spending, the militarization. They will clean up, at any expense, for weeks of this party to look as nice as possible, no matter how many years the aftershock is felt.
What changes has NOlympics LA seen since the Olympic bid? I remember they said they wouldn’t build anything for this event, but then L.A. built a few stadiums for local teams, and now they’re talking about building transit infrastructure.
The “no build” term is really Trumpish because they're saying we just happened to, around the very same time, start developing like three or four different stadium projects. But they're not for the Olympics.
We've already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on renovations for the LA Memorial Coliseum, which would otherwise not be necessary. Between that and the convention center, there’s now been hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure that doesn’t serve the everyday Angeleno.
No city should be forced into hosting, but it’s uniquely bad for L.A. given its lack of investment in public transit and reliance on cars. Now Mayor Karen Bass just said this is going to be a “car-free” Olympics in 2028. If we were making a new bus line for people who’ve been priced out of the neighborhoods that they work in, that would be amazing. But they're doing this to get people who are in hotels over to the stadiums, knowing these people are spending ungodly amounts of money and will be annoyed to find their hotel is an hour away from the stadium.
Black, brown, and poor communities are relying on the economies created by tourism here. But every host city’s tourism has gone down because these cities are not equipped to handle these events.
Near the Coliseum area and by the BMO soccer stadium we’ve seen a renewed interest in evicting the Flower Drive communities who live there. It's not a coincidence. These communities were not built for profit maximization. Same with Inglewood and the SoFi stadium – these are places where families live largely due to restrictive housing and racist and classist attitudes of the city. But now we're realizing, we can also sell those parts off to the highest bidder, too, – we just need to evict the low-income families living there.
So what are NOlympics LA’s demands?
We want to cancel the games. This Olympics was approved by 15 city council people, most of whom are no longer in office. Multiple of them have been federally indicted for pay-to-play bribery. The mayor who ushered in the bid, Eric Garcetti, is already gone. And by 2028, zero of them will be in office.
The 1984 Olympics are largely considered a triumph because they were famously the games that turned a profit. But that profit created something called the LA84 Foundation, which today is increasing the displacement, privatization, and destruction of public space. The LA84 Foundation is heavily invested in Blackstone, the largest landlord in the country. Their forward facing mission is getting kids into youth sports, but an audit showed that about 3 percent of that money was spent on youth sports.
There is a world where they could put this profit directly into the pockets of taxpayers. But they're using it for private investments that are continuing to fuel that displacement. The cycle keeps going.
When you start a project of cleaning up explicitly Black and brown neighborhoods, then something like Operation Hammer is a foregone conclusion. And then something like Rodney King becomes a foregone conclusion. We directly militarized our own police force to clean up for the party. The party ended and we're surprised that the police didn't just say, alright, back to normal. It really is like a nexus of evil. So many forces that are profiteering off cruelty in this city were based in or are a part of the Olympic Coalition.
At what point will NOlympics LA focus on harm mitigation over ending the bid?
The coalition is made up of housing advocates and tenants organizations. We're going to be fighting the militarization of police, gentrification, and the displacement of Angelenos no matter what. But it is our unique opportunity to push the public imagination and spirit to say we will not accept this. We have the opportunity to push our systems of governance to challenge this for as long as we possibly can. The IOC is a monster of the global ruling class, and people want to see us fight this monster.
Our primary job is to show people that this is an effort of the global investing class; to familiarize people with the means, mechanisms, people, and modes of power that they accomplish this by; and to then bring this fight to people. Our job is to show people that this thing seemingly written in stone by the word of Zeus is actually very flimsy and fake.
In that sense, harm mitigation will always be a part of who we are. But the people we’ve spoken to want to see us lead the fight on something that has been termed by the elites to be "a done deal," but again, has no public buy-in or input.
What is your response to people who see your demand and say, “But what about the games?”
These athletes are being put in precarious situations and are at the behest of really corrupt organizing bodies. The USA Gymnastics system is inundated with legal pressures over Larry Nassar’s systematic abuse of young gymnasts. And in particular to the LA ‘28 bid, Casey Wasserman – chairman of the LA28 board and CEO of a sports agency that would profit from these Olympics – has [allegedly] paid out millions to staffers and was on the Epstein flight logs.
There are so many ways to honor and appreciate these sports. But it would start with removing the authority of these institutions which are historically abusive and obsessed with profit. And I refuse to believe that the only way to allow these sports to flourish is to displace people every two, four years.
We're not arguing for the Lakers to leave Los Angeles because they're bad for the community. But the rotating displacement forces and pay-to-play of it all makes this very unfair. We could be spending all of this time and youth sports energy creating infrastructures that celebrate these athletes year round, and don't rely on games that displace and politic all across the world for them to have their chance.
Is there anything we haven’t covered that you wanted to mention?
These organizations, the IOC, repeatedly lie. They said it was going to be a “no build” Olympics, you see them say this is going to be a “car-free” Olympics. They've said it was gonna be “X” amount of money, now it's “Y” amount of money. And notice all the things they're not guaranteed. They're not guaranteeing that rents are going to stabilize, or that tourism is going to hold. They are not guaranteeing less police spending.
If the Olympics was truly this magical thing that goes from city to city creating all these benefits and making the world a more joyous place, why don’t cities want this? There was a referendum as early as Denver in 1972 and as recently as in Calgary in 2018. When this actually gets up to people, they don't really want it.
This is a campaign, above all, about the right to the city. Does the right to the city belong to you and your neighbors, or does it belong to the IOC, the Casey Wassermans, and the uber-rich? They have more money, but we have more people.
Thank you for talking about this! Big fan of NOlympics and what they’re doing. LA City Hall using $500,000 of taxpayer money for flagpoles is insane. (Source: https://x.com/julesboykoff/status/1825252072708833376?s=46)
OK, so also there's the massive double standard and hypocrisy that the US and its vassals employ regarding PEDs. US athletes are given exemptions for all sorts of drugs that legitimately help performance but evil baddies like Russia and China are either totally excluded or ruthlessly and rigorously tested prior to every event. Something like 5X more often than American and other "western" athletes.