Los Angeles has made it official — several 2028 Summer Games events will be held in Oklahoma City.
But hosting Olympic canoe slalom and softball at the next Summer Games comes with a price tag. A $34.5 million guarantee to LA28 organizers is on the agenda of Tuesday’s Oklahoma City Council meeting, according to a report in The Oklahoman.
“It’s not a check we expect to write out‚" Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt told the newspaper.
Holt said the $34.5 million would only be paid if the city fails to live up to its agreement with the L.A. Games, an amount reportedly based on what it would cost organizers to relocate the events to the Los Angeles area.
“From their perspective, we’ve committed to do this,” the mayor said. “They committed to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) these events will happen. They are relying on us to keep the commitment they made.”
Oklahoma City has yet to estimate the economic impact of holding Olympic events at Oklahoma City’s Riversport Rapids, a whitewater course along the Oklahoma River and at Devon Park, the home of USA Softball, but up to 200,000 spectators are anticipated, the newspaper reported.
The competitions are being moved some 1,300 miles away from southern California in an effort to keep the cost of organizing the Games down by utilizing existing facilities rather than building new permanent venues, an initiative pushed by the IOC.
Using the specialized facilities in Oklahoma has been on the table for several years, but the venues weren’t approved by the Los Angeles City Council until late last month. While these are the first out of state venues finalized, they may not be the last.
There is no decision yet on a location for cricket although New York has been touted as a possibility. Both softball and cricket are among the new sports added by the IOC to what will be Los Angeles’ third Olympics, along with baseball, flag football, squash and lacrosse.
Like their California counterparts, organizers of Utah’s 2034 Winter Games do not plan any new permanent venues. Utah’s next Olympics will use nearly all of the venues from the 2002 Winter Games and build a temporary big air skiing and snowboarding jump in downtown Salt Lake City.
But there is a big difference. All of the competition sites for the 2034 Games are within an hour of the athletes village, once again set to be situated in student housing at the University of Utah.
Such compactness, even for the smaller Winter Games, is an exception. The 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy, are described as the most widespread in Olympic history, with Milan about a six-hour drive from the mountain ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo.
And the 2026 Games starting next February may have an even more far-flung venue. The bobsled, luge and skeleton track in Lake Placid, New York, is a back-up if a new track still under construction isn’t ready in time, although that appears increasingly unlikely.