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≡ LA28 UPDATE TO ASOIF ≡
“It’s a big task, but we’re up for it.”
That was LA28’s Chief Sport and Games Delivery Officer Shana Ferguson, telling the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) General Assembly in Lausanne (SUI) about the challenge of planning and staging the 36-sport 2028 Olympic Games.
She explained that where the organizing committee had less than 200 staff at the end of 2024, there are 720 LA28 employees at present, to balloon to 6,000 full-time staff at the time of the Games, the largest staffing number disclosed so far.
The seventh International Olympic Committee Coordination Commission meeting on the LA28 Games will be held from 2-4 June in Los Angeles. LA28 expects to announce more information on the routes for the road cycling events, along with other new details about the Games.
Four Olympic Village facilities will be used, primarily at UCLA in Los Angeles and in Oklahoma City for the softball and canoe slalom events, plus the University of California, Irvine in Orange County for the southern venues and another satellite facility in northeastern Los Angeles County.
Ferguson, who came to the organizing committee from USA Swimming, also gave a fascinating insight into the day-to-day development of the 2028 plan around four major development steps in order to create “team building and additional training”:
● Talk-throughs: in process
● Walk-throughs: in process
● Tabletops: have begun
● Simulations: coming in 2027
Ferguson explained that the staff teams for sport and for venue management, often seen as separate in the past, have been co-located inside LA28 and work together, side-by-side, sport-by-sport:
● “The fact that our team is sitting in clusters already helps us with these talk-throughs. Every day our teams are conceptualizing how these venues will run, how these fields of play need to be operated and how, certainly, we deliver.”
● “Walk-throughs, at our venues. Again, 50 competition venues, you can imagine the number of site visits we have is almost untenable, but frankly, I think we’re wearing out our welcome at these venues already. Remember, this is a no-build Games, so every single venue is already in operation, many of them with 365 days of existing programming, right, so we’re doing many, many, many site visits; certainly, we’re prioritizing field of play and technology at this point. But in those walk-throughs and those site visits, we’re talking about what if? What will this be like? What will this feel like? How will be manage through this particular obstacle?”
● “Tabletops have started in earnest. Our CEO, Reynold Hoover, as you know, is a retired three-star Army General. You can imagine that tabletops and simulations to somebody of that caliber.
“We have tabletops once every three-to-four weeks as a senior leadership team. As a matter of fact, I am heading back tomorrow because we have a mandatory tabletop, all day, in person on Friday … we’re doing these, we’re a little more than two years out, but we have quite a bit of work to do in simulating what it will feel like at Games time and it is not too early for us to start that.”
● “And then certainly rehearsals and event testing – sport-specific – is our key cog in this entire wheel.”
She explained that the testing strategy for LA28 is focused at this stage on sport, technology, venue infrastructure and event management and will be done in waves, starting in the third quarter of 2027 – primarily at outdoor venues – then in the winter of 2027-28 for indoor venues, and close to the time of the Games, but just prior in May and June of 2028 once the sites are in LA28’s possession. She added:
“We’ll have some fully-owned testing events, but some that are co-owned or delivered, maybe by some U.S. [National Governing Bodies] or maybe some of you in the IF world, or by our league event delivery partners.
“And then there are some third-party events; certainly, it would be foolish of us not to take advantage of existing events.”
Sport Senior Vice President Nicco Campriani shared the LA28 sport staffing plan, with an organizational chart showing 15 members of the Sports department functional management team, plus 40 sports managers or sports experts as the sport manager team is built out. They work together in an integrated structure with the 11 event management cluster leads.
He added that “the volunteer portal is going to open this summer. More than 60,000 volunteers; one of the 60,000 volunteers, 20,000 – one third of the total – are allocated to sport.”
Campriani, a three-time Olympic champion in shooting and who previously worked at the International Olympic Committee, assured the federations, “We’re earning your trust every day and we’re going to continue to do so.”
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