History
Los Angeles, Three-Time Olympic City: 1932, 1984, 2028
Only London and Paris have hosted three Summer Games. LA joins them in 2028.
July 19, 2026Updated September 29, 20265 min read
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The Three-Timers Club
Only two cities have hosted three Summer Olympic Games: London (1908, 1948, 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924, 2024). In 2028, Los Angeles becomes the third, and each of its earlier Games shaped the one coming.
1932: The Games Nobody Else Wanted
Los Angeles won the 1932 Olympics essentially unopposed, and then the Great Depression arrived. Athletes struggled to afford the trip; some federations could not send full teams. What LA built still shows up at every Games: the first purpose-built Olympic Village housed the male athletes in Baldwin Hills, the victory podium and medal-ceremony rituals took the standardized form we still recognize, and the Memorial Coliseum was the center of it all.
The city put on Games that worked in the worst economy of the century.
1984: The Games That Saved the Olympics
By the late 1970s the Olympics were in serious trouble: Munich's tragedy, Montreal's debt, Moscow's boycott. Los Angeles was again effectively the only bidder for 1984, and voters refused public financing. Peter Ueberroth's organizing committee ran the Games as a privately financed enterprise, on existing venues, funded by sponsorship and broadcast rights. No host had done that before.
Even with a Soviet-led boycott, the 1984 Games produced a surplus in the hundreds of millions that has funded Southern California youth sports through the LA84 Foundation for four decades. Every host city since has studied the model, and 2028 is running it again on purpose.
The 1984 Games also gave the torch relay its modern American form: a coast-to-coast journey that let ordinary citizens carry the flame for the first time. (How that relay changed things.)
2028: The Inheritance
From 1932, 2028 gets the Coliseum, set to become the first stadium in the world to host three Olympic Games, now paired with SoFi Stadium in a two-venue opening on July 14, 2028. From 1984 it gets the no-new-permanent-venues, privately financed model, scaled up to 36 sports, 49 venues, and roughly 14 million tickets.
It also adds two firsts: the first Paralympic Games hosted in Los Angeles, and the first Olympic torch relay to visit all 50 states.
Why This History Is Personal
I run past this history every week, down the coast from Santa Monica in the same ocean light that sold the 1932 organizers on California. Three times in a century, when the Olympics needed a host that could deliver, it was Los Angeles.
In 1984 the relay ended with Rafer Johnson climbing the Coliseum stairs. The 2028 relay ends at the July 14 Opening Ceremony, which LA28 is staging across the Coliseum and SoFi Stadium. I want to carry one mile of it on the way. If you'd back a runner from Santa Monica, add your name here.