LA 2028
What Milano Cortina 2026 Reveals About LA 2028
A regional Games, a long relay and a few ideas LA should borrow
February 5, 20264 min read
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I watched Milano Cortina 2026 the way a runner watches the lane next to him: partly as a fan, mostly taking notes. Three of those notes apply directly to what happens here in two years.
A Regional Games Can Still Feel Like One Games
Milano Cortina spread the Winter Olympics across northern Italy on a scale no host had tried: ice in Milan, snow in Cortina and the mountain clusters of Bormio, Livigno and the Val di Fiemme, a closing night in the Roman arena at Verona. The competition map stretched across the Alps, and on television it still read as one Games. The organizers leaned into the map, lighting two cauldrons simultaneously, one at Milan's Arco della Pace and one in Cortina's Piazza Dibona, a first in Olympic history.
LA 2028 makes the same bet in summer. Venues run from the Valley to Long Beach, and the opening ceremony is planned across two stadiums, SoFi and the Coliseum. Italy showed that a Games can sprawl and still hang together if its symbols reach across the distance.
The Relay Before the Games
The relay ran 63 days in Italy: 10,001 torchbearers, 110 provinces, all 20 regions, roughly 12,000 kilometers. On January 22 the flame crossed Venice's Grand Canal on traditional boats. In December it passed through Pompeii in the hands of Jackie Chan, one stage among dozens where global stars shared the road with hometown torchbearers.
For two months, the Games belonged to towns that will never host an event. A week before the opening ceremony, Arianna Fontana carried the flame through her own Valtellina, then carried Italy's flag into San Siro, then won three medals.
LA28 has announced a torch relay through all 50 states, running more than three months, which CEO Reynold Hoover has said will "bind the nation to LA and to California." No American generation has seen its flame up close, everywhere, in one season. Italy just showed what that does to a host country's mood.
LA Already Knows About Restraint
Milano Cortina leaned on existing venues and temporary structures wherever it could. Not perfectly; the rebuilt sliding track in Cortina drew years of argument. But the direction was clear, and LA has pointed the same way since before it won the bid: no new permanent venues, and borrow the infrastructure the region already owns.
LA has done this before. The 1932 Olympics gave the city the Coliseum tradition, and 1984 turned fiscal restraint into a template the movement still studies, complete with a torch relay that changed everything and a surplus that has funded Southern California youth sports for four decades. Milano Cortina confirmed the approach still works.
What I Hope LA Borrows
The gondola, or the principle behind it. When the flame reached Venice, Venice carried it the way only Venice could, and the relay bent to the place.
LA's version is easy to picture. The flame moving down the beach path at dawn, past the lifeguard towers. Through Mariachi Plaza with the trumpets going. Along the LA River on a bike. Up the stairways of a hundred neighborhoods in a hundred languages. If the relay treats Los Angeles as one more parade route, it will miss the city. I hope it lets each neighborhood carry the flame its own way.
Two Years Out
Milano Cortina made the case that the torch relay is where the Olympics reaches ordinary people, and I intend to be one of them, on a stretch of road in Santa Monica. Start with everything we know about the 50-state relay, and if someone in your life should carry it, nominate them.