LA28 Olympics Presale Tickets Spark Backlash Over High Prices and Steep Fees

When Los Angeles won the rights to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, city officials promised an accessible Games that would put Angelenos front and centre. Six years out from the opening ceremony, that promise is already being tested by reality.

The LA28 organising committee opened its resident presale lottery on 2 April, setting aside hundreds of thousands of tickets exclusively for locals in southern California and Oklahoma City, which will host canoe slalom and softball events. The headline figure was an appealing one: tickets as low as 28 dollars. For many residents who logged on during their designated time slots, however, that number proved illusory.

The cheapest inventory vanished rapidly, particularly for high-demand sports like gymnastics and track and field. Kathy Dorn, a Los Angeles resident who registered for the lottery on the morning of 3 April, told the Guardian she was alarmed to find gymnastics tickets already exhausted during her window. Rather than the bargain she had anticipated, she ended up spending roughly 1,200 dollars on tickets covering rhythmic and artistic gymnastics preliminaries and sailing finals. She had also wanted to attend a swimming session but baulked at a price of 558 dollars per ticket for a two-hour event.

The frustration was compounded by an additional 24 percent service fee applied at checkout, a charge LA28 said was designed to fund customer operations throughout the Games. One Los Angeles resident told NBC Los Angeles he spent 11,000 dollars on eight tickets for track and field, with nearly 400 dollars of that attributable to the service fee alone.

Gigi Gutierrez, an LA28 spokesperson, defended the pricing, pointing out that tickets for marquee events like swimming and soccer were comparable to other major sporting spectacles such as the Super Bowl and the upcoming World Cup. Reynold Hoover, the chief executive of the LA Olympics, noted that hundreds of thousands of the 28-dollar tickets had sold successfully and described them as the lowest-priced Olympic tickets in modern history.

The controversy has cut deepest in Inglewood, a majority Black and Latino community that will host the opening ceremony as well as swimming and basketball inside the newly built Intuit Dome and SoFi Stadium. Residents there have watched an entertainment district rise around them in recent years, and some worry the Olympics will bring gridlock and disruption without commensurate economic benefit to their own businesses. As one Inglewood native told CBS Los Angeles, the community should not merely bear the burden of hosting the Games but should also be able to take part in them.

LA28 is operating under a budget exceeding 7.1 billion dollars and has committed to covering costs without relying on public funds, a significant shift from recent host cities in Greece and Brazil that left behind debts and derelict infrastructure. Whether that financial discipline can be achieved while keeping the Games within reach for the local communities who will live with the disruption remains the central tension as Los Angeles counts down to 2028.