I've been hearing from friends, reading news articles and the basic buzz seems to be the ticket prices are way out of control. Below is a brief clip from an email from my brother...


"So I got my time slot for purchasing Olympics tickets… Man are they expensive! Nothing less than $100, and most things $300 or so. Decision made: sorry, we’ll skip the LA games. I wasn’t even slightly tempted. I mean, $1100 for Track and Field. We went to the final night in Paris where multiple gold medals were awarded and paid about €300 each. And they were excellent seats!"

Looks like there will likely be multiple viewing opportunities (free) for the Men's Road Race. Once the OOC finalizes the course, I imagine cycling fans will be looking for the best photo ops.

This is another part of cycling which I love, its not an elitist sport for the rich to play and watch.
I think all the other sports will cost $$$ to view the events.
Same for participation, no country club membership is needed and a good rider can be obtained relatively cheaply.

I think one of the problems with the ticket prices is that if you are coming from out of town and that visiting the Olympics it's not just a 1 ticket thing. You're going to be her for a week or so and if there are two of you, going to several events could cost a fortune. In this particular case my brother and his wife had offered to take us (my wife and ) to an event. If those tickets were $300 east... just 1 event could set you back $!200. That's insane.

No, not buying during this initial sale to Los Angeles 'locals'. If they discount them closer to the actual dates of the Games I might buy some. I was here in 1984 and the prices were high back then for the prime events. We were just going to watch what was on TV but they discounted a lot of unsold tickets to minor events at the last minute by up to 50%; better to get "butts in the seats" at some revenue than empty seats. We got in for some of the wrestling, volleyball, badminton (meh). We also went to some of the 1st week's track & field, when they have some qualifier races for countries that didn't have anyone eligible by time/distance to get into the main T&F competition the second week. The events I remember were the 100m, 800m, 5000m, long jump, triple jump, shot put & discus. They use those folks to fill out empty spots in the preliminary races of the 'big dance' in the second week. Also went down to Mission Viejo to see the m & w bicycle road races (multiple laps on a 10 mile loop course), easy to get around it on an MTB and the big hill on the course wasn't too far from the start/finish.

road race-7.23.28-scheduled on a sunday. supposedly starting at venice beach. you just know they’ll be including the sammos on both sides of the 405 fwy and pch at some point. rumors include mully and the
rock store climb. dunno the exit point of fhe sammos but would they really tie up beach traffic on both sides of pch on a summer sunday? could see them heading westbound on pch towards pepperdine university and using topanga canyon rd (+ old topanga canyon) or malibu canyon rd to access mully and probably kanan dume to exit the
mountains and drop into the valley. doing any serious climb such as decker, latigo, las flores, yerba buena or deer creek would definitely break up the proceedings. with a race the supposed 250km length, could nibble into the angeles national forest either by placerita canyon, then down little tujunga canyon and/or heading up big tujunga canyon and descending the 2 into la cañada/pasadena. as much as i’d love to see them do a long stretch of the angeles crest hwy (in either direction), that red box to blue ridge segment gets so beat up and is closed too frequently to confidently rely upon. gmr/grr/mt. baldy rd pretty beat up (i’ll take a pre-olympics repave tho!!) currently. griffith park likely to figure in as well. a million (temporary)road closure complaints await! the tt would likely be dtown and incorporate some elysian park, glendale, rose bowl/pasadena and griffith park.

i’m sure the officials/organizers will be going over the old la area tour of california routes/tt maps for what (feasibly) worked and what didn’t. will definitely try to get out on the courses with trying to shoehorn myself into the top of the highest climb most likely.

We'll see if this holds true with all that can happen over rain, landslides and fire seasons.

I liked Mission Viejo in 1984 because it was free (other than the gas, the motels, the food) and you got a chance to see the racers six times. I remember some of the dropped riders got some great cheers from the crowds, including the ones from Malawi who were way out of contention but still pushing along. As the pack zoomed by on one of the middle laps, a rider from (I think) New Zealand tossed their empty bottle out of the pack and it skidded and rolled right up to where we were standing. Still have that bottle as a race memento. Most of the day, it was just a bunch of people out having a good time and able to say "we saw an Olympic event."

Don't know if I'll head over for 2028. I don't think the family would be interested in traveling that far just to see the riders briefly once (and none of them would want to go up into the hills for the loop) so it would probably be solo or with riding friends. Maybe stay east of town, take Metro in with the bike really early that day, see near the start in Venice, then mosey over to Hollywood or Griffith for a later view.

As for free events, don't forget the men's and women's marathons.

I was in LA during the '84 Olympics. The place where I was interning gave me a ticket to see the US basketball team wipe the floor with somebody or other at the Fabulous Forum. The only suspense was whether the US would double the other team's score. As I recall, they didn't but were within 5 or 10 points of doing so. I think the opponent was France, but it may have been Spain. Almost doubling up either one would not happen today; the sport has become far too international.

And as for going this time, that's a hard pass. I'm not that big a fan of either LA or the Olympics, and I do not feel like having to sell a kidney or take up highway robbery to pay for it. I'm sure I'll watch some of it on the telly, but only the stuff that is not on a pay-to-play station. If that means that the only thing I can see is the 43 Man Squammish quarter-finals, so be it (and kudos to you Mad Magazine fans if you get the reference). I loved the Olympics as a kid and some of the individual performances were and can still be breath-taking. Footage of Bob Beamon's long jump and Franz Klammer's downhill run can still give me chills. But between the cheating scandals, the political BS and the utter corruption of the IOC, my former love has turned to occasional mild interest increasingly tempered by disgust.