As the Paris Games come to an end, Los Angeles enters the Olympic batter's box (2024)

PARIS — “As soon as we come back with the flag on (August) 12th, it is no longer just theoretical, it is literally, we move from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box. And we’ll be sitting in there for four years.”

This was Casey Wasserman, sports impresario, Wasserman family scion, patron of presidents, friend and partner to some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment and, most important for this moment, the chairman of LA28, the organizing committee for the next Summer Olympics, four years hence in Los Angeles.

He was sitting in a conference room in the organization’s Paris offices, days away from accepting that aforementioned flag during the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Like nearly everyone else that experienced these Games, Wasserman could gush for hours about how Paris had set its North Star and reached it.

A decade ago, the French had set up a plan for a people’s Olympics, to break the Games out from the remote parks, to enmesh them within the life of the city, and they had pretty much pulled it off. At great inconvenience and expense — though not nearly as much as permanent stadiums would have cost — the Paris organizers had constructed temporary venues in the middle of their stunning capital.

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Skateboarders zipping across Place de la Concorde. Volleyball players spiking balls into sand beneath the Eiffel Tower. Triathletes swimming in the Seine, the city’s sewer for more than a century, for crying out loud. Paris had delivered a new idea for the Olympics, an institution desperately in need of a reboot after a series of grin-and-bear-it spectacles. The past decade had wrought partnerships with governments hostile to human rights in China and Russia, vast disorganization in Rio, two Olympics without spectators because of the coronavirus pandemic.

All of this was fantastic. Big ideas that had ultimately swept the French along onto a wave of summer bliss during a summer of strife.

It’s just that Wasserman had spent a lot of time thinking about smaller things. God, he was going to need a lot of chain-link fencing. And signage. Signs everywhere telling people where to go.

He breathed a sigh of relief every time he saw an usher confused about where to direct a spectator in a temporary stadium. For the most part, Los Angeles is using existing stadiums. The ushers at Sofi Stadium will be well familiar with their surroundings.

He spent lots of time fiddling with the app that Paris organizers built to manage their transport system. He made a note to reach out to any number of West Coast tech companies who might be able to adapt their transportation widgets to the needs of the L.A. Games, because everyone asks him about traffic and travel.

They’re figuring it out he said. Some ideas on the board include truck deliveries during overnight hours only, something that was done for the 1984 Games, and quasi-mandatory remote work in areas around venues.

Big ideas? There are some mid-sized ones already out there.

— The world’s biggest sporting spectacle comes to the world’s greatest and most modern collection of stadiums, allowing the athletes to be the stars rather than, say, the obelisk at Place de la Concorde. And volleyball on the beach in Santa Monica should be pretty epic.

— Bringing a generation and a half of sports fans from the world’s largest economy that has never experienced a home Games into the Olympic fold, using everything from the creative energy of the world’s entertainment capital, to the NFL, which got flag football into the Olympic program.

— Removing as many barriers to entry into youth sports in Southern California as possible, with a $160 million investment that is already subsidizing league entry fees. Forty years ago, the last Los Angeles Olympics delivered nearly $100 million to the LA84 foundation, which made similar local investments that helped spawn countless sports endeavors and a few notable careers.

As young girls, Venus and Serena Williams played on tennis courts the LA84 Foundation helped build. James Harden played basketball on its playgrounds.

Wasserman’s three weeks in Paris weren’t about the biggest ideas though. There was a little of that, but this was largely an operational research mission. Los Angeles secured the rights to host the Games in 2017, 11 years of lead time that was supposed to give them two shots at seeing how the Summer Olympic machine worked. Maybe one could have focused on the big picture and the other on the nitty gritty.

COVID-19 happened. Tokyo prohibited spectators. So much for that concept.

Hence Wasserman’s memos-to-self about chain link fencing and signage. Best to order it sooner rather than later to avoid getting gouged on last-minute pricing or supply-chain issues, he says.

(It’s at this point in the conversation that you realize that Wasserman, who is buddies with LeBron James and some of the biggest and brightest of Hollywood stars, has a seriously nerdy side to him.)

Hence Janet Evans, the two-time gold medalist and chief athlete officer for LA28 buttonholing athletes about food and transportation. Turns out, ice for cold water — in the dining hall, at competition venues, in changing rooms — was a hard-to-come-by commodity in Paris. It shouldn’t have been.

“When this is all over, I’m going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of athletes,” Evans said between bites of a cheeseburger during the first week of the Games.

The guy in charge of executing all of this is Reynold Hoover, a retired three-star lieutenant general, whose last post was serving as deputy commander of the U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs from 2016 until he retired in 2018.

Hoover, who once trained for the New York City Marathon by running around his base in Afghanistan, said he used to think that last assignment was the best job anyone could have. Not anymore.

“This is the best job in the world,” he said. (Note to self – check back with the retired lieutenant general in three and a half years when he suddenly needs more signs and fencing and there is a supply chain backlog.)

Why is this the best job?

“We’re bringing the world together through sports,” he said. “What could be better than that?”

There it is. A big idea. A vague one, and not necessarily specific to Los Angeles, but the starting point for the handful of mega international sports events.

A few blocks from Wasserman’s office, Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, spent a healthy chunk of time holding court at Team USA House, the palace that her organization converted into a high-end hospitality venue for these Games and the upcoming Paralympics.

Hirshland has a big idea about Los Angeles.

“I don’t know that there’s another country that is built from so many cultures from around the world and that has so many immigrants and folks who have equal pride in America and their roots and bring that to life,” she said. “That’s a fun sort of diversity and inclusion conversation through the lens of sport and these games that … we’re going to go on a little bit of a journey here for the next couple of years as we think about that.”

She’s not wrong. America, a place where nearly everyone traces their roots to somewhere else, hasn’t hosted a Summer Games since 1996. The country looks a lot different now than it did then.

Cricket probably would have been a tough sell at the Atlanta Games in 1996. Same with lacrosse. Both are new sports, along with squash, and organizers are expecting big things from all of them.

The athletes who represent the U.S. look different now than 30 years ago, too. Hirshland has watched those U.S. athletes pile up medals, and then watched them tell the world all about it. As soon as their competitions were over, many of them had images of themselves competing that they could share on all their social media channels. It sounds like an obvious detail, but it takes thinking about putting that infrastructure in place far ahead of the Games to make it happen.

It’s all part of an effort to get America thinking about the Olympics, and there is no better messenger for that than the athletes who won more than 125 medals for the U.S. over the past 17 days — the big stars like Gabby Thomas and Noah Lyles and Katie Ledecky, but also the lesser known ones like Brady Ellison in archery and Olivia Reeves in weightlifting.

The rest of the world’s stars are going to play into this, too, she said. If you don’t know much about the French super-fish Léon Marchand, the winner of four individual gold medals who trains in the U.S., you are going to.

“We have an outsized influence on what happens around the world,” Hirshland said. “We’ve got to continue to say, let’s up our game. We need a healthy culture. We need a clean culture, we need an inclusive culture, we need a high-performance culture. We want good coaches. All those things help move sport around the world in a positive way. So it’s a bold ambition, but it’s also doable.”

Wasserman’s heart warmed every time he saw an American athlete win a medal, too. He’s got a lot of tickets to sell, and after more than two decades in the sports business, he knows a simple truth.

“Americans like to win,” he said.

They should do plenty of that. Also, there are something like 30 million people who live within a six-hour drive of Los Angeles. The local market is massive, and foreigners love to visit Los Angeles.

Still, if there was something Paris did masterfully in addition to stitching the Games across the city, with venues and community watch areas across the city and the country, it was sell tickets. Nearly everywhere Wasserman went, stadiums were packed to the gunwales.

Early afternoon preliminary-round fencing was packed. A water polo quarterfinal between the U.S. and Australia brought some 20,000 people to La Défense Arena. The bleachers overflowed at rowing, 30 miles from the center of the city.

Wasserman did some research on this. Organizers, he said, took a risk of holding back a significant chunk of tickets until just weeks before the Games. They created a constant state of scarcity. Then, as excitement built, they released them, at very reasonable prices, and Parisians who hadn’t gotten emotionally invested in the Games wanted to be a part of it.

Now he’s hearing from plenty of athletes, even those on the back ends of their careers, who are starting to think about how they can be a part of the Los Angeles Games.

The other day he saw LeBron James, who is 39. “He was like, ‘Well, I would be able to sleep in my own bed,'” Wasserman said.

He knows the Los Angeles Games will be compared to Paris, and also that they will be very different, as they should be.

“Not better or worse,” he said. “Theirs is what they would want to do for their city and we will do what’s best and what’s right to make our Games the best for our city right now.”

Four more years. Actually a little less.

(Top photo of the LA28 logo on a smartphone screen: Sipavia AP Images)

Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman