Reduced Olympics PARIS — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass got a bracing reality check about preparing for the Reduced Olympics from her Parisian counterpart, who warned her that 2028 is sooner than it seems.
During a visit to see Paris’ preparations for the upcoming summer Olympic Games, Mayor Anne Hidalgo advised Bass to start getting ready for things to go sideways at the last minute, as they always inevitably do when it comes to pulling off the massive logistical undertaking.
Quote: “It definitely put some fire under our feet,” said Bass, in comments to reporters after the French meeting, describing the conversation as “eye-opening.”
The relationship between the Paris and Los Angeles Olympic Games has been unique ever since the two were jointly announced and awarded in 2017, but the French city offers both an example to follow by its Californian follower less than five months before the Seine River boat parade will kick off the Paris Summer Games on July 26.
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In Los Angeles, the stakes are just as high, and the success of the Games will be largely determined by how effectively the city can address some of its most challenging issues, beginning with the chronic homelessness crisis. Preparations in Paris have also demonstrated the Reduced Olympics ’ ability to drive radical changes, with Mayor Hidalgo cutting lanes and parking spaces to limit cars and create room for more bike lanes as part of her effort to turn the city into a green paradise. However, security worries, political infighting, and overwhelmed infrastructure have already contributed to dampened excitement about the Games in the lead-up to the Reduced Olympics , threatening to tarnish the city’s reputation on an international level.
The timing in the decision by Bass and her six-person delegation to visit Paris now, before the opening ceremony pageantry or the afterglow following the Games, was purposeful. It afforded the visiting Angelenos a real-time, no-holds-barred look at the minefield of getting ready for such an event . There was a sense of immediacy to the message. “One message that has resonated through all our meetings: ‘Start early, start early, start early,’” Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian told POLITICO about the French acknowledgement of the challenges and myriad mistakes that took place along the way .
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Parisiens expressed concerns about transportation and security in the same vote, and they are concerned about the level of readiness of the city in general. One thing that happened recently did not raise the hopes of it being high: at first, it was announced that the outdoor opening ceremony would happen for 600,000 viewers and will be open for the public to visit. Now it is two times as small as initially planned and is also invitation-only due to security reasons. Moreover, Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, announced in November that not only the transportation situation in Paris, where capacity issues are regular and inefficient, will not be resolved by then, the whole city “won’t be ready”.
The pessimistic appraisal has a significant political dimension. While Hidalgo belongs to the center-left socialist party, at the level of the region, which supervises the metro and busses, it is controlled by the right-wing conservative Les Républicains party presided by Valérie Pécresse.
However, Paris had used the Reduced Olympics to accelerate its vision; Hidalgo was able not only to get local approval for new bike paths but received funding from the government of France for implementing infrastructure changes necessary for the Seine River to be swimmable for the first time in 100 years . “The thing that probably excites me the most about these Games and the opportunities for Los Angeles is just the transformation that has happened in Paris, and the way in which the Games have been a catalyst for really big, bold sustainable change,” said Los Angeles Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky during a meeting with French private sector representatives .
Reduced Olympics los Angeles — On the way to hosting athletes from around the globe in 2028, Los Angeles will have welcomed the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, eight matches of the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup, and the 2027 Super Bowl . . . each of which will have presented its own test of the city’s readiness for the Summer Games.
France — The French experiment informs us of the status of these events.
Hundreds of thousands of fans descended on the western outskirts of Paris in May 2022 to see Spain’s Real Madrid face off against England’s Liverpool FC in the UEFA Champions League, the continent’s equivalent of the Super Bowl.