Los Angeles, Oklahoma City 2028: Ticket rip-off of Olympic proportions | Opinion
.jpg "The author, rocking his official 1984 USA Olympic team jacket, shows his reaction to the availability and prices of 2028 Los Angeles Olympic tickets online.")
After having experienced my first “ticket drop” for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, I can confidently report that it’s a rip-off the size of Mt. Olympus itself.
I went into the ticket drop encouraged by statements like these from the LA28 ticketing website:
“More than 1 million tickets will be available for $28.”
“Nearly 50% of all Olympic tickets are under $200.”
Those statements turned out to be comparable to what the equines will leave behind after the equestrian competition at Santa Anita racetrack.
There wasn’t a $28 ticket anywhere in sight. There were no tickets less than $100.
Planning an Olympic trip? Watch out
A little background: My wife, Kathy, and I spent our first 10 years of married life in the Los Angeles area. I was there for the 1984 Olympics, but she wasn’t.
So we’ve been making plans to book sleeper car tickets on Amtrak and take a leisurely jaunt across the country to the Olympics, with a side trip to the Grand Canyon (we’ve both been there, but never together).
Seeking to acquire tickets, I did everything you’re supposed to do. I registered well before the deadline for the first ticket drop. I watched the video that explained how the ticket drop would work. I assembled a list of events to attend and was at my computer signing in the second the time slot opened.
What a disappointment.
Equestrian events were one of the things I thought might be fun to attend. There were no tickets available. Ditto that for basketball, tennis, diving, gymnastics (even rhythmic gymnastics, the goofy kind performed with clubs, hoops, and ribbons), and a lot of other sports.
I went through the list page by page and the cheapest ticket I could find was $105.43. It was for a women’s cricket preliminary match in Pomona, about an hour and a half from the Olympic epicenter at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Some other examples: Baseball, men’s preliminary, starting at $204; Handball, women’s preliminary, $241; (Field) Hockey, women’s preliminary, $173.
And 24% of the price is a “service fee” to process your payment and send the e-tickets to your phone.
At one point, I considered just running down to Oklahoma City to get our Olympic fix and taking our train trip some other time. OKC is a satellite venue and will be hosting softball and canoe slalom, whatever that is.
But, there weren’t any tickets available for those events either.
So I didn’t buy any tickets.
My theory is they’re trying to extract as many dollars as possible from desperate suckers the most dedicated Olympics fans by selling the highest-priced tickets to obscure sports nobody really cares about first, and they’re holding on to the cheaper seats until later rounds of ticket drops.
1984 was way better
All I can say is that this is nothing like ‘84.
Back then, before the Internet, cell phones and digital tickets, they printed a ticket brochure that you picked up at Sears, which at the time had a presence in just about every community in America.
You checked off events you were interested in and sent it in by mail (they only accepted one form per address, to discourage scalping). If demand for a particular event exceeded supply, they did a drawing for the tickets.
Tickets left after the drawing were put on sale at local shopping malls.
Prices started at $3 for early rounds of obscure sports. The highest tickets — $50-$200 — were for the Opening and Closing ceremonies. In today’s dollars, that would be about $160-$650.
In the current ticket drop, the Opening Ceremony is unavailable and the Closing Ceremony starts at $4,961.
There’s inflation, and then there’s gouging.
In ‘84, I went to three events — two baseball games and some rowing thing out at Lake Casitas northwest of the city.
The baseball tickets were either $5 or $10, about what we were paying for good-not-great seats at Dodgers’ games at the time. I honestly don’t remember much about the rowing event, because let’s face it, rowing is rowing, and beer was involved.
But you know what? We all had a great time.
Accommodations, public safety and transportation planning were basically flawless.
There were no major security issues, lots of local residents rented out rooms in their homes to international visitors, and buses took people to and from the events, so the widely feared traffic nightmare never materialized.
To this day, LA84 is widely regarded as one of the most successful Olympics ever.
The committee even made money on it — a stark contrast to earlier Games that left host cities mired in debt for decades. The $250 million profit was distributed to youth sports across the country.
In 1984, we proved we could show the world a good time without breaking the bank. In 2028, we still can.
But I’m far from the only one who thinks this ticket scheme is off to a miserable start. Something has to change, pronto, before we all lose interest and just stay home and watch the Games on TV.
Where’s Sears now that we really need them?
This story was originally published April 22, 2026 at 4:55 AM with the headline "Los Angeles, Oklahoma City 2028: Ticket rip-off of Olympic proportions | Opinion."
