‘we Need To Have A Plan B’: La Braces For Olympics Disruption Ahead Of 2028

LOS ANGELES — This city has been here before.

Los Angeles’ last Summer Olympics, in 1984, unfolded in a divided world whose fraught geopolitics were laid bare by a 14-country boycott led by the Soviet Union.

Four decades later, LA is again preparing for an Olympics that officials are suddenly beginning to fear could be disrupted by a boycott or mass protest. Global backlash against the Trump administration is at the core of those worries, and other political threats to the Games appear to multiply by the week.

“When you see the escalating rhetoric and policy of the president, let's just say there have been boycotts over less,” Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of the Los Angeles City Council, told POLITICO. “That's what raises the specter of that possibility.”

The frayed nerves over the Olympics are the product of a confluence of factors — from Donald Trump’s antagonistic posture abroad to deepening outrage over Casey Wasserman, the 2028 Olympics head under pressure to resign over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. And the stakes are enormous in this heavily Democratic city laboring to project a sense of order and achievement after devastating wildfires and the upheaval of Trump’s immigration raids. 

Rattled late last month, Harris-Dawson and others on the council’s Olympics committee convened within days of several prominent politicians and soccer officials in Europe saying that countries should consider boycotting matches held in the U.S. for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. In a sign of the international anxiety, European Union sports commissioner Glenn Micallef recently met with FIFA President Gianni Infantino to express concern that sports fans could be unsafe when traveling to the United States, owing at least in part to the immigration enforcement activity.

“This conversation around FIFA, that's just a forewarning of what potentially could be coming and affecting us,” LA City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said at the meeting. “We need to have a plan B.”

But for the LA Olympics, it has only gotten worse.

Wasserman, chair of LA28, the organizing committee planning the Games, has been mired in controversy since his decades-old emails with Ghislaine Maxwell were released by the U.S. Department of Justice last month. The flirtatious messages with Maxwell, convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other charges related to Epstein, have led to widening calls for his resignation, including from LA Mayor Karen Bass and state lawmakers from the region.

Wasserman, who is CEO of his namesake talent and sports marketing agency, has apologized for “past personal mistakes,” and said he regretted the correspondence, which he noted occurred long before Maxwell’s “horrific crimes came to light.” Last week, the executive committee of LA28’s board backed Wasserman after outside counsel reviewed his interactions with Epstein and Maxwell and found that they “did not go beyond what has already been publicly documented.” However, Wasserman, 51, said he would sell his agency, which has lost a handful of notable clients in recent days.

Amid the uproar, Rodriguez said that she has not gotten the answers she has sought from LA28 on planning for a possible international boycott of the 2028 Olympics, which has a projected budget of about $7.1 billion. Should the event record an operating deficit, the city of Los Angeles is on the hook for the initial $270 million of any shortfall, with other possible financial obligations down the line.

Rodriguez, who has called on Wasserman to step down, told POLITICO that LA28’s answers to her inquiries left “many unanswered questions.”

LA28 did not respond to requests for comment. During the City Council committee meeting in late January, John Harper, chief operating officer of LA28, said that the organization had not discussed the possibility of a boycott with the International Olympic Committee, adding that there were “no indications that that’s going to be a concern here.”

An IOC spokesperson said in a statement that preparations for the 2028 Games are “progressing well, underpinned by strong cooperation with key stakeholders and public authorities at local, state and federal level.”

But the Winter Olympics, which end Sunday in Milan and Cortina, has done nothing to alleviate concerns, with Vice President JD Vance getting booed during the opening ceremony and Trump — whose foreign policy has included the removal of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and threats to invade Greenland — reacting angrily to one American athlete’s comments on political issues, calling the competitor “a real Loser.”

Rep. Laura Friedman, a Democrat from Glendale, said in a statement to POLITICO that Trump should “stop giving the world reasons to boycott.”

“Threatening the games because of political differences with local leadership and alienating our international partners isn't a recipe for success,” she said. “In fact, it's a recipe for exactly the kind of boycott we should all want to avoid.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle touted Trump’s domestic and overseas agenda in a statement to POLITICO, saying that his “Peace through Strength foreign policy is a tried-and-true approach that keeps America safe and deters global threats.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s bold vision and leadership, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics will be hosted right here on our own soil and will be the greatest Olympics in history,” Ingle said.

The likelihood of a major international boycott, some Olympics experts and LA stakeholders believe, is still small. The IOC has, over several years, beefed up its governance framework, making it harder for countries to enact a boycott. The Olympic Charter casts the Games as apolitical and discourages using them to make a political statement. It also says that a member country’s national committee is “obliged to participate” in the Olympics by sending athletes, and any country that violates the charter could face “temporary or permanent ineligibility or exclusion” from the Games.

“The situation is much different than it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, where you had a totally different kind of global communication system that was much slower,” said Rich Perelman, who served as vice president of press operations for the ‘84 Olympics organizing committee and whose Sports Examiner website covers the Games. “And you don't have the Soviet Union anymore.”

A boycott by a smaller collection of countries, said Zev Yaroslavsky, an LA City Council member during the 1984 Games, “wouldn't register on the Richter scale.”

Still, said Yaroslavsky, who is director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, “We shouldn't be doing anything to provoke a boycott.”

There are other ways a country could register its dissent during the 2028 Games without resorting to a full boycott. One option is a diplomatic boycott, in which athletes compete but officials stay away — a step taken by the U.S. and several other governments at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing over China’s persecution of the Uyghurs.

Beyond government action, athletes could stage individual protests and corporate sponsors could dial back their support.

How might such decisions affect things?

Ahmed Nimale, a former Live Nation executive who consults with major venues across the U.S., expects the LA Games to attract a massive in-person audience. But he acknowledged that protests could cloud the atmosphere.

“What is the experience delivered at that point?” he asked. “And are venues prepared … to deal with these perceived disruptions? And do they have enough time and financial-planning assets to account for that?”

The ‘84 Games saw top competitors in several sports sidelined by the Soviet boycott, which followed a U.S.-led boycott of the Games in Moscow four years earlier.

Still, the 1984 Olympics were a financial success: More than 5.7 million tickets were sold — at the time a record — helping generate a roughly $230 million surplus.

Looking ahead to 2028, fan interest is already strong: last month, more than 1.5 million people registered for the ticket draw in the first 24 hours, a record. Asked about a possible boycott, a spokesperson for Bass said that the mayor’s “message has been clear — all are welcome to the City of Los Angeles. We are preparing for the greatest Games the world has ever seen.”

But that vision is running into opposition from many sides, uniting a disparate coalition of forces who have opposed the Games. Among those who have spoken out against them are conservative personalities and politicians — such as the late Charlie Kirk and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), both of whom questioned local leadership in the aftermath of the January 2025 firestorms — and some local activists who oppose the event on social, economic and moral grounds.

In the span of just a few weeks, planning for the Olympics has been buffeted by scandal and political turbulence. And the Games are still more than two years away.

“We could be at war with Denmark, trying to get Greenland,” said Alissa Walker, editor of Torched, a website that covers the ‘28 Games. “The whole European Union could be coming after us. It's too far off to say, and everything is too unpredictable.”