Los Angeles has already ceded too much power to the Olympic machine

W hen the International Olympic Committee handed the 2028 Olympics to Los Angeles back in 2017, the Games floated fuzzily in a futuristic fairyland. Eric Garcetti, then mayor of LA, promised everything but free kittens and unicorns, vowing the Olympics “will lift up every community in Los Angeles”. Today, five years before the Games, the freshly elected mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is sliding into the same well-worn grooves of Olympic myth-making. Now is the time for Bass and her administration to sharpen their focus, get up to speed on hard Olympic realities, and start asking tough questions of the IOC. It’s not too late.

Bass arrives with progressive bona fides. Her election is meant to herald a more just city government that is less hostile to workers and the poor, particularly the legions of those who are unhoused. Yet when it comes to the 2028 Olympics, Bass has been more of the same, essentially cloning the missteps of her predecessor. She made this clear when she selected Christopher Thompson to be her chief of staff. Before being tapped, Thompson was the head of government relations for the LA28 Olympic organizing committee. Now this “head of government relations” is part of – and indistinguishable from – the government itself.

The merging of corporate, Olympic and public power has caused enough consternation that questions immediately surfaced over what role Thompson will play in regards to Olympic organization and city contracts. The Bass administration issued a clipped response, asserting that Thompson “will not participate in matters regarding the Olympics for the first year of his service”. In truth, Bass had no choice. She was merely adhering to conflict of interest rules in the Ethics Handbook for