Environmental, political climates elicit uneasy feelings ahead of 2028 Olympics in L.A.
Destructive wildfires, Trump's impending 2nd term loom as Summer Games approach
The human cost of recent wildfires in Los Angeles is still accruing – 24 deaths so far, and more than 12,000 homes and other buildings destroyed. Photos of burnt-out hellscapes where vibrant neighbourhoods once flourished drives the point home event further.
If this kind of widespread destruction doesn't trigger some anxiety about the fate of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, it should. Climate change is no longer the future. It's here right now and it's reshaping almost every aspect of our lives, including sports.
Last week, the NFL conceded that the Los Angeles Rams couldn't host the Minnesota Vikings at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood as wildfires raged nearby. So the league, the two teams, and the Arizona Cardinals quickly coordinated to relocate the playoff game to Glendale, Ariz.
But the Olympics?
We're talking more than 10,000 athletes, along with support staff, volunteers, equipment and infrastructure. You can't move a 16-day sports festival on a few days' notice. You measure that overhaul in months or years.
But while I dream up 2028 hypotheticals, large swaths of the Los Angeles area remain in flames.
By the time the fires die down, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump will have returned to the White House, with significant say over the federal aid Californians will receive. For now, he's serving up scapegoats, like Gavin Newsom, the governor he accuses of hiding water, and L.A. mayor Karen Bass, whose newest budget reduced fire department funding.
Except scapegoats aren't solutions. Many Americans understand that reality. Many who don't voted for Trump, who will be in the last lap of his second presidential term with the Olympic Games slated to return to Los Angeles. It's too early to create an exact picture of the environmental and political landscapes we'll inhabit four years from now, but recent developments have me uneasy.
And that's just as a sports fan.
The region is increasingly prone to wildfires, and the incoming president is still given to authoritarian tendencies. Against the backdrop of those trends, L.A. 2028 is shaping up as the most tense, least cheerful Summer Olympics in decades.
Before we continue, let's acknowledge that I could be wrong.
WATCH | Canadian pilots help combat L.A. wildfires:
Four years ago, I predicted that the sports world would abandon Trump. I figured his post-election temper tantrums – the vote-tampering in Georgia and the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 would make him radioactive. Sports franchises revere winners; Trump was the sorest loser in recent history.
Four years later, it looks like I overestimated the value of sportsmanship, because here was Trump at UFC fight cards, NASCAR races and at the annual Army-Navy football game. He showed up with VP-elect J.D. Vance, and with Daniel Penny, whose sole claim to fame was beating a homicide charge after choking a homeless man to death on a New York subway. Accepting defeat with dignity? That's for losers, apparently. I should have known.
Or he might just keep spewing misinformation that eventually trickles into the sports business.
Sometimes it happens through a surrogate, like ESPN superstar Stephen A. Smith, who, in an interview with Kevin Frazier of Entertainment Tonight, argued that neither Newsom nor Bass had done enough to prevent the wildfires. When Frazier pointed out that elected officials can't stop natural disasters, Smith responded with talking points that might as well have come from a Trump post on Truth Social.
"Donald Trump asked for water to be pumped from Canada into the L.A. system, and Gavin Newsom opposed that," Smith said.
It's worth remembering that a large portion of Smith's audience is sports fans that find him both entertaining and credible. You can hope that they recognize the inaccuracies that hobble his argument, but hope only goes so far. There's no such thing as a Water Restoration Declaration, but Trump keeps saying Newsom refuses to sign one. And there's no pipeline ready to drain water from Canada to keep Los Angeles hydrated.
The idea that Canada can irrigate L.A. is only slightly less far-fetched than that classic piece of satire, published in 1997 by The Onion, presenting a plan to end recurring droughts by siphoning water from the bodies of non-white Los Angeles residents. The joke pivots on its sheer absurdity, but also hits on a bigger truth – that the thankless work of solving society's problems often falls to marginalized people.
We see it on the front lines of the fight against the ongoing wildfires, where thousands of incarcerated people have been deployed to battle the flames.
And we see it at the intersection of domestic politics and Olympic sport, where we expect Black American athletes to perform, win medals, and bring glory to a country that doesn't always love them back.
It's Tommy Smith and John Carlos standing in stocking feet on the medal podium after the men's 200 metres in Mexico City in 1968, raising their black-glove fists in protest while The Star Spangled Banner played. But it's also George Foreman winning gold at the same games, waving a tiny American flag to prove his patriotism in contrast to Smith and Carlos' fearless pro-Black stance.
Maybe it's Cassius Clay winning gold in Rome, then coyly parrying a Soviet journalist's question about racial segregation in the U.S. In later years, Muhammad Ali would have firm answers to direct questions about American racism; 18-year-old Cassius Clay could only deflect.
"Tell your readers we've got qualified people working on that problem," he said.
Or it might be Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in 1936, delivering the U.S. a key symbolic victory over Nazi Germany in the years preceding World War II. An avatar of American excellence on the world stage, but a second-class citizen at home.
In 2028, it'll be someone, and I wish I could tell you I was looking forward to finding out who, and seeing how they balance celebrating the U.S. and holding it accountable for its racism. But between the environmental climate and the political one, I'm not optimistic.
Given the frequency and ferocity of these wildfires, just reaching the opening ceremony will feel like a victory. After that, it's two weeks of anxiety.
Hope only goes so far.
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