Olympics
Olympic winners and losers
The IOC’s decision to award both the 2024 and ’28 Olympics together constitutes a new day in the Olympic movement. Here’s whose standing improved, and whose declined.
Paris
Paris got what it wanted: the ’24 Olympics.
St. Petersburg, Brisbane, Toronto
In truth, no city had developed a serious plan to bid for 2028, but these three cities are known to have at least been thinking about it.
Casey Wasserman
Olympic enthusiasts and skeptics agree: Wasserman went to the negotiating table and won meaningful financial concessions from the IOC, which had said they weren’t necessary only weeks ago.
Eric Garcetti
As conventional wisdom hardened that Paris had an edge on L.A. in a potential straight-up vote, it took a world-class political mind to decide how to proceed. The end results — second place being celebrated as a clear victory — shows he got it right.
Thomas Bach
The joint award was Bach’s plan all along, but he made it look like democracy. He planted the notion with a vague remark at a press conference, let the world come around to it, co-opted his skeptical vice presidents by ordering them to figure out the details, and then presented a final plan to a membership vote as a fait accompli. It was a legacy-defining maneuver, coming on the heels of his much-criticized response to the Russian doping scandal.
IOC members
They willingly gave up their biggest source of power — the deciding vote on who gets the Games — and left all of the details up to the executive board and IOC staff.
USOC
USOC Chairman Larry Probst and CEO Scott Blackmun dedicated their professional lives to amending U.S.-IOC relations, including agreeing to a lower share of recurring IOC revenue. The end result is an L.A. Games that might generate hundreds of millions for the USOC.
Most sponsors and broadcasters
The price of extending Olympic deals beyond 2024 just went way up.
NBCUniversal, Alibaba and Omega
These three have Olympics deals that now include LA ’28, at prices agreed to before the site was known.
Bid consultants and Olympic trade journals
A micro-industry of full-time, globe-trotting experts has developed to advise bid cities, but now they’ll be out of work for a key Summer Games cycle. International sports trade journals traditionally have relied on bid committees as a major source of advertising revenue, too.
