LA28 Committee Moves Softball, Canoe Slalom to Oklahoma City

The LA 2028 Olympics and Paralympics Committee revealed on Friday an updated venue plan that relocates some competitions around the Los Angeles area and beyond.

The biggest change to the initial plans, which were part of the 2017 proposal to bring the Olympics back to Los Angeles, has softball and canoe slalom outsourced to Oklahoma City.

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The LA28 committee explained that there are no canoe slalom venues in the western United States, while the largest softball stadium in the LA area seats just 2,000 people, below the Olympic standards for seating fans. “Both the canoe slalom and softball venues in Oklahoma City are built to international competition standards, ensuring a high-quality experience for athletes and fans, while allowing LA28 to realize cost savings and revenue gains to support its balanced budget,” the committee said in a statement.

“LA28 also recognizes that the Oklahoma City community has consistently supported top events for both sports and is confident that they will for these Olympic competitions as well.”

Oklahoma City annually hosts the Women’s College World Series. While not named outright due to the IOC’s policy of not using corporate names for stadiums and arenas during competition, Devon Park will be the home for Olympic softball. The 13,000-seat softball-only park has been renovated several times since opening in 1987. Riversport OKC, the outdoor recreational park that hosted the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic trials for rowing and kayaking, will host canoe slalom.

According to committee president Casey Wasserman, moving some events to Oklahoma and using existing structures in and around LA “rather than building new permanent or temporary stadiums, achieves more than $150 million in savings and new revenue to help maintain a balanced budget.”

Since London was awarded the 2012 Summer Olympics back in 2005, the International Olympic Committee has approved bids where cities incorporated temporary structures or permanent venues that could be significantly scaled down for long-term use by pro sports teams. These innovations would ideally lower the costs of building infrastructure for the events while avoiding the fate of Olympic sites such as Athens, which still has a few “white elephants”—venues that have either been abandoned or underutilized in the 20 years since hosting the 2004 Games.

Additionally, the IOC has encouraged organizers to use existing venues outside of the host city. For the upcoming Paris Games, for example, soccer matches will be played across France, but surfing competitions will take place over 9,800 miles away on the other side of the world in Tahiti, an island nation that remains under French sovereignty.

Having Olympic events outside of the host city isn’t a new phenomenon, and it’s not even the first time this has happened for Los Angeles. In 1984, preliminary soccer matches took place as far north as Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and as far east as Harvard University in Boston and at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

LA is taking advantage of the vast array of old and new facilities in the metropolitan area. Track and field will take place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, making it the first stadium to be used for the sport in three separate Olympic Games. Basketball will be held at the soon-to-open Intuit Dome, which will be home to the NBA’s Clippers in late 2024. Gymnastics will be at the Crypto.com Arena. And with an idea seemingly borrowed from the recent U.S. swimming trials at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, SoFi Stadium will host the swimming competitions. (SoFi will also serve as a host stadium for the 2026 men’s World Cup, which will be played throughout the U.S., Mexico and Canada.)

This isn’t the only sports connection between LA and the state of Oklahoma. For close to a decade, the Dodgers’ top two minor league teams, the Triple-A Oklahoma City Baseball Club (nee Dodgers) and the Double-A Tulsa Drillers, have resided in the Sooner State.

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