This note below came to me yesterday through the Pony Express:
When the Olympic track & field events are held at the LA Coliseum in 2028, they will be run, not on the Coliseum floor, but on an elevated 11-foot high platform.
Extra seating (14 rows) was installed in the Coliseum years ago to provide more, and closer, seats for football. This renovation no longer allows for a nine-lane track on the current Coliseum floor, so an elevated platform 11-feet high will span the Coliseum (and those 14 rows of seats) to have enough room for an Olympic sized running track.
See the attached article that explains how this temporary platform and running track will be installed, and, then dismantled after the 2028 Olympics.
Coliseum ready for Games, but some assembly required
from L.A. Times, July 7, 2024
Organizers plan to build false floor 11 feet above field to create official Olympic track.
By David Wharton
There was no way to bring the Olympics back to Los Angeles for a third time without holding track and
field at the Coliseum. Not with all those ghosts knocking around.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias competed at the historic stadium during the 1932 Summer Games, winning the
javelin and hurdles. Carl Lewis won four golds there in 1984, a competition that also featured the infamous
Zola Budd-Mary Decker collision in the 3,000 meters.
But as local organizers devised plans for the 2028 Olympics, they faced a basic dilemma: There wasn’t
enough room on the Coliseum floor for, well, a track.
Renovations in the early 1990s added 14 rows of seats at the bottom of the bowl, moving the stands closer
for football, shrinking the size of the field. The LA28 organizing committee needed a temporary fix.
The solution will require thousands of columns and metal plates to build a new floor about 11 feet above the
current one. Because the bowl slopes away in all directions, this elevated surface will have room to stretch
out, covering all those added seats.
For a city that has enough existing world-class venues to host the Games without major construction, the
$100-million project represents what LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman calls “the most expensive and
probably complicated thing we actually have to build.”
Not everyone is thrilled about the stadium’s role for 2028. A Coliseum official has expressed
disappointment about a proposed opening ceremony that would begin under his renowned peristyle, but
shift to the newer, glitzier SoFi Stadium for formal protocols.
“The torch and the parade of nations and the Olympic oath all should take place at the Coliseum,” said
George L. Pla, president of the Coliseum Commission.
LA28 executives insist they are committed to showcasing the historic venue at both the Summer Games and
the subsequent Paralympics. John Harper, chief operating officer, described it as “a beacon.”
Plans for track competition there began years ago when organizers researched technology that had been
used for European sports events. At the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, workers
installed 6,000 columns and nearly 200,000 tons of steel components to create an elevated field.
To do something similar at the Coliseum, LA28 expects to begin construction as soon as USC plays its last
football game of the 2027 season.
Turf and dirt will be scraped away to expose the stadium’s concrete base and adjustable columns will be
arranged every 10 or so feet. The work will be laborious if only because the Coliseum has only one access
point from outside — the tunnel where Trojans football players run onto the field. Some building materials
might have to be lifted over the top of the bowl with a giant crane.
“It’s an incredibly complex build in that it’s an incredibly tight space,” said Bill Hanway, executive vice
president for AECOM, an infrastructure consulting firm hired to oversee much of LA28’s preparations.
After laying a metal deck across the top of the columns, workers will add almost 2 feet of gravel and soil to
create a stable base. Then comes a synthetic track and a turf infield for events such as discus and javelin.
The space underneath the floor could be used for a warmup area and the call room, where athletes check in
before competing. LA28 is considering a mechanical platform that would slowly raise athletes to field level
for a dramatic entrance before, say, the women’s 100 meters.
“We are incredibly excited about having the Games in Los Angeles,” said Max Siegel, chief executive of
USA Track & Field. “Just the innovative thinking that they have.”
Constructing all this during seven or so months — after waiting for football season to end — means the
stadium might not be ready for Olympic test events or the U.S. track trials in the early summer of 2028. It
means crews will have to work quickly to restore the field for USC’s football home opener in the fall.
“I guess the good thing is we have all our venues in place,” Wasserman said of Southern California’s
existing stadiums and arenas. “The flip side of that is, they’re used a lot.”
If spending $100 million on a temporary remodel seems extravagant, LA28 needed a major stadium for
track — one of the most popular Olympic sports — and faced similar challenges with options such as SoFi
or the Rose Bowl.
“When you think about the cost compared to a new stadium,” said Hilary Ash, vice president of Games
delivery and infrastructure for LA28, “it doesn’t even compare.”
Once the Games begin, organizers won’t waste any time showing off their work: They have decided to flip
the usual Olympic schedule, moving the track competition from the back half of the 17-day Games to the
very start.
“We have world-class athletics at the Coliseum the first day after the opening ceremony and that hasn’t
happened in a long time,” Wasserman said. “I think it’s going to really create a lot of energy.”
Well, that article provoked some mild discussion as follows:
From George: It's simple economics and mathematics. How many football stadiums in the past 100 years have removed their running tracks to increase seating? The playing field drops down and seat numbers increase, ticket sales increase, and track finds a new home on a nearby land fill or cow pasture. Today most college football stadiums could not squeeze in a one lane track of 300 meters. And the A.D.'s and college presidents are thinking, "If we can drop men's and women's track, we can make a parking lot expansion for the football stadium or a new dorm, or a new president's residence, or maybe the A.D.'s new residence. Oh hell no, let's make it a new gym for the football team, an indoor practice facility, and a jock dorm, or if we must, a needle exchange site. Whatever but for God's sake not a freaking track. Where is the money in that kind of decision making? Over the years, the L.A. Coliseum has become a major league baseball field with a 250 foot left field fence and huge 90' high screen to keep pop ups from being homeruns , then gone back to a track for the 84 Olympics, and even had NASCAR races on that hallowed ground.
It certainly can float an elevated track for two weeks and go back to football. USC may have to open the 2028 football season with a lot of away games for the first month or so while the playing field is restored. The team could reside at the U. of Alabama near their new conference, take online courses, learn they can marry their 16 year old second cousins legally and return when the stadium is re-re-converted. By the way you can marry your cousin in California as well but she/he has to be 18.
Very interesting concept but because such extremes are needed says it all about T&F, now a niche sport in the US. I suspect the officials will cave in to the objections which will surely follow about the cost of this 11-foot platform and opt to build a nice 20,000 T&F stadium instead to challenge Eugene. They might also opt to simply use 11,700 seat Drake Stadium at UCLA with increased seating to expand to 21,400, and host the Olympic T&F there. This would officially once-and-for-all relegate T&F to a minor sport on the world stage. Opening ceremonies would be at SoFi stadium with cones used to form a temporary 1/5 mile track. No need to pass these ideas along or else those in charge will actually act on them.
Commenter probably wishes anonymity. Don't worry, the suits don't read this blog. ed.
Opportunity to farm out certain sports to more appropriate venues is always there. France is sending surfing to its colonial possession of Tahiti. Actually I'm not sure if Tahiti is a colony, and I don't know if it went far right in the latest election. May have to consult with Fletcher Christian's descendents to find our answer. When the mayor of Paris and Macron offered to take a swim in the Seine, to demonstrate that water quality is of a high enough standard to hold events, the far right suggested that their followers all descend on the banks and take a dump. How can you not love a national leader who married his school marm? But will she welcome him back in le sac after that plunge into the waters. I guarantee it won't be as clean as the waters of Lourdes. George
With his checkered luck recently, he could end up — as they say in certain parts of Brooklyn — swimming w the fishes. After all, the French have a rather unbroken penchant for wanting or wishing for, if not actually performing, the decapitation of whatever leader might — at the moment — be in power. And this would be so much more economical … anonymously entering him in the iron man competition. And, sacre blue, less messy. Richard Mach
Hello Bill and George,
All great information and comments to a very strange solution. Maybe we have underrated the importance of T&F to the Olympic movement and also the importance of the LA Coliseum to LA. It has fallen into hard times in recent years and was renovated with a huge pressbox, in my mind destroying the integrity of this hallowed American coliseum. Did you notice the swimming venue in the 1932 picture of the LA Coliseum? I'm sure it is no longer there. Bill Schnier
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