LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles City Council members on Monday called for the city and LA28 to have “hard and honest” conversations and come up with a backup plan in the case of a widespread boycott of the 2028 Olympic Games.
The council members’ requests come against the backdrop of mounting calls for a boycott of this summer’s World Cup because rising international concerns about the Trump administration’s actions regarding Greenland, Venezuela and the recent fatal shootings of citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
Oke Göttlich, vice president of the German Football Association, said in an interview with a German newspaper that the time has come to “seriously consider and discuss” a World Cup boycott.
Sepp Blatter, the controversial former president of FIFA, earlier on Monday said in a social media post that fans should “stay away” from the World Cup.
Council members said during a regularly scheduled meeting of the council’s committee on the Olympic and Paralympic Games on Monday that they expected calls for an Olympic boycott to only increase.
“So we need to have some honest, really hard and honest conversations, folks,” council member Monica Rodriguez told LA28 chief operating officer John Harper. “And I know that’s terrifying, but we could be talking about a lot more irreparable harm, financially, let alone all the other implications of what’s happening, but that was raised eight years ago, and so now that was long before we’ve seen the things that we’re seeing. And so this conversation around FIFA, that’s just a forewarning of what potentially could be coming and affecting us. So I say that we need to have a Plan B, and that is something that we have to do, not just for the protection of taxpayers, but because of the potential implications of what may ensue. And that’s just a real hard conversation that everyone needs to have, because they said this long before, and that was the underlying concern when we were there.
“So let’s not bury our heads in the sand.”
Council president Marqueece L. Harris-Dawson also expressed concern that a boycott could do significant harm to the Olympic movement, reminding his colleague and LA28 officials that the 1984 Games in Los Angeles were also boycotted.
“I would just say to you, like this council has as its charge the well-being of the city of Los Angeles. So we’ll do that piece,” Harris-Dawson said. “But another piece of it that I just offered to use is damage to the Olympic movement overall, which is all of our inheritance, everybody’s in the world, and I certainly don’t want to be the city in the country that is at the center of doing serious damage to that. So that’s in addition to what we have as a council, which we will absolutely do the protection of the city and its taxpayers, but the Olympic movement is very, very important. Again, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before, that we never talk about the boycott of ’84 but there was a significant boycott in 1984, so it doesn’t mean that you can’t figure it out, but it also means we have to face it and face it directly.”
Harper said LA28 has “had no discussions with the IOC, no indications that that’s going to be a concern here. But obviously we’ll continue to work with the IOC and the IPC as they head towards 2028, but all indications are that we’re looking forward to welcoming the world.”
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