Sticker Shock in LA28: Residents Learn “Affordable” Doesn’t Mean Cheap Olympic Seats

Sticker Shock in LA28: Residents Learn “Affordable” Doesn’t Mean Cheap Olympic Seats

Residents in some of our countries’ deep-blue areas are certainly having to deal with a lot of disappointment recently.

Those living in New York City will not receive the free bus rides they were promised. Virginians now realize they elected a taxation-loving, illegal-immigrant-supporting progressive for governor.

And while Los Angelenos have clearly learned to swim in a sea of disappointment, many still held out hope of enjoying being part of the 2028 Olympics audience. After all, the city bureaucrats promised that tickets for the Olympic events would be reasonably priced.

However, anger and frustration are mounting as many realize the definition of “affordable” seems….flexible.

Event organizers consistently promoted tickets as “affordable,” but that wasn’t the case when LA residents got early access to tickets this past week. Despite the promise of tickets starting at just $28 (including a 24% service fee), presale lottery winners saw ticket prices soar into the thousands.

…“They told us that prices were going to start at $28 and that they were going to stagger the most coveted tickets so everyone had a fair shot,” Kelly Burson told The Times. “Either that was total incompetence or a total lie.”

Burnson bought two tickets for a swimming event at $1,230 apiece, and three tickets for the decathlon finals at $1,600 each.

Some prospective buyers reported a price tag of more than $5,000 per ticket for the Opening Ceremony. A few events on presale were simply listed as “unavailable.”

The website used for ticket purchasing was buggy, upsetting those who managed to get through.

To add to frustration, some logging on during their time slots last week were booted off and routed to a webpage showing an “Access Denied” message.

Kirsten Simitzi, 50, of San Fernando Valley logged on at 10 a.m. sharp for her time slot Friday. But for 2½ hours she got the error message and could not access the pool of tickets until 12:30 p.m., by which time, she said, “the pickings were slim.”

She expected to see more cheap tickets added by the time her mom had her chance over the weekend, or during her sister’s slot on Monday. But tickets had grown only more expensive, she said.

“They made it sound like, ‘You’re a local, you’ll get $28 tickets.’ But it didn’t happen, the tickets were just gone,” Simitzi said.

There are many theories as to why ticket prices are so high. However, the most likely one is that Los Angeles doesn’t go deeper into debt than it already is.

LA28 hasn’t said specifically how many Olympics tickets are for sale, only that together with the Paralympics, there are 14 million tickets in total.

But Rich Perelman, who worked for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, recently estimated that if 12 million of those tickets are for the Olympic Games in particular, the average ticket price would need to be $208.33 to hit the $2.5 billion in expected revenue.

“That’s why they are so expensive,” Perelman wrote on his website The Sports Examiner.

Matheson, the sports economist, said high ticket sales could help LA28 stay out of the red.

The city faced a $1 billion budget deficit at the end of last year. Prospects for restrained spending and wise fiscal choices seem remote.

It appears that Los Angeles residents are once again learning that when city officials promise “affordable opportunities,” it often means affordable only to those well-connected or wealthy enough to shrug off four-digit ticket prices.

The 2028 Olympics were supposed to be a civic celebration of unity and accessibility, especially or locals who’ve endured years of high taxes, traffic, and inflation. Instead, the Games are shaping up to be just another exercise in fiscal gymnastics, where the balance beam of “equity” tips firmly toward bureaucratic convenience and financial desperation.

Much as the dashed hopes for free buses in New York or responsible governance in Virginia, Angelenos are confronting the reality that progressive promises are easy to make but costly to keep. When all is said and done, the real Olympic event may not take place in the stadiums, but in the city’s budget office, where the race to fill the deficit will be far fiercer than anything on the track.

By way of contrast, the average Olympic ticket price in 1984 was….$17.

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