IOC Is Planning Morning Finals for Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games

Happy April Fools. This was a joke. Please stop citing it as real news :-(.

Organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games are planning to reverse the sessions and host finals in the morning and prelims in the evening, a source from within the Local Organizing Committee told SwimSwam on Wednesday.

“The growth of the sport, especially on the competitive side, in China is hard to deny,” the source said.

They pointed to the recent China Open, where there was more prize money and appearance money awarded in a single meet than in the entirety of the USA Swimming Pro Swim Series. American stars like Gretchen Walsh, Kate Douglass, and Jack Alexy all participated in that meet.

This will be America’s opportunity to repay China for the latter’s generosity in 2008 when Beijing hosted the same unusual pattern to benefit American viewership.

When SwimSwam reached out to the LA28 organizing committee for comment, they would not address the sessions specifically, but did respond that “the organizers of the Olympic Games respect the Chinese people and are always looking for ways to further their engagement in the Olympic movement.”

China has 1.4 billion citizens, the second-largest national population in the world, and one that is increasingly becoming engaged in professional sports.

The source said that organizers explored a number of options to increase interest in the Olympic Games, but options were limited given that B-Finals were already eliminated after the 1996 Games.

That move resulted in a significant drop in NBC’s television ratings, with roughly 12 million fewer Americans (31%) watching the opening ceremonies, and less than half the viewership for the closing ceremonies.

Viewing numbers in the United States significantly rebounded in 2008, including 31.1 million tuning in to watch Michael Phelps winning his 8th gold medal – the best Saturday night number for NBC in almost 20 years.

“What we learned from that was that people preferred morning finals,” said Soren Halverson, who was the assistant to the head of the IOC’s event productions team at the Beijing Games. “There seems to be something about the combination of swimming and a big bowl of congee that really draws viewers in.”

SwimSwam talked to one NBC producer who is not involved in the organization’s Olympic coverage about how the early morning time slot might impact attention in the United States. He said “a 9AM start time in Los Angeles puts the broadcast window in the peak noon time slot when Americans on the east coast are taking their lunch breaks. Now, instead of working through lunch with a microwaveable meal, they will have the opportunity to gather around the TV in the lunchroom.

“Plus, this gives producers the chance to edit out all of the events where other countries win and tape delay the meet in a repackaged format for prime time.”

The move will not only benefit China, but also Europe, which will now get mid-afternoon finals sessions starting around 3:00 PM, when European office workers are returning from their mid-day siestas and need a distraction from the last hour of their workday.

History indicates that this could bode well for the American program headed toward the Brisbane 2032 Games. The US has struggled at international meets in recent years. China entered the 2008 home Olympics in Beijing in a similar position as the Americans – a years-long competitive downturn after highs in the late 80s and early 90s.

While China won only 1 gold medal in swimming at the home Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Four years later in London, owed mostly to the popularity of morning finals, that number increased by 400%.

Those 2012 Olympic Games were the breakout meets of global superstars like Ye Shiwen and Sun Yang, who gained huge followings in America. Much as America is returning the favor of time zones, hopes from America’s swimming leadership are that China’s people will treat America’s swimming stars as well as America did China’s, injecting badly-needed financial stability into the American swimming marketplace.

This provides one more huge benefit: with crowds of as many as 40,000 expected to attend swimming finals sessions in SoFi stadium, a USC study in 2018 found that morning traffic is roughly 14% lighter in LA than evening traffic.

That should help maximize the record-setting crowds for the Games.