Tickets for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games became available last week for locals in LA and Oklahoma City. Today is the first day that non-locals can buy tickets with their time slot in the drop 1 lottery. No tickets for finals of swimming are available and prelims tickets are only available for category A, the highest price.
Finals tickets sold out for swimming with the local drop on Monday, April 6th. It was originally thought that only a portion of the tickets were made available for the local presale, so more would become available once tickets opened to the general public. Instead, the LA28 Olympics have posted on social media, “Due to high demand during the LA & OKC Locals Presale, certain sports do not have any more inventory in Drop 1. If you search a sport and no sessions come up, it is no longer available in this drop. More inventory will be added in subsequent drops, the next of which will be later this year.”
Based on this, it seems that ticket allocations were by “drop” rather than by local vs non-local. If there are no tickets for swimming in drop two, it will be assumed that anyone not local to LA or OKC will have to buy their tickets on the resale market, presumably at a much higher price. Although official ticket resale is set to open in 2027, there has been no formal announcement regarding potential price controls, leaving uncertainty around affordability.
In addition to no finals tickets being available, remaining tickets are at much higher prices as one user tells SwimSwam that only prelims tickets are available for $1,116.27. That is the ‘A’ tier (highest) pricing for a prelims session.
Sports economist Victor Matheson told LAist that the reason prices are so high is because, “there are more people than ever who want access to sporting and music events and can afford to pay for them.” There is higher demand for tickets but the same supply of tickets, causing equilibrium to shift upwards in price.
There are no tickets available at all in today’s drop for swimming. 😠
Thanks. I thought I was the only one
I found this online. There ARE swimming finals tickets available if you go the Hospitality route. But it is certainly expensive.
https://hospitality.la28.org/en/products?events=SWM&dates=&groupSize=2
They should really consider sticking the pool in the middle of the stadium and selling 70,000 tickets.
How corrupt is the LA28 organization? How corrupt is the city of LA? I have a feeling we are going to find out. I wonder what Spencer Pratt thinks of all this.
Well, at least now I don’t feel bad about not getting a timeslot until April 17h. They’ve said that if you don’t purchase tickets in this drop, you will be re-entered in the lottery.
With the prices we’ve seen, I’ve mostly given up on the idea of going. It is a shame that they price the tickets so high. They should keep the prices low on the first round and then allow them be sold at higher prices in resale. This would ensure that they aren’t restricting ticket sales to only rich people
Miranda, I totally agree. It’s discussed me to find out how expensive for the first drops
Looks like Phase 1 “non-locals” get the Phase 1 “locals” leftovers. That means, no affordable tickets for any sport. They surely did a poor job trickling out tickets to afford fair opportunity to all. Maybe they’ll do a better job during the next phases (maybe).
I’m curious to know how the ticketing process works for families of athletes (specifically, American swimmers for the swimming sessions). Does USA Swimming allot some number of tickets for each athlete that qualifies for the Olympics? Or, are families left on their own to find tickets.
It varies from year to year. Bobby Finke’s dad made a good comment about how it went down in Paris.
https://swimswam.com/los-angeles-2028-olympic-games-expecting-2-5-billion-from-ticket-sales-swim-ticket-sale-update/#comment-1692850
I had missed that comment. Thanks!
Dear LA28: GFY.
The letter “A” in the logo looks garish.
Well represent Los Angeles.