LA wildfires spark Olympic debates

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — The Los Angeles wildfire disaster has cast a shadow over preparations for the 2028 Olympics, raising questions over whether the city can deliver a safe and successful Games.

So far, none of the more than 80 venues due to stage Olympic competition in Los Angeles have been directly affected by the infernos that have left at least 24 people dead and reduced entire neighborhoods to smoldering ruins.

But experts say the ongoing disaster has underscored the challenges of staging the world’s largest sporting event in a region increasingly under threat of wildfires.

“The situation is clearly grave and given the prospect of significant climate change, you do have to wonder whether the current situation might be repeated, possibly even during the Games,” Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School in Paris, told British daily The iPaper.

“This raises very serious questions, not least about insurance, and whether Los Angeles’ big-ticket 2028 attraction might be about to become an uninsurable mega-event.”

While the flames that razed Pacific Palisades came uncomfortably close to the Riviera Country Club — which will host 2028’s Olympic golf tournament — the overwhelming majority of venues are situated outside what would be regarded as high-risk fire zones.

Historical data, meanwhile, indicates that the chances of a similar disaster erupting during the 2028 Olympics are highly unlikely.

Prior to last week, no fire in Los Angeles County had appeared on a list of the 20 most destructive fires in California history, according to statistics provided by CalFire, the state’s fire agency.

The 2028 Olympics will also be taking place in July, a time of year when there are no Santa Ana winds, the powerful seasonal gusts widely seen as the biggest factor behind the unprecedented scale and scope of last week’s carnage.

And Los Angeles has already staged the Olympics successfully on two occasions — in 1984 and 1932.

Nevertheless, Dan Plumley, sports finance expert at Sheffield Hallam University, said the fires would have set alarm bells ringing among Olympic organizers.

“Organizing committees will have factored these events into their planning but you’re very much working on a contingency basis — how much do you reasonably budget for this and how cautious or not cautious are you going to be?” Plumley told The iPaper.

“How much risk they want to build in, we’ll have to wait and see but these fires will have acted as an enormous wake-up call.”

Pennsylvania State University professor Mark Dyerson, meanwhile, floated the idea of the Olympics being moved to 2024 hosts Paris if LA was unable to deliver the games.

“They could go back to Paris,” the academic told the New York Post.