Olympics|At the Los Angeles Olympics 2028, swimming is the main sport of the Games.
Athletics and swimming have been the parade sports of the Summer Olympics for decades. In the early stages of the Olympic Games, the sports were conducted in such a way that the track and field sports were performed first and the swimming competitions afterwards.
This is how it was done, for example, at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952. Then the atmosphere of the competition died down after the first week of the competition, when the blue-and-white track and field athletes failed one after the other. A shower of medals was expected, but the catch was a difficult javelin bronze Toivo Hyytiäinen brought by
In the Rome Games in 1960, the schedule was changed, and in the “eternal city” swimming was competed before the athletics events. This practice has continued until these days. In the summer, even in Paris, swimming was the main sport of the first week of the competition, after which all-rounders were allowed into the arena.
In the following in the summer olympics, the order of the sports will change, and at the same time, swimming will be the main product of the five ring games in Los Angeles 2028. That suits the American media, which follows the country’s successful swimmers very closely during the games.
The reason for the new marching order of the sports is above all the choice of venues. The city’s number one stadium, SoFi Stadium, completed in 2020, serves as the swimming stage. Hulppea Stadium is the home field of the NFL clubs Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will be held at SoFi Stadium, and after them a swimming pool will be built there and a warm-up pool on the other side of the field. With these arrangements, the stands can accommodate 38,000 spectators, which is significantly more than ever before in Olympic swimming.
Because building a swimming stage takes time, the swimmers jump into the pool only in the second week of the competition. So the athletics starts right after the opening ceremony and the venue is the Coliseum known from the previous Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The stadium, completed in 1923, hosted the athletics events of the Olympic Games in both 1932 and 1984. The Coliseum will be the first stage where Olympic athletics have been competed three times.
The Coliseum is the home field of the American college football team USC Trojans. The stadium can accommodate about 77,000 spectators.
From the Finnish point of view, the change in the order of performance of the sports is not a happy thing. Quite a small group of Finnish swimmers seen in the swimming pool. There were exactly two of them in Paris: Ida Hulkko and Matti Mattsson. At the Paris Games, a swimming pool was built at La Défense Arena, which is the home ground of the rugby team Paris Racing.
The blue and white athletics team is, with a fair degree of certainty, considerably larger than the group of swimmers. On the other hand, there may be few potential winners. Therefore, a drop in atmosphere similar to the Helsinki Olympics is possible if athletics is left without a medal, as has happened in Rio 2016, Tokyo 2021 and Paris 2024.
Correction 14.12. at 8:43 am: Fixed story captions. SoFi Stadium is located in the city of Inglewood, not the borough. The name of the college team is the USC Trojans, not the Los Angeles Trojans.