Reading all the responses, it seems people genuinely hate the city, the country it’s in, and don’t think it has anything worth while or has contributed anything, culturally. If that was the case, it would be a given that LA should never host again. Surely there are much better places?
we were bashing LA because Paris was such a treat. we were able to see the entire city and all the iconic landmarks–
in comparison, LA has nothing, but that includes any US city because our country is very young in comparison to the rest of the world. and our city planning (especially in LA is non-existent).
LA has a notorious mass transit crisis and we are all skeptical how transit will work.
it’s more of an appreciation for the parisian games and a recognition that LA pales in comparison.
Very few cities in the World can be like Paris - old, big, with majestic architecture all around and full of history. Probably only Rome and London have these characteristics as well. It’s not LA that’s a bad city (not at all), it’s Paris that’s simply an outlier in being a fantastic city. What I personally believe is that what LA has going for itself is the importance it has to the Olympics. In sports culture, LA + Olympics in itself is already a strong concept, like it is for any of the cities that hosted the games twice or more already - London, Paris, Tokyo, Athens, and LA. For example, the opening ceremony will be held in the Memorial Coliseum, the stadium that hosted the games in 1932 and 1984, it’ll be the first time an opening ceremony will be held in the same place three times.
Also, each host city will play their strongest assets on the table. Rio, for example, is neither an old nor a full of nice architecture city, but the natural beauty of the city is without match in the World, so they organized the events in a way that used this as the backdrop to the competitions. Atlanta, which internationally is a city (for those who know it) synonymous with connection flights and Coca Cola, pulled off really memorable games that offered beautiful venues and made use of their nice parks for fan fests and screenings of the sporting events. And London and Paris, who recently hosted the games, have the traffic about as bad as LA according to the Global Traffic Scorecard of 2023, so I’m confident they’ll be about to do really great Olympics despite the inevitable jams it will cause.