Which Olympic Events Should I Buy Tickets For?

What do you suggest?

Tickets for the 2028 Los Angeles summer Olympics go on sale in April, 2026. (You can pre-register here now.)

So, what should I buy?

I live up in the northwest corner between Valley Complexes 1-4 and Comcast Squash Center at Universal Studio, so I probably won’t make it to surfing at San Onofre. The San Fernando Valley is hosting some very Valley Dude sports — skateboarding and BMX biking — plus 3 on 3 basketball and modern pentathlon where you pretend to be a military courier who has to get a message to Napoleon via riding, running, swimming, shooting, and fencing. Is squash watchable?

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first time in my experience that ticket prices for anything I wanted to go to were dauntingly expensive, such as up to $200 for the opening and closing ceremonies and $95 to see Michael Jordan in the basketball final.

A lesson I learned from 1984: Pay to go to gold medal final events, not to preliminary rounds. The gold medal is the point of the Olympics: everybody has been waiting four years for this moment and they may well not get another chance in their lifetime. That adds drama to any sport. Frankly, Olympic sports are primarily spectator sports that aren’t interesting enough to pay attention to without the excitement of the gold medal.

For example, in 1984 I paid $60 for an excellent seat at a 78-67 quarterfinal between the U.S., with Michael Jordan (sorry, Michael Jackson was a totally different guy who was big in 1984) and Patrick Ewing, vs. West Germany with Detlef Schrempf.

But that quarterfinal, the closest game the Americans faced, was kind of ho-hum compared to the weightlifting gold medal final. All the weightlifters seemed out of their minds on steroids in 1984, so weightlifting was extremely entertaining with all these huge guys stomping around trying to psych out their opponents: pretty much one-man professional wrestling.

Olympic wrestling, on the other hand, was too fast for me to follow. There’d be a flurry of action and I’d be sure there must have been a point for the American, but it usually turned out to be a point for the Turk instead.

The soccer final, with 100,000 jammed into the Rose Bowl, was fun (even though, admittedly, it can’t compare to American football as a spectator sport). 1984 was the year of The Wave, so the crowd entertained itself throughout halftime doing the Wave. (France beat Brazil for the Gold Medal in the under-23 competition).

I’ve never seen big time tennis, so maybe I’ll go. Tennis seems like a better Olympic sport than golf because the best player ought to win whereas golf tournaments have more luck involved. Golf will be at Riviera, which I’ve been to a half dozen times.

Indoor cycling looks pretty crazy on TV.

I like swimming on TV for one week every four years. (This time, by the way, they are switching the schedule and having track the first week and swimming the second. Is swimming bigger in L.A. than running?) I haven’t been to the newish Sofi stadium, so going there to seem swimming seems like a good deal.

So, what do you recommend?