Dispersed Games to become increasingly common, says US Olympic chief

NEW YORK – Geographically dispersed Games are well on their way to becoming the norm, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) chief Sarah Hirshland said on Oct 15, as the growing scale of the Olympics complicates infrastructure plans for hosts.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials hailed the most recent Milano-Cortina Games as a success, despite early concerns over the first spread-out Winter Olympics that had venues scattered over 22,000km.

The upcoming LA28 Games are also expected to be spread out, with softball and canoe slalom set to take place in Oklahoma City and football to be in several metropolitan areas: New York City; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; St Louis; San Jose, California; and San Diego.

“The dispersal of the Games themselves is evolving. And a lot of that is because the scale of the Games has gotten so big and significant that the infrastructure required to host is very hard to find in a single place,” said Hirshland, who was speaking at the Columbia University Sports Management Conference.

The 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps are expected to follow the Milano-Cortina model, with venues in Nice and the Alpine regions. Earlier in 2026, New York state formed an exploratory committee to host the 2042 Winter Games, with the duties to be shared between the five boroughs and Lake Placid.

Salt Lake City, Utah, has already been confirmed as the host of the Winter Olympics in 2034 and its centralised plan for venues will serve as a “rare exception”, said Hirshland.

“It is likely that the LA 2028 Games will be the largest summer Games ever,” she said.

“My guess is that the summer Games thereon after will probably be smaller than what we’re going to see in LA. And a lot of that is infrastructure demand, cost demand, and to some degree there is a point at which even the logistics get so cumbersome that you can’t continue to grow unless you really rethink the way you do it.”

Hirshland also said the USOPC expects a surge of interest in Olympic sports from hosting two Olympic Games in six years.

The Atlanta Games in 1996 preceded a double-digit uptick in participation in some Olympic sports in the US, Hirshland told reporters, expecting a similar boost when the country hosts for the first time since Salt Lake City staged the 2002 Winter Games.

“We’ve had a number of conversations here with our respective national governing bodies this week about how to think about the participation interest that we anticipate on the backs of the LA28 Games as a result of the data points that we have both anecdotal and sort of factual around the impact of the ’96 Games 30 years ago,” said Hirshland.

“The work that our teams are doing now... is to think about how do we ensure that in a world where social media is prevalent and information flows so much more freely than it did back in 1996.”

The USOPC has poured efforts into social media over the last two Games in Paris and Milano-Cortina, as the IOC relaxed rules around what athletes can post at the Olympics.

Hirshland said she anticipated that the LA28 Olympics and the 2034 Games in Salt Lake City could prompt an interest in more niche Olympic sports at college level, where the country’s more traditional pastimes like American football are still dominating the landscape.

“That would be absolutely a victory from our perspective. We have to have the schools prepared to accept that interest and be able to support it,” she said. REUTERS