The day before the Milan Cortina Olympics started earlier this month, Sarah Dunlay pulled out an old Ghirardelli chocolate box holding her ticket stubs from the 1984 Olympics.
When Dunlay and her husband, Dennis Kissick, reminisce on the summer the Olympics came to Los Angeles, they note the highlights that many Angelenos still recall — the glorious weather, the remarkable reprieve from L.A.’s normally clogged traffic, the elation as the United States’ medal count piled up each day.
She also can hardly believe some of the prices on those old ticket stubs. She saw Olympic exhibition baseball at Dodger Stadium for $6. For $16, she saw the world’s best boxers compete. Her track and field tickets cost $33: “It seemed like a lot at the time.” (It’s a little over $100 in today’s dollars.)
“It was all totally fun,” Dunlay said. “The spirit of it all, and the pageantry, and people from different countries.”
Now, the Olympics are headed back to Los Angeles. When the Milan Cortina Games wrap up on Sunday, the world will start to look ahead to the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A. But ticket prices will be much higher — organizers have said that only a third of tickets will cost under $100, and another third will cost more than $250. The experience of 1984, when many Angelenos were able to see five or 10 Olympic events, would be costly to replicate in 2028.
Back then, Olympics ticket prices started at $3 (adjusted for inflation, that would be just under $10 today). According to a New York Times article at the time, half the tickets were under $10 — meaning in today’s dollars, half of all tickets were cheaper or around the cost of today’s cheapest seats, which will be $28. The average ticket cost $17 in 1984, which would be $55 today.
Incomes are higher now, but by that measure too, today’s tickets are less affordable. That $10 ticket represented just under an hour of work for the median California worker in 1984. Today, a $100 ticket would cost more than two hours’ work at the median California worker’s income — and still, 2 in 3 tickets will cost more than that. At the upper end, the L.A. Olympics are already taking $10,000 deposits for private suites.
Dunlay, who just retired from a career in advertising, and Kissick, who works part-time at age 77 as a legal secretary, aren’t so sure they’ll be in the stands again. Their favorite sport is soccer, and they were disappointed recently to learn that when the FIFA World Cup comes to the U.S. this summer, tickets to see a game in L.A. will be far too pricey for them to afford, with tickets starting at more than $100 and going for as much as $8,680.
“I’m afraid it will be the same for the Olympics. It was easy to get tickets in 1984,” Kissick said. In 2028, however, “I’m assuming they’re not going to be cheap.”
Organizers for the L.A. Olympics say they’re committed to Angelenos from all walks of life enjoying the Games’ return to their city. But based on the organizers’ early framework of ticket prices, and the L.A. area’s concentration of extreme wealth, many in the city are doubtful that the Olympics will be for them.
Gigi Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the games, assures ticket prices will be within reach. “When you have so many Angelenos working on a project, it’s kind of the first thing you think of: How are my cousins and my aunts and uncles going to get to the games?” she said. “It’s a love letter to our city. So affordability has always been top of mind for us.” The Olympic committee has promised to charge $28 for 1 million of the 14 million tickets.
Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor who has written three books on Olympics economics, pointed out that California has more billionaires than anywhere else in the U.S. — about 200. “They want to take advantage of that,” he said. “Ticket prices have gone way, way up in all sports. … Since 1984, there’s been a sharp increase in income inequality. You have more money at the very top, people who can afford to spend this kind of money.”
Stanford economist Roger Noll was living in L.A. back in 1984, teaching at the California Institute of Technology. He went to a soccer match and a team handball game. “It was $3. It was nothing. It was an incredibly small amount of money,” he said. Now, he thinks economic conditions make it obvious that that experience won’t repeat itself.
“As incomes rise, people spend more money on things like this, and there’s a limited amount of space. … It is now getting to the point where you pretty much have to be wealthy to attend anything but very minor events,” said Noll, 85. “Almost all the economic gains are accruing to the top third of the income distribution, and they have more discretionary income to spend.”
Across all major sports, U.S. ticket prices have soared, with costs for baseball and football games tripling between 1991 and 2023. Teams have increasingly catered to the wealthiest ticket buyers.
Noll thinks the promise to keep a third of tickets below $100 won’t help many would-be spectators. “One hundred dollars is a lot.”
Some experts take a sunnier view. Victor Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economist who campaigned against a Boston Olympics, pointed out that many cities have dropped Olympics bids in recent years because they had trouble “convincing local voters that it was in their interest to host a party for rich people from around the world.” The L.A. Olympics organizers know they need to entertain Angelenos.
“I think what we’ll see is cheap tickets for the things that people don’t really want to see, but are still actually great at the Olympics, and wildly expensive tickets for the things that everyone wants to see,” Matheson said. “If you’re okay with seeing a group stage game in team handball, this is going to be great.”
Today’s dynamic pricing technology can lead to both cheaper and more expensive tickets, Matheson said, as computers can more precisely tease out customers’ willingness to pay.
Gutierrez said that the L.A. Olympics will not use dynamic pricing for the first round of tickets that become available through the ticket lottery in April, but will use the technology for later rounds, once the Olympics committee collects data from initial ticket sales.
“Dynamic ticket pricing … is not bad for the fans at all if you’re willing to go all-in following Bulgarian weightlifters and get your Olympic experience that way,” Matheson said.
At the last Summer Games, wealthy fans enjoyed ultra-luxe packages, while organizers in Paris walked back their plans to make events like the Opening Ceremonies along the Seine free to all due to security concerns. Still, Paris offered free and low-cost tickets to many.
Ticket prices are set by the local Olympics organizers, and the vast majority of the proceeds go to the host city, with a small slice to the International Olympic Committee. While some recent Olympics — including Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 — have been financial disasters for their host cities, which built expensive stadiums and failed to recoup their costs, Los Angeles has vowed to avoid costs to taxpayers.
The last L.A. Olympics set a precedent for that, too. In 1984, the Olympics had been so costly for other recent cities that L.A. was the only one to bid to host. With a novel approach to corporate sponsorships and television rights, and a full portfolio of existing venues instead of pricey new construction, the L.A. Olympics managed to turn a modest profit.
The 2028 L.A. Olympics are expected to cost more than $7 billion, to be paid for by domestic sponsorships and other ventures as well as by ticket sales.
Ronan Evain, the head of the fan group Football Supporters Europe, has become the world leader of criticizing FIFA, but says Olympic pricing is much more reasonable. “You’ll have, yes, an expensive, exclusive experience for those that can afford it. And then accessible prices for the others,” Evain said. “Given how negative the perception of the World Cup is in relation to ticket prices and the reputational nightmare for FIFA, if I was the Olympics in 2028, I would do the exact opposite. And I think that’s the direction they’re taking.”
John Ellis was 25 and a recent UCLA graduate when the Olympics came to town in 1984. He remembers looking at the lineup with a friend one morning and deciding on the spur of the moment to go to a field hockey game, which had cheap last-minute tickets available. He also splurged for $200 tickets to the Opening Ceremonies, the most expensive tier.
In 2028, Ellis, a real estate appraiser, expects much higher prices. “I went to one of the Dodgers World Series games this year and had to pay $1,000. I’m not happy about it. It’s just these major live events — concerts and big entertainment — are just so expensive. But I think they’re important,” Ellis said. “There’s a certain price where I wouldn’t go. If I could get in [to the Opening Ceremonies] for $1,000, I would. At $2,000, maybe not.”
He’d like to experience that Olympics high again. “It was just such a positive feeling, being there with the other fans, local people and then people from all around the world — it created a common bond.”
Suzanne Ehrmann, 79, remembers stretching her budget for that Olympic feeling in 1984. Each ticket alone wasn’t much, but she wanted to go to as many sports as she could afford. She saw synchronized swimming, diving, gymnastics. At the conclusion of the marathon, she watched a woman stagger to the finish line. “You could just feel in this stadium everybody was encouraging her to go on. I’ve never felt that in my life. I don’t know how many thousands of people were in the stadium, and every single person was holding their breath and hoping that she would finish. And she did.”
“My dad said ‘You’re crazy, spending all this money,’” said Ehrmann, who was working for her family’s picture frame business at the time. Her late husband, who was working in public health at the University of Southern California, was key: He had a free parking spot at USC.
Dennis Smith, who had just finished his first year teaching history in the L.A. public schools in the summer of 1984, bought last-minute tickets for $10 to see the gold medal demonstration baseball match, played at Dodger Stadium, between the U.S. and Japan. He still has the ticket stub showing his seat in right field. He and his mother went to track and field events for all eight days. His father, an accountant, had been a devoted track fan since the day he watched Cornelius Warmerdam set a world record in 1940. His dad was the one who requested the tickets, but died of a heart attack before the games.
Now, Smith is retired after 37 years of teaching, and he’s keenly aware of L.A.’s tendency toward exclusive events for the rich. He recently scoffed at a $1,500-a-meal restaurant pop-up.
“I used to go to a lot of Lakers games in the ’80s and ’90s — that was the Magic Johnson, Karim Abdul Jabar era of the Lakers. It was the hottest ticket in town, and it was still affordable for a high school teacher,” he said. Not anymore. “It was easier to afford to go to a sporting event back then than now.”
He’s not sure if he’ll make it to any Olympics events in 2028. In part because of the price. But in part because his heart has changed too since that sunlit summer. “It was really a way of saying goodbye to my dad.”
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