Above photo: An action by the anti-Olympics protest group Le revers de la médaille, or The Other Side of the Medal, in December 2023. Phineas Rueckert.
Los Angeles and Paris couldn’t be more different cities.
Yet activists and city officials say there are lessons to be learned from this summer’s Olympic Games.
On Nov. 3, a group of young people armed with banners began to prepare a protest. It was just two days before the U.S. election, but these activists weren’t at the White House or Trump Tower. Instead, they made their way to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
As evening fell, the activists beamed a powerful laser onto the iron grills of the tower. “Olympics Legacy: 20,000 Evictions,” the message read.
This action was the grand finale of The Other Side of the Medal, a coalition of Parisian activists shedding light – in this case, literally – on how the Olympic Games can harm host cities through temporary displacement of rough sleepers, heavy policing of low-income communities, greenwashing and other side effects.
Across the ocean, activists and government officials in the next summer Olympics host city, Los Angeles, watched what went down in Paris this summer.
Many fear that Los Angeles will be even worse. Not only does L.A. have twice the population of Paris, it also has 10 times the unhoused population. And despite claiming to be the first car-free Olympics, the city has about 10% as many transport riders as Paris, according to numbers shared by the Comptroller’s office.
Still several years from the opening ceremony, these groups are already fighting to save Angelenos from the same destruction Parisians faced.
‘Organize Early And Often’
Shortly after the closing ceremony ended, members of the activist coalition NOlympicsLA were on the phone with their Parisian counterparts, a group called Saccage 2024, for a debrief. NOlympicsLA and Saccage 2024 are part of the global NOlympics Anywhere movement, which includes activists from around the world, including Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. All seek to end the Olympics, which they say leads to displacement, surveillance and overpolicing of vulnerable communities.
Saccage 2024’s main takeaway? “Regardless of how terrible the Olympics go and how bad they are for the city – whether we’re talking about the thousands of migrants removed from the streets or the immigrants who worked on the stadiums under extremely poor conditions – these games are presented as a rousing success,” filmmaker and skateboarder Eric Sheehan, a leading member of NOlympicsLA, tells Next City.
The collective amnesia brought on by the excitement of the three-week mega-event is why activists pushing back against the Games have to be forward-thinking, detail-oriented and united from the get-go, Jules Boykoff, who has written several books on the Olympics, said.
“From an activist perspective, I think the main lesson would be to organize early and often,” Boykoff says.
Boykoff, who has spent time with anti-Olympics organizers in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, points to the protests already organized by union leaders at Unite Here, which represents blue-collar hotel employees in Los Angeles. Unite Here has used the upcoming Olympics to push for higher wages and better contracts – similar to how Parisian labor unions used the Games to drive regularizations of undocumented workers. In Paris, this type of direct action has been accompanied by qualitative research from non-profit actors like The Other Side of the Medal, which has driven press coverage of the Games’ negative side through shareable sound-bites and statistics.
Organizing against the Olympics juggernaut, he cautions, often involved activists bringing together multiple stakeholders – whether it be from housing, environmental, digital rights or other sectors. That means organizers needed to stay united, regardless of whether they are working within the system or pushing for an outright ban on the Olympics. He points to a “diversity of tactics” agreement developed by activists ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Games.
“Having those conversations in private, having them earlier than later, and making that explicit and maybe even putting in writing so people can refer back to it when needed — I think that could go a long way as well,” he says.
Already, Los Angeles activists are working to establish these frameworks, says Hamid Khan, the founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. The group is a member of the NOlympicsLA network, which includes the LA chapters of Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter, as well as various tenants’ associations and feminist groups.
“It becomes more heightened the closer we get,” Hamid says. “So what is our strategy? How are we intervening? How are we organizing?”
Activists at NOlympics LA and their partners have already started to draw parallels between the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, responsible for a significant policing build-up that was then aimed at suppressing protests in the wake of the Rodney King beating by the LAPD. They are currently planning several publications and events around the topic.
The group has already organized a series of NOlympics teach-ins, as well as a syllabus and blog.
“There is a common thread, there is a continuous weaving, which is the expansion of the police state,” Khan said.
Running Out Of Time
Activists were not the only Angelinos following this summer’s events in Paris closely. After the Games ended, city officials from L.A. and Paris met in Los Angeles to discuss shared learnings from the Paris Games.
“It was two days of 300 or 400 key people from the school district, the city, smaller cities that are hosting venues in the vicinity, police, state police, county government listening with both rapt attention and sobering realism about what they were hearing about how much more complicated the Olympics are than would just meet the eye by watching them on television,” says Los Angeles’ Chief Deputy Controller Rick Cole, who attended the conference.
Cole worries that while the Olympics could have been an opportunity to push for much-needed city improvements in Los Angeles, it may already be too late to get material gains from the Games.
“We will pull off the Olympics,” Cole says. “Failure is not an option, but it will be potentially at a very high cost with much less benefit than we might have derived had we started earlier and had capacity to capitalize on the positive potential of the Olympics.”
Mike Shear, who heads research at the Comptroller’s office, is concerned that L.A. is behind on rudimentary city government needs, such as hiring staff and basic repairs for city infrastructure. “We’re still not filling all the potholes and fixing all the sidewalks we need to, and now we’re adding the Olympics on top of that,” he says. “It’s going to be a huge challenge.”
Add millions of visitors and infrastructure needs, and you have a recipe for disaster, Shear and Cole agree. Although LA 2028 Olympics organizers are promising a no-build Olympics, there are a number of pricey infrastructure improvements planned, including a high-speed rail line to Las Vegas, a redesign of the LAX/Metro Transit Center Station and the Westside Subway Extension.
Besides these infrastructural challenges, Sheehan fears that the Olympics will be used not only as an excuse to “clean” Los Angeles of its unwanted residents, but also to invest in repressive policing tools that could be used to surveil vulnerable communities, such as undocumented immigrants, in the longer-term.
The Olympics “tend to exacerbate problems that cities are already facing,” Sheehan says.
“When you host a six-week party, there’s a lot of money that gets spent, and a lot of people have fun and have their pockets padded, but at the expense of people, at the expense of tenants who are evicted, at the expense of homeless folks who are thrown in jail for no reason and may be bussed somewhere else, at the expense of black and brown folks who are labeled as gang members and ruthlessly swept from the street for no real reason,” he says.
“We expect all of this to be the legacy of L.A. 2028.”