The move is a cost-saving measure to avoid having to build new facilities, a promise made by local organizers in line with the International Olympic Committee’s demands for cheaper games in the spirit of the minimal new construction of the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Los Angeles has no whitewater sports facility or swimming pool with a stadium large enough to host Olympic events.
“There are no existing venues [for white-water events] “This new venue will be the first of its kind in California, or frankly in the Western U.S.,” LA28 Chairman and President Casey Wasserman said Friday in a video call announcing the new venue. “This new venue will be the first of its kind in California, or frankly in the Western U.S..”
Oklahoma City has a facility built on the Oklahoma River next to downtown that Wasserman called “one of the premier canoeing venues,” and he added that the city’s Devon Park, home of the Women’s College World Series, has undergone extensive renovations to become “the best softball venue in the country.”
A move to Oklahoma City wouldn’t be unprecedented: The surfing events at this summer’s Paris Olympics will be held in Tahiti, and many of the mountaineering events at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics will take place four to five hours outside of Milan. The International Olympic Committee is even considering moving sliding out of Italy if a sliding center under construction near Cortina isn’t completed on time.
LA 28 originally planned to hold the swimming events in a temporary stadium built inside USC’s baseball field on the edge of downtown Los Angeles, but USC wanted to renovate the stadium, forcing tournament organizers to find another venue. After searching around Los Angeles, Wasserman said, “we came up with this really fun idea of moving to SoFi.”
A few years ago, such a move would have been unimaginable, but organizers of this summer’s Paris Olympics plan to host swimming events in a temporary pool inside a two-story indoor rugby stadium. USA Swimming is currently hosting the Olympic trials at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Wasserman, who will be attending the trials this weekend, said his staff has been tossing ideas around with workers building the temporary pool in Indianapolis.
But holding the swimming events at SoFi created another logistical problem: The stadium will be the main venue for the opening ceremonies, along with the Los Angeles Coliseum near downtown L.A. Typically, the swimming events take place during the first week of the Olympics, but the need to quickly convert SoFi into a swimming venue meant that the swimming events were swapped for track and field, Wasserman said.
He added that the SoFi Pool will be built well before the Olympics begin and will be covered during the opening ceremonies.
He also said canoeists and softball players could attend either the opening or closing ceremonies while they were in Oklahoma so they wouldn’t feel left out of the events in Los Angeles.
