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Setting out to prove that topping Paris isn’t mission impossible, Los Angeles rolled out a skydiving Tom Cruise, Grammy winner Billie Eilish, and other stars on Sunday as it took over Olympic hosting duties from the French capital, which closed out its 2024 Games just as they started — with joy and panache.
Capping two and a half extraordinary weeks of Olympic sports and emotion, Paris’ boisterous, star-studded closing ceremony in France’s national stadium mixed unbridled celebration with a somber call for peace from International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach.
Following in Paris’ footsteps in 2028 promises to be a challenge: It made spectacular use of its cityscape for its first Games in 100 years, with the Eiffel Tower and other iconic monuments becoming Olympic stars in their own right as they served as backdrops and venues for medal-winning feats.
But the City of Angels, like the City of Light, showed that it, too, holds some aces.
Cruise — in his Ethan Hunt persona — wowed by descending from the top of the stadium to electric guitar “Mission: Impossible” riffs. Once his feet were back on the ground — and after shaking hands with enthralled athletes — he took the Olympic flag from star gymnast Simone Biles, fixed it to the back of a motorcycle, and roared out of the arena.
The appetite-whetting message was clear: Los Angeles 2028 promises to be an eye-opener, too.
Still, this was largely Paris’ night — its opportunity for one final party. And what a party it was. Thousands of athletes danced and sang the night away — reveling in the artistic show that celebrated Olympic themes and its fireworks flourish.
Even Bach got the party bug, jokingly calling the Paris Games “Seine-national” — a nod to the Seine River that, despite water quality concerns, staged the Olympic triathlon and marathon swimming and the wacky and wonderful opening ceremony.
- At what will be his last Games after announcing his intention to step down next year, Bach also made a somber appeal for ”a culture of peace” in a war-torn world.
“We know that the Olympic Games cannot create peace, but the Olympic Games can create a culture of peace that inspires the world,” he said. “Let us live this culture of peace every single day.”
Cruise then provided a change of gear.
After being lowered on a rope live from the roof’s giddy heights, Cruise drove his bike past the Eiffel Tower in a prerecorded segment, onto a plane, and then skydived over the Hollywood Hills. Three circles were added to the O’s of the famed Hollywood sign, creating five interlaced Olympic rings.
In the stadium, the athletes’ enthusiasm bubbled over when crowds of them rushed the stage at one point. Stadium announcements urged them to double back. Some stayed, creating an impromptu mosh pit around Grammy-winning French pop-rock band Phoenix as they played before security and volunteers cleared the stage.
Multiple French athletes crowd-surfed. U.S. team members jumped up and down in their Ralph Lauren jackets.
On the stadium’s giant screens, Eilish, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, rapper Snoop Dogg — wearing pants with the Olympic rings after being a popular feature of the Paris Games — and Dr. Dre kept the party going in a prerecorded show from a California beach.
Each is a California native, including H.E.R., who sang the U.S. national anthem live at the Stade de France, crammed with more than 70,000 people.
The stadium crowd roared as French swimmer Léon Marchand, dressed in a suit and tie instead of the swim trunks he wore to win four golds, first collected the Olympic flame from the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.
Reappearing later in the stadium to spectators’ chants of “Léon, Léon,” Marchand then blew out the flame. The Summer Games were over.
Their next stop: is LA in 2028.
The national stadium, France’s largest, was one of the targets of Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers who killed 130 people in and around Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. The joy and celebrations that swept Paris during the Games as Marchand and other French athletes racked up 64 medals — 16 of them gold — marked a major watershed in the city’s recovery from that night of terror.
“Paris became a party again and France found itself,” said Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Games organizing committee.
The closing ceremony also saw the awarding of the last medals — each embedded with a chunk of the Eiffel Tower. Fittingly for the first Olympics that aimed for gender parity, they all went to women — the gold, silver, and bronze medalists from the women’s marathon earlier Sunday.
The women’s marathon took the spot of the men’s race that traditionally closed out previous Games. The switch was part of efforts in Paris to make the Olympic spotlight shine more brightly on the sporting feats of women. Paris was also where women first made their Olympic debut, at the Games of 1900.
The U.S. team again topped the medal table, with 126 in all and 40 of them gold.
As a delicate pink sunset gave way to night, athletes marched into the stadium waving the flags of their 205 countries and territories — a display of global unity in a world gripped by global tensions and conflicts. The stadium screens carried the words, “Together, united for peace.”
A golden-shrouded figure dropped spider-like from the skies into a darkened world of smoke and swirling stars. Olympic symbols were celebrated, including the flag of Greece, the birthplace of the ancient Games, and the five interlaced Olympic rings, lit up in white in the arena where tens of thousands of lights glittered like fireflies.
Now, the lights are out. But the memories of Paris’ special summer won’t dim anytime soon.
“We saw ourselves as a people of incorrigible grumblers,” Estanguet said. “We woke up in a country of wild fans who would not stop singing.”
In their winning bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, Los Angeles leaders pledged that the city’s version of the Games would be the greenest ever — a goal they planned to achieve in large part by making access to the event “car-free.”
It was a bold statement because, well, it’s Los Angeles. Could America’s capital of car culture, where traffic shapes daily life more than the weather, really pull that off?
Now that the Paris Olympics have ended, the clock is ticking. Los Angeles must complete much-needed upgrades to the region’s transit system to handle an influx of athletes and visitors without bringing car traffic to a standstill. That includes extending rail lines, adding a legion of buses and clearing countless traffic lanes to allow hundreds of thousands of people to navigate a metropolis that sprawls across 4,000 square miles.
“I’m optimistic,” said Eli Lipmen, the executive director of Move L.A., an organization that advocates for the expansion of public transit in the region. “There’s nothing better than a deadline.”
At the closing ceremony on Sunday, Mayor Karen Bass received the official Olympic flag to mark the official countdown to the 2028 Games. And on Saturday at a news conference in Paris, she reiterated that those Games would be “no-car.”
But in some ways, the dream of a car-free — or, as organizers have been putting it more recently, “transit-first” — Olympics in Los Angeles may feel even more out of reach than it did seven years ago when it was named the host city for the third time.
Ridership on public transit, which includes 109 miles of rail lines and nearly 120 bus routes, plunged during the coronavirus pandemic, as it did in cities nationwide, and has yet to fully rebound. Usage of Los Angeles’s Metro system is at about 85 percent of its 2019 levels, according to the transit agency. And it’s not uncommon for public transit trips in Los Angeles to take twice as long as driving because of infrequent service and stops that are far from some people’s homes.
The rise in the region’s homeless population has turned some Metro trains and buses into de facto shelters, making many riders feel unsafe, and high-profile incidents of violence on the system have amplified those concerns.
Overall road traffic has increased. Last year, the average driver in Los Angeles lost 89 hours to congestion, one of the highest numbers in the nation, as driving trips in the middle of the day have surged with fewer people making daily commutes to work, according to the transportation analytics company INRIX.
Adding in game-day traffic at virtually every major venue in the region, from the storied Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena to the Long Beach Convention Center, could seem apocalyptic for drivers.
But Los Angeles leaders say all of that makes the Olympic Games a unique chance to finally free Angelenos from their cars and the hours of gridlock they endure by showing them what’s possible — if officials can get enough done in four years.
“It’s an incredibly good opportunity to showcase the multibillion-dollar investment we’ve had in infrastructure,” said Stephanie Wiggins, the chief executive of Los Angeles’s Metro system, which is overseen by elected officials representing Los Angeles County, as well as some of the 88 cities within it.
Metro’s bold plan to improve the region’s transit system in time for the Olympics features a combination of long-planned upgrades and quicker fixes. As part of the plan, which is called “28 by ’28” and consists of dozens of projects, a new rail line through South Los Angeles opened in 2022. And last year, Metro unveiled the longest light-rail line in the country, which offers a direct route from East Los Angeles to Santa Monica.
But the to-do list is long, and only five of the projects are complete. Construction on a dedicated rapid bus lane along Vermont Avenue, a major north-south corridor where riders make 45,000 trips per day, has not even begun. And pressure is building to finish extending the subway’s Purple Line from downtown Los Angeles to the University of California, Los Angeles, campus, where the athletes’ village will be, which could turn a two-hour drive into a 30-minute train ride.
”I think the biggest challenge is that not as much of the transit system is likely to be complete by 2028 as might have been hoped,” said Joshua Schank, a senior fellow at the U.C.L.A. Institute of Transportation Studies and a former chief innovation officer for Metro.
Some residents share those doubts. Sebastiaan Gregoir, 45, a film and TV editor who lives downtown, said that the city was courageous in the way it was investing in public transit. But on the question of whether the Metro system would be ready to handle the Olympics, he’s far from convinced.
“My answer is probably no,” he said. “In public transport, four years is nothing. It’s tomorrow basically.”
Paris, too, had vowed to make its Games fully accessible by transit — and succeeded. The city is more walkable and has better transportation infrastructure. (It also had signage everywhere and an army of volunteers pointing people where to go.)
But there are measures Los Angeles can take beyond transit upgrades to ease congestion during the event. The city can alter truck delivery times and encourage remote work, said Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA28, which is organizing the 2028 Olympics. He and others in the group were in Paris observing the day-to-day operations of this year’s Games. Mr. Wasserman added that communication campaigns and partnerships with city and transit groups were also essential.
During the 2028 Olympics, Metro is planning to borrow more than 2,700 buses to help transport athletes and visitors. California’s transit agency will designate freeway lanes for buses only.
That was also the plan for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 before rail lines even existed in the city. Despite worries in the lead-up to those Games, the bus system, in addition to staggered work schedules that were adopted by businesses, added up to extraordinarily light traffic, or “automotive nirvana,” as The Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
Ms. Bass has said that this time around, the city has more public transportation options, as well as technology that can facilitate remote work to keep the roads as empty as possible.
She has also noted that Los Angeles will get a couple of dress rehearsals before the Games. The region is slated to host some matches for the World Cup in 2026 and the Super Bowl in 2027.
Some Angelenos said that while they were skeptical about whether they would see gleaming new stations or better lit subway cars in a transformed Metro system in the next four years, they would be open to using transit if it was convenient.
Nick Andert, 36, a documentary producer who lives in West Hollywood, a walkable enclave surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, said he would welcome a way to get to the Games without a car.
“I definitely hate the idea of trying to drive and park,” he said.
The United States had an excellent showing at the Summer Olympics in Paris. It won the most medals by far, and tied with China for most gold medals — the first such tie at a Summer Games.
| United States | 40 | 44 | 42 | 126 |
| China | 40 | 27 | 24 | 91 |
| Britain | 14 | 22 | 29 | 65 |
But that’s not all. The U.S. won the most medals looking only at men’s events, and the most counting only women’s. It won the most medals in team events and the most in solo competitions.
| United States | 13 | 16 | 23 | 52 |
| France | 11 | 14 | 13 | 38 |
| China | 17 | 10 | 7 | 34 |
| United States | 26 | 23 | 18 | 67 |
| China | 19 | 15 | 16 | 50 |
| Australia | 13 | 9 | 8 | 30 |
| United States | 12 | 9 | 8 | 29 |
| Britain | 7 | 5 | 9 | 21 |
| China | 8 | 6 | 5 | 19 |
| United States | 28 | 35 | 34 | 97 |
| China | 32 | 21 | 19 | 72 |
| France | 13 | 22 | 18 | 53 |
But Americans didn’t win in every way you could slice it. They didn’t win the most medals in events with weapons (yes, the javelin counts). And they didn’t win the most in sports scored by judges.
| South Korea | 10 | 5 | 2 | 17 |
| United States | 3 | 5 | 3 | 11 |
| China | 5 | 3 | 3 | 11 |
| China | 14 | 8 | 5 | 27 |
| United States | 4 | 6 | 7 | 17 |
| Britain | 2 | 3 | 10 | 15 |
| China | 8 | 6 | 0 | 14 |
| United States | 3 | 2 | 3 | 8 |
| France | 1 | 5 | 2 | 8 |
| France | +6 | +14 | +11 | +31 |
| United States | +1 | +3 | +9 | +13 |
| South Korea | +7 | +5 | – | +12 |
These are extremely unofficial categories. But they do reveal some interesting patterns — if it felt as if South Korean athletes dominated the archery and sharpshooting podiums, they did.
The U.S., by contrast, won the most medals in events that involved a race of some type. And even if we look only at sports that were also held at the 1900 Paris Olympics, the Americans have the most medals.
Involve a Race
1900 Paris Olympics
| United States | 23 | 22 | 19 | 64 |
| Britain | 8 | 17 | 13 | 38 |
| Australia | 14 | 14 | 9 | 37 |
| United States | 34 | 34 | 29 | 97 |
| Britain | 12 | 18 | 18 | 48 |
| China | 15 | 13 | 16 | 44 |
We should note that we are sorting these tables by total medals, not gold medals. Opinions differ on the proper approach.
And the U.S. is, of course, a large country with many resources. If you want to give the small countries a fair shot, the tables below can help out.
10 Million People
$10K G.D.P. per Capita
| New Zealand | 10 | 7 | 3 | 20 |
| Hungary | 6 | 7 | 6 | 19 |
| Denmark | 2 | 2 | 5 | 9 |
| Uzbekistan | 8 | 2 | 3 | 13 |
| Ukraine | 3 | 5 | 4 | 12 |
| Kenya | 4 | 2 | 5 | 11 |
Which way of counting is best? That’s for you to decide. You can pick your favorite here.
| United States | 40 | 44 | 42 | 126 |
| China | 40 | 27 | 24 | 91 |
| Britain | 14 | 22 | 29 | 65 |
| France | 16 | 26 | 22 | 64 |
| Australia | 18 | 19 | 16 | 53 |
| Japan | 20 | 12 | 13 | 45 |
| Italy | 12 | 13 | 15 | 40 |
| Netherlands | 15 | 7 | 12 | 34 |
| Germany | 12 | 13 | 8 | 33 |
| South Korea | 13 | 9 | 10 | 32 |