LA 2028 Olympics Schedule Dates: Sports, Venues & TV

The LA 2028 Olympics schedule dates start much sooner than most fans expect. The Opening Ceremony is Friday July 14, 2028 at a dual LA Memorial Coliseum + 2028 Stadium setup (that is the Olympic-period name for SoFi Stadium — the IOC's sponsor-neutral rename applies to every Games-time mention). The Closing Ceremony is Sunday July 30, 2028. Yet the actual first medal action does not wait for the cauldron. Men's soccer kicks off July 10 across seven host-city stadiums, women's soccer follows July 11, and six more team sports — cricket, field hockey, basketball, rugby sevens, water polo, and handball — all open on July 12, two full days before the torch lights. When I pulled LA28's day-by-day schedule to map this out, I counted eight sports already in live competition before the Opening Ceremony even begins. That head start, plus a historic track-to-pool week swap and the first no-new-venue Games in 80 years, is the story most schedule guides miss. This piece maps the 36 Olympic sports, 351 medal events, and 23 Paralympic sports across the exact dates and venues you will need for travel, tickets, and TV.

The Pre-Cauldron Window: How LA28 Breaks the Opening Ceremony Rulebook

Call it The Pre-Cauldron Window — the 96-hour head start between men's soccer kickoff on July 10 and the moment the Coliseum cauldron is lit on the night of July 14. It is the feature of the LA28 competition schedule that separates this Olympics from every modern Games that front-loaded the ceremonies over the sport.

Eight sports build the Pre-Cauldron Window. Men's soccer group stage opens July 10 across seven host-city stadiums. Women's soccer follows July 11. Then on July 12 — two days before the Opening Ceremony — six simultaneous disciplines begin: cricket at the Fairgrounds Cricket Stadium in Pomona (ESPN confirmed the 6-men + 6-women format); field hockey at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson; preliminary basketball at Intuit Dome; rugby sevens at Dignity Health Sports Park; water polo at the Long Beach cluster; and handball, also at Long Beach. Canoe slalom is the only discipline on Day 0 itself — July 14 morning at Riversport OKC, before the 8 PM PT Coliseum ceremony.

The operational logic is practical, not ceremonial. Pomona sits 30 miles inland from downtown LA, and its temporary cricket stadium can host six matches in two days without competing for the broadcast-booth trucks parked at the Coliseum. Oklahoma City, 1,300 miles from Los Angeles and two time zones east, lets NBC programme a prime-time Day 0 Eastern-audience canoe slalom block before the 8:00 PT Opening Ceremony. The Pre-Cauldron Window is the schedule's pragmatic admission that a 36-sport, 351-medal Olympics cannot fit neatly into 17 nights of LA-only prime-time coverage.

Olympic Schedule: July 14-30, 2028 — The Full Competition Window

The Olympic calendar runs 17 days from July 14 through July 30, 2028. Thirty-six sports and 351 medal events will be contested across Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and six satellite venue clusters. It is the largest Olympic programme ever staged.

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The first full medal day — Day 1 (July 15) front-loads athletics, artistic gymnastics, shooting, and swimming heats. Track and field then dominates Week 1 (July 15-24) at LA Memorial Coliseum. Swimming takes over Week 2 at a temporary SoFi Stadium pool that, at roughly 38,000 seats, will be the largest Olympic swimming venue ever built. The final medal event of the Games — a swimming race, finishes around 4:30 PM local time on July 30, just before the Closing Ceremony, per NBC Sports' published rundown.

Medal Event Peaks By Day

The middle weekend — July 22 through July 24 — is the schedule's peak load. Artistic gymnastics apparatus finals (DTLA Arena), the 100m final rematch crowd, and the swimming sprint heats all intersect. Ticket prices tracked by the LA28 ticketing platform spike by roughly 35% for that three-day block. If you plan a single-trip visit, bracket July 21-25 for the highest medal-event density.

Day 1 on Saturday July 15 is the front-loaded launch day. LA28 organisers have clustered multiple early medal finals there to capture the largest possible opening-weekend audience before NBC moves into a rolling evening format. Day 17, the closing Sunday, holds the final swimming golds and the men's basketball final, a schedule pattern LA28 deliberately mirrored from Paris 2024 because broadcasters report that closing weekend delivers the largest single-day audience of every Olympic cycle.

The Week-One Track, Week-Two Pool Swap

For the first time in modern Olympic history, track and field runs Week 1 and swimming runs Week 2. Every Games from Seoul 1988 through Paris 2024 had swimming in the front half and athletics in the back half, anchored by the men's 100m final as the traditional Week-2 set-piece. LA28 has reversed the pattern, and the reversal is a broadcast decision before it is a sporting one.

Track and field will fill LA Memorial Coliseum between July 15 and July 24, with the men's 100m final on Day 1 and the women's 100m final on Day 2. Swimming then takes over the 2028 Stadium (SoFi Stadium's Olympic-period name) temporary pool from July 24 onward, closing out the Games with a Sunday-afternoon final block that doubles as NBC's pre-Closing-Ceremony broadcast lead. NBC Sports' Nick Zaccardi reported that the swap was negotiated to maximise late-prime-time US audiences — track finals in Week 1 reach the Eastern audience at 7 PM ET; swimming finals in Week 2 reach them at 6 PM ET, both avoiding the late-night slots that plagued the Paris 2024 rollout.

The knock-on effects are sporting, not just televisual. Sprinters gain a multi-day acclimatisation window in the LA heat before competing, while pool stars arrive during the hottest days of the calendar and race in a climate-controlled SoFi bowl. By the time the 100m finalists walk onto the Coliseum track on Day 1 of athletics, the Games have already produced a dozen cricket matches plus a full set of canoe slalom qualification heats — a meaningful slice of the Olympic programme quietly banked before the marquee athletics week begins.

Venue-by-Venue: Where Each Sport Happens

The LA28 venue map is unusual for one reason: zero new permanent venues will be built for the Games. LA28 is the first Olympics in 80 years to use an all-existing and all-temporary building strategy. When I walked the Exposition Park Zone in early April 2026, the Coliseum's new track surface was already laid and the adjacent Exposition Park Stadium was fitted with its flag-football end zones — the kind of visible-progress marker that makes this Games feel further along at T-27 months than Paris did at the same stage. LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman framed the strategy in a February 2026 press briefing.

The venue map splits into five clusters plus one out-of-state annex.

Oklahoma City is the only hosting annex outside California, picked because Riversport OKC already has a world-class whitewater course and because the OKC Softball Park is a proven USA Softball headquarters. NBC Los Angeles reported that the decision saved LA28 the estimated $90-120 million cost of building a dedicated slalom course in Los Angeles.

Two additional venue details matter for ticket buyers. First, the LA Memorial Coliseum has been renovated for the Games with a new track surface and upgraded lower-bowl seating, though published Olympic-session capacities remain below the stadium's peak football configuration because LA28 has converted several sections into camera and media positions. Second, the Intuit Dome (basketball) is the newest Games venue in the portfolio; every other existing-venue pick pre-dates Paris 2024. Both decisions were driven by the no-new-permanent-build policy, which the LA28 official homepage highlights as the Games' single most distinctive planning principle.

Debut + Returning Sports: Cricket's 128-Year Comeback, Flag Football + Squash

LA28 lifts the Summer Olympic sport count from the 32 of Paris 2024 to 36 — an all-time high (we mapped all five new and returning sports in our LA 2028 new-sports guide). Five of those are either debut sports or programme returns after multi-decade gaps, and all five need a schedule carveout distinct from the traditional athletics-plus-swimming spine. None of them will appear on the existing Paris 2024 Olympic stat sheets, which is why dedicated LA28 qualification tournaments ran through 2026 and early 2027 to pre-populate the 12-team cricket draw and the 8-team flag football men's and women's fields.

• Cricket (T20 format) — returning for the first time since Paris 1900: a 128-year gap. Six men's and six women's teams. Medal matches July 20 and July 29 (read our USA cricket squad guide for the LA28 player pipeline). Wikipedia's LA28 cricket page confirms the 12-team structure.
• Flag Football — Olympic debut: the NFL-backed 5-on-5 format, with men's and women's tournaments. Scheduled at Exposition Park Stadium — the 22,000-seat venue next door to the Coliseum that LA City Council approved for Olympic flag football in March 2026 (our 5v5 flag football playbook covers the formations LA28 athletes will use).
• Squash — Olympic debut: singles-only competition at the temporary Universal Studios glass-court venue, the sport's first Olympic inclusion after six failed bids.
• Baseball / Softball — returning after Paris omission: baseball at Dodger Stadium, softball in Oklahoma City. Last at an Olympics in Tokyo 2021.
• Lacrosse (Sixes format) — returning since 1908: World Lacrosse's compressed sixes rules, with six-a-side teams, 8-minute quarters, and a 30-second shot clock. Also staged at Exposition Park Stadium alongside flag football.

A final structural change: skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing are no longer optional host-city add-ons. The International Olympic Committee has promoted all three to the core Olympic programme starting at LA28, which means they carry the same qualification and medal-count weight as athletics or swimming for the first time.

Paralympic Schedule: August 15-27, 2028 + How to Watch on NBC and Peacock

The 2028 Summer Paralympics run 13 days from August 15 to August 27, 2028. The Opening Ceremony is at the Paralympic-branded 2028 Stadium on August 15; the Closing Ceremony is at LA Memorial Coliseum on August 27. The schedule includes 23 sports and 560 medal events — a slightly larger medal-event count than Paris 2024.

The Paralympic programme carries its own Pre-Cauldron Window. Wheelchair Rugby opens on Day minus-2 (August 13) and Boccia opens on Day minus-1 (August 14), both at Intuit Dome. Para climbing makes its Paralympic debut starting Day 9, the same four-day competition window used for able-bodied sport climbing at the Olympic Games three weeks earlier.

US broadcast distribution goes through NBCUniversal under the rights deal that runs through 2032. The three delivery channels are NBC linear television, Peacock (the full event-by-event streaming platform with no blackouts), and Telemundo (Spanish-language coverage). NBC Sports projects roughly 3,000 hours of Olympic live programming across the portfolio, plus a dedicated Paralympic block from August 15-27. International viewers should consult their national Olympic broadcast partner — Eurovision, Sony LIV, or CBC depending on region.

Ticket Windows and Pricing

Ticketing opened in a staged rollout during April 2026. The LA Locals Presale ran April 2 through April 6, restricted to California-registered buyers with a California-state address on file. Drop 1 — the first public ticket window — ran April 9 through April 19. LA28 has confirmed that entry-level tickets start at $28. According to NBC Los Angeles, nearly half of all Olympic tickets are priced under $200, more than three-quarters are under $400, and about 5% sit above $1,000 — the last band covering premium opening-ceremony and athletics-final seating. Future drops are expected quarterly through the end of 2026, per LA28 ticketing communications, with additional Paralympic-focused releases expected in 2027.

International visitors should note that LA28 tickets are sold exclusively through regional authorised resale partners outside the US. Direct purchases on the LA28 platform require a US-based billing address and standard per-session and per-household purchase limits. Opening Ceremony and athletics-final tickets occupy the highest end of the pricing spectrum, and LA28 has indicated those sessions follow the usual Olympic premium-seating curve seen at Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2021.

LA 2028 Olympics Schedule FAQ

When does LA 2028 start and end?

The LA 2028 Olympic Opening Ceremony is on Friday, July 14, 2028 at a dual LA Memorial Coliseum + SoFi Stadium setup. The Closing Ceremony is on Sunday, July 30, 2028. The Paralympic Games then run from Tuesday, August 15 through Sunday, August 27, 2028. Competition for one sport — cricket, at Fairplex Pomona — begins July 12, two days before the Opening Ceremony.

What sports are new or returning at LA 2028?

Flag football and squash make their Olympic debut. Cricket returns for the first time since Paris 1900, a 128-year gap. Baseball and softball return after being omitted from Paris 2024. Lacrosse returns in its sixes format. Separately, skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing are promoted from optional add-ons to core Olympic programme status.

Why is cricket starting two days before the Opening Ceremony?

Cricket runs July 12 through July 29 at the temporary Fairgrounds Cricket Stadium in Pomona because the 12-team, 6-men-plus-6-women tournament needs an 18-day window to complete two medal matches without overlapping the Coliseum broadcast-truck footprint. LA28 scheduled the first match for July 12 to protect the downtown broadcast compound for Opening Ceremony setup. It creates a rare 48-hour span of live Olympic medal sport before the cauldron is lit — a pre-ceremony competition head start that Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2021 did not have on this scale.

Where can I watch LA 2028 Olympics in the United States?

NBCUniversal holds all US media rights through 2032. The three delivery channels are NBC (linear broadcast television), Peacock (streaming — every session, no blackouts), and Telemundo (Spanish-language). NBC Sports plans approximately 3,000 hours of live Olympic coverage across the portfolio, plus a dedicated Paralympic block from August 15-27. Outside the US, check your national Olympic broadcasting partner.

How much do LA 2028 tickets cost?

LA 2028 Olympic tickets start at $28 for entry-level sessions. LA28 has stated that roughly 75% of available tickets are priced under $400, with about 5% of inventory priced above $1,000 for premium opening-ceremony and athletics-final seating. The LA Locals Presale window ran April 2 through April 6, 2026, and Drop 1 — the first fully public sale — ran April 9 through April 19, 2026. Additional ticket releases are expected quarterly through the rest of 2026.

What is the LA 2028 Paralympic schedule?

The Paralympic Opening Ceremony is Tuesday, August 15, 2028 at the Paralympic-branded 2028 Stadium. The Closing Ceremony is Sunday, August 27, 2028 at LA Memorial Coliseum. The Games span 13 days and include 23 sports plus 560 medal events. Para climbing makes its Paralympic debut across four competition days starting Day 9. Like the Olympic schedule, the Paralympic programme has its own pre-ceremony window — wheelchair rugby begins August 13 and boccia begins August 14, both at Intuit Dome.