Fans who hoped to get tickets this week for the 2028 Summer Olympics were met with high prices, sold out events, and technology glitches.
The presale for local residents and subsequent drop for all fans is the earliest release in Olympic history; Paris 2024 tickets went on sale in May 2023. Tickets made available in this drop ranged from $28 to $5,519.
The LA28 committee said nearly 50% of all tickets were under $200, more than 75% were under $400, and roughly 5% were above $1,000. Despite the number of budget-friendly tickets, fans still felt they were priced out of a chance to attend.
“The campaign made you feel like you had a shot at an insider deal because we are hosting the Olympics and this is our town…and I’m looking at tickets online for $400 a person, $600 a person, $2,100,” Los Angeles resident Sarah Maizes told LAList.
In an email to Front Office Sports, LA28 said that ticket prices were determined by “heavy analytics and extensive market demand research around entertainment and live sports in the U.S.”
“Pricing is based on a variety of factors and heavily informed by what fans have told us, as well as venue capacity, type of session, seat location and historical demand,” an LA28 spokesperson told FOS. “The most expensive tickets represent a small portion of the overall inventory, and there are also accessibly priced options at these same sessions we know will draw headlines.”
Ticket prices also include a 24% service fee, which LA28 told FOS accounts for processing and delivering tickets in a manner that will “align with standard industry practices for ticketing live events in the U.S.” The 2024 Paris Olympics instituted a 1.5% service fee.
Local Presales and Tech Issues
Select fans living in certain counties surrounding Los Angeles and Oklahoma City—where softball and canoe slalom events will be held—gained access to a local presale from April 2–6. Fans who entered into and were selected from a ticket draw were able to purchase tickets in the first general drop, which opened Thursday and runs through April 19. All fans selected for the ticket draws were assigned times where they could make their purchases, with 30 minutes to do so after the first ticket was added to cart.
LA28 did not specify what percentage of tickets were made available in the first drop, nor how many drops there will be.
Prior to the local presale, LA28 posted a thread on X/Twitter with tips to make the process easier, but multiple fans responded with reports of error messages when trying to access tickets.
“@LA28 I’m getting an “Access Denied” issue when I click the link from my time slot email – I’ve tried multiple devices, VPN and private relay off…” one user wrote on April 3.
LA28 said the issue prompting the error was resolved April 3.
Los Angeles resident Kirsten Simitzi told the Los Angeles Times that she could not access tickets until two and a half hours after her assigned time slot.
More than one million of the $28 tickets were available, according to LA28, but they went fast. Per LAList, only women’s golf preliminary rounds and women’s soccer matches were available at that price by the end of the local presale.
LA28 Tickets for Popular Events
Fans who were able to purchase tickets did not get to select specific seats. Instead, tickets were split into price categories representing different sections of a competition’s venue. The ticket prices for most events were split into three or four tiers, but sports such as swimming (8), athletics (9), and baseball (10) were split into significantly more.
Below are presale ticket price ranges for some of the most popular Olympic events, compiled by expunk, a community-created website.
- Track and field (finals): $104 to $2,461
- Swimming (finals): $104 to $1,860
- Artistic Gymnastics (men’s and women’s, finals): $104 to $2,264
- Basketball (men’s gold medal game): $107 to $3,455
- Basketball (women’s gold medal game): $107 to $1,145
- Baseball (gold medal game): $56 to $1,718
Ahead of Thursday’s ticket drop, LA28 announced that tickets for certain sports would be not available due to high demand from the presale. Notably, swimming news outlet SwimSwam reported that by April 5, the second-to-last day of the presale, only $1,860 tickets were available for finals sessions.
There will be multiple future ticket drops, and people who entered into earlier draws are still eligible to purchase tickets during future drops. Each individual is allowed to buy a maximum of 12 tickets, as well as an additional 12 for soccer matches.
