Olympics contracts and the politics of who gets rich

WHOEVER wants a slice of the 2028 Olympics should prepare a bid, hire a consultant, and lower their expectations. That is the upshot of a new campaign by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute, together with LA28's corporate sponsors, to help local small businesses win contracts for the Games and, while they are at it, Super Bowl LXI at SoFi Stadium in February 2027. The campaign is well-meaning. It is also a concession that the structural design of the Games makes it very hard for the host city's own businesses to benefit.

LA28, the private organising committee, has pledged to direct 75% of its addressable procurement spending to businesses in the Greater Los Angeles region and 25% to small businesses. In April 2026 it unveiled the plan alongside Intuit, a sponsor, which will co-create a supplier-readiness programme. JPMorganChase, another Founding Partner, announced on 5 August that it would deploy more than $1m in new philanthropic funding to help small businesses prepare for Games contracts and hire an extra 100 business bankers across Southern California over the next five years. These are not trivial sums. They are also a side-door solution to a problem that the organising committee itself created.

The trouble begins with what counts as "local". LA28 defines the Greater Los Angeles region as five counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. The city of Los Angeles, which is the official Olympic host and the financial backstop for the Games, is not guaranteed a preferential share. LA28's chief executive, Reynold Hoover, told the city council in April that it would give the city's suppliers priority "when all else is equal". He would not commit to anything more. Focusing exclusively on the city, he argued, would "artificially reduce the pool of competition" and place greater risk on the city's taxpayers. That is a neat inversion. The city taxpayers are the backstop; they deserve to know whether the private committee will actually direct contracts to their businesses or merely pray the market takes care of it.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson put it plainly: "You could have a scenario where no L.A. business does any business with LA28." He is right. The plan contains no quotas for the city. The procurement disputes have been joined since the city's contracts chief, John Reamer, revealed that his staff did not review the plan before it was released and questioned whether the relationship between the city and LA28 was a genuine partnership.

This is not a new tension. Mega-events have a habit of generating spectacle and scattering money. Rio's businesses gained little. London's legacy was mixed. LA28 has a novel twist: it is operating on a privately funded model with a $2.5bn domestic sponsorship revenue target, and it has already secured over $2bn in sponsorships by late 2025. The organising committee is not, in the usual sense, a public project. But it is not entirely private, either. The city of Los Angeles is on the hook if things go wrong. The incentive structure is thus asymmetric. LA28 can define "local" as broadly as it likes. The city cannot walk away.

That is where the sponsors' campaign fits in. The LABC Institute, Turner Construction, AECOM and others have been hosting forums to connect small businesses with procurement pathways. The city's own ProcureLA programme, launched in October 2024, offers one-on-one consultation and certification assistance. Intuit and LA28 will work together on supplier readiness. None of these programmes substitutes for a binding commitment to the host city. They are scaffolding around a hollow centre.

To be sure, the organising committee has a point about competition. A narrow geographic carve-out could raise costs and narrow the quality pool. But the gap between competition and protectionism is not a straight line. London required local-content provisions in its Games contracts. Tokyo pushed small-business quotas. Both were imperfect. Both were explicit. LA28's plan is none of the above: it is a suggestion wrapped in a sponsorship programme, with the city's risk left unaddressed.

The deeper problem is institutional, not arithmetic. LA28 operates as an independently funded non-profit, answerable neither to the city council nor to taxpayers. Its governing board can decide that five counties is local, that a supplier-readiness forum is enough, and that the city's complaints are politically motivated rather than economically grounded. The city, for its part, has no contractual leverage over procurement decisions. It can grumble. It cannot veto. The result is the familiar one in which a host city underwrites a private project and receives a press conference in return.

The LABC Institute's campaign does not solve this. It smooths it over. Small businesses need more than a forum; they need a guaranteed pipeline. The city needs more than a handshake; it needs a procurement agreement. LA28 needs to decide whether "local" means the region that happens to surround the venues or the city that happens to backstop the risk.

A wiser design would be simple. The city could negotiate a binding procurement agreement that guarantees a floor for city-based suppliers - say, half of the 25% small-business share. LA28 could still compete contracts broadly, but with a mechanism that ensures the host city captures a predictable portion of the upside. The sponsors, for their part, might deploy their readiness programmes as a complement rather than a substitute. That would be more honest about what is charity and what is compensation.

Until then, the campaign to help small businesses win Olympics contracts is a signal that even the optimists know the system is not designed for them. The Games will generate billions of dollars in spending, and lucrative contracts for construction, catering, cleaning and IT will flow to whoever is best positioned to bid. That the host city's businesses are told to "compete" - rather than to "receive" - says everything about where the power lies. LA28's organisers are right that protectionism dressed up as local hiring is a danger. They are wrong to pretend that their own design does not have the same effect. The city of Los Angeles is the bank. It should get the receipt.