After almost a week of frantically checking lottery result emails, sitting in (brief) virtual queues and doing double takes on ticket prices, the locals presale for the 2028 Olympics has come and gone. Now it’s time for everyone else chosen in the ticket draw to try their luck (including some Angelenos who were passed over for the presale), and our staff at Time Out L.A. has some firsthand tips to share.
By now, email notifications have already started to go out for LA28’s first ticket drop, which runs from April 9 to 19 (registration for the ticket draw has already closed). If you followed the chatter around the presale, you probably already know a bit of what to expect: eye-popping prices and low-to-no availability for some of the Games’ premier events, but also the opportunity to partake in L.A.’s third Summer Games—including some chances to see Olympic-caliber competition for only $28. Our two L.A. staff members didn’t have any sort of special treatment when it came to tickets; we were placed in the same pool as every other would-be ticket holder and faced both disappointments and unexpected ticketing pickups. If we were able to do it all over again—because make no mistake, there will be more ticket drops—here’s what we wish we knew ahead of time.
1. Add to cart first, ask questions later.
If there’s one piece of advice I can stress, it’s this. When your time slot opens, beeline it to the events you’re most interested in and start adding tickets to your cart. On the fence about whether the seats left are too expensive? Just add them for now; you can always remove them later. Once you add your first set of tickets to your cart, you’ll then have a half hour to check out—meaning those seats are also now set aside for the next half hour.
So the next step? Add some more tickets to your cart (there’s a 12-ticket limit per account, as well as an additional 12-ticket allotment for soccer matches). Those first few minutes of a time slot are absolutely crucial for procuring seats at sought-after events. Then when you feel satisfied with your selections, you can decide whether you’ve gone over budget and either remove some selections or go straight to the checkout process. Note that you can complete multiple transactions within your 48-hour window, so you don’t have to buy all of your tickets at once.
2. Know the five-digit codes for the events you want to see.
If you’re trying to attend high-demand events, you’ll waste precious time scrolling through the hundreds of sessions to find what you need. And sports like swimming and track, which pack multiple heats and finals into two sessions each day? Forget about finding your preferred event on the fly. Instead, do some research beforehand: LA28 has a table of every single event, each with a corresponding five-digit session code. You’ll want to type that code into the search bar of the ticketing page to go directly to the event you’re after.
Navigating that official PDF can be pretty unwieldy, though, so I highly suggest turning to fan-made options instead. (To be fair, LA28’s ticketing page does have plenty of options to filter by sport, price and availability—as well as a helpful walkthrough on YouTube—but I found those options most useful as I was perusing events after the initial rush for tickets.) Personally, I made a copy of this shareable Google Sheet and used that to narrow down which events I was most interested in. Alternatively, I’ve seen this very user-friendly schedule explorer passed around (though I also saw a similar one taken down a few days ago). These two sources also list the prices, so you can get over the sticker shock in advance. Speaking of…
3. Prepare for high prices—or no inventory at all.
Disappointed Angelenos fell into three buckets during the locals presale: those who weren’t selected at all, those who were gobsmacked by the premium prices and those who couldn’t find any open spots for high-demand events. Let’s start with the prices, because unlike most seated sports events, you’re not actually selecting individual seats but instead choosing from a handful of pricing categories (exact seats will be assigned closer to the Games). And there’s quite a spread between those categories; while the men’s gold medal basketball game tickets start at just over $100, the next category jumps up to nearly $650 and only gets worse from there, climbing into the thousands. Want to sit field-level at the opening ceremony? That’ll be over $5,000. Finals always cost more than preliminary rounds; take swimming, where a morning prelim may start around $50 but the get-in price for a final that evening roughly doubles.
LA28 has said that a million $28 tickets will be available across the Games, and about half of all tickets will be under $200. But there are 843 sessions on the schedule—meaning these bargains are sometimes very limited, and likely the first sections to sell out. Take the closing ceremony, where the sole $28 tickets are for a tiny section at the top of the Coliseum that’s partially obstructed by the press box, otherwise the next tier of tickets starts at $217. Or some of the track finals, where the sub-$500 tickets were quickly claimed, and a $700-plus ticket might still have you situated toward the very top of the stadium. That said, other events are certainly more generous: For the preliminary rounds of beach volleyball, $28 seats abound in the upper tiers behind the end lines.
This is all assuming you can find any open tickets for some events. The locals presale started on April 2, and I was lucky enough to draw a time in the afternoon on April 3. But when it was my turn, I was unable to find any tickets at any price point for the opening ceremony, and there were none left for the women’s gymnastics final as well. And I thought I would be the only weirdo prioritizing track cycling, but the comparatively intimate velodrome was already booked up for the events I was eyeing. There didn’t seem to be any added inventory as the weeklong presale progressed; my mom and wife each had time slots on the following days, but inventory continued to dwindle across all sports, and the opening ceremony remained sold out. That might be the case for this first ticket drop, too: LA28 says that due to high demand during the locals presale, “certain sports do not have any more inventory in Drop 1” but that more tickets will be added in additional drops that start “later this year.”
4. Keep checking for high-demand tickets for around a half hour after your start time.
Circling back to my “cart first, questions later” pointer, plenty of other people will add tickets to their cart but opt not to actually purchase them. That means some tickets will flicker back into stock, particularly about a half hour into your time slot as people’s carts expire. The ticketing site has a bookmark system built in, and I found it was solely useful for this process: Bookmark a handful of events that you couldn’t find tickets to, and then keep refreshing your bookmarks tab about a half hour into your time slot; if tickets become available for any one of them, you’ll see a badge that says “starting at…” in this view. On the other hand, don’t expect to find more ticket inventory later on in your two-day window.
5. Log in ahead of your time slot to make sure your account works.
This is just a bit of quick digital hygiene. You’ll receive your ticketing link about a day before your time slot opens, and this is the perfect opportunity to make sure that you can actually log in. I’d also suggest saving your credentials to your browser; this way you’re not fumbling with passwords as you race against the clock to secure tickets.
6. Be flexible and attend an unlikely sport if you can get cheap tickets—but keep your 12-ticket maximum in mind.
Our things to do editor Gillian Glover was hoping to score tickets to gymnastics or rep the Valley during skateboarding at the Sepulveda Basin or squash at Universal Studios. But given high prices and limited availability, she instead opted for much more affordable tickets to a badminton prelim.
There are a bunch of other sports that have tons of preliminary rounds—baseball, handball, cricket, field hockey, rugby and volleyball, among them—that may have more affordable tickets than some of the typical primetime contenders. That said, maybe think twice before scooping up too many cheap tickets: Your 12-ticket maximum carries across all ticket drops, so you may miss out on other opportunities for in-demand events as they add more inventory later in the year. (Again, soccer has its own separate 12-ticket maximum.)
7. Artistic gymnastics and rhythmic gymnastics are not the same.
Simone Biles pulling off her gravity-defying maneuvers on the vault? Stephen Nedoroscik crushing it on pommel horse? Those are both part of artistic gymnastics, which is what most Olympics-watchers think of when we say “gymnastics.” But there’s also rhythmic gymnastics, a more dance-like variant of the sport that involves routines with hoops and balls. When you’re trying to buy tickets, be very mindful of which gymnastics you’re vying for. As someone who very much would have liked to have seen ribbon-tossing gymnasts ferociously compete against each other, I’m convinced that rhythmic gymnastics sold out so quickly because confused ticket buyers thought they were nabbing seats to artistic gymnastics.
8. Pay attention to the event locations and plan accordingly.
Whether you’re an out-of-towner or a local, you almost surely associate Los Angeles with traffic. We don’t know exactly what the roads will be like during the city’s promised car-free Olympics, but even without traffic (and with taking advantage of public transit), L.A. is a big place. There are roughly 40 miles between beach volleyball in Long Beach and skateboarding in the Valley, and it could take you about as many minutes with zero traffic—or two hours in the thick of rush hour. So if you’re buying tickets to multiple sessions in a day, make sure you pay attention to the location. Venues within an individual zone are mostly within walking distance of each other (notably inside the DTLA, Exposition Park, Inglewood, Carson, Long Beach and Valley zones), but the distinct zones are often a substantial bus, train or car ride away from each other (aside from the DTLA and Exposition Park zones, which are only a couple of Metro stops away).
Also, some events aren’t even in L.A. at all. And I’m not talking about the sports that are being staged toward the edges of the county, like mountain biking and cricket, or volleyball and surfing, which are an entire county away. Instead, I’m referencing softball and canoe slalom, which are both being held in Oklahoma City, as well as the preliminary soccer matches being staged around the country, including in San Diego, San Jose, Nashville, St. Louis, Columbus and New York. (Later round matches will be held in Pasadena at the Rose Bowl.)
9. Consider playing the waiting game and keeping your fingers crossed for last-minute resale tickets.
The Olympics are still more than two years away; there will be other ticket drops, and there will—for better or worse—be plenty of resellers. If you’ve largely struck out with tickets now, there’s always a small chance resale prices could crater just ahead of an event. Of course, we normally think of resale markets as being considerably more expensive. But inevitably, some desperate secondhand ticket sellers opt to lower prices in the days or hours ahead of an event—and with more than 800 ticketed sessions, that’s a lot of tickets to unload.
