Biles and Ledecky for 2028? Home Olympics will be a lure for Team USA veterans

TThe run-up to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles officially began on Sunday evening with a closing ceremony at the Stade de France featuring a “life-threatening stunt” by Tom Cruise – who jumped off the stadium to retrieve the Olympic flag for on the way to LA through the streets of Paris – with performances by Californian emissaries Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

But for many American athletes, the countdown to LA 2028 began sometime in the past two weeks, after they wrapped up their business here in Paris and began openly claiming that their own missions were impossible: extending their careers to earn a shot at the Olympics on home soil when they might otherwise be riding off into the sunset.

Like the rest of the world, the senior members of the U.S. Olympic delegation watched from the front row as Léon Marchand, Teddy Riner, Antoine Dupont and the Lebrun brothers became figures of national obsession during the Summer Games, where even the overly cool Parisians could not help but get caught up in the excitement. Their performances over the past two weeks have been unavoidable even to non-sports fans, their profiles far higher than if they had been chasing glory in Tokyo or Rio.

For someone like Katie Ledecky, attempting to compete in LA 28 would be a matter of taking a victory lap in front of a home crowd. The nine-time Olympic gold medalist, who last week became the most decorated U.S. female Olympian in any sport, is one of several Americans who have gone on record as saying they would love to compete in LA, where the swim program will take place before a roaring crowd of 38,000 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, by far the largest swimming facility in Olympic history. She’ll be 31, but after seeing her win the women’s 1500m by more than 10 seconds, it’s hard to doubt she’s up to the task.

“When I see the support the French athletes get here, I think all the American athletes think how cool it would be to have a home crowd in Los Angeles,” she said. “That would be amazing.”

The same goes for Ryan Crouser, who last week became the first shot putter to win three consecutive gold medals at the Olympics. He’ll be 35 when the heat hits Exposition Park, but could he really pass up the chance to win a historic fourth place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which hosted the 1932 and 1984 Games?

“For now, I’m enjoying the moment,” Crouser said. “As an American athlete, it would be a dream to hang up my boots on American soil at an Olympics on home soil. It’s a long way off. I don’t know how [silver medalist Joe Kovacs] does it at 35. I feel it at 31. If I can channel my inner Joe, I would like to go to 2028.”

Simone Biles just became the oldest Olympic all-around gymnast in 72 years, and will be 31 when the Games begin in Los Angeles. But it’s a good bet we’ll see her there in some form, perhaps as a specialist, probably after the same two-year break she took after Rio and Tokyo.

“You never say never,” Biles said this week. “The next Olympics are on home turf, so you never know.”

Even those with Sharpie-drawn plans for the future, like 30-year-old fencer Lee Kiefer, who is returning to her third year of medical school after a fairytale in Paris that ended with her second and third gold medals, admitted that a home Olympics would be too hard to pass up. The temptation could be even stronger for those who didn’t make their dreams come true, like 29-year-old skateboarder Nyjah Huston, whose bronze in the men’s street final was better than a shocking seventh-place finish in Tokyo.

“I have to do my best,” Huston said. “Skateboarding is not easy, it’s hard stuff that we do out there, it’s hard on the body. At my age, I’m 29 now, I’ve been skating professionally for 18 years and it’s not easy to keep up with these guys.”

Of course, hometown glory is only part of the equation. LA 28 will be awash in staggering amounts of money, coming amid an eight-year period—the #decadeofsport—in which the U.S. will host the Summer and Winter Olympics, in addition to the men’s and women’s FIFA World Cups. At a time when truly mass-audience events have become increasingly hard to come by for marketers, brands have been increasingly eager to associate themselves with the Olympic movement and sports at large. By the time President Logan Paul declares Salt Lake City 2034 open from a porch at Rice-Eccles Stadium, there will be hundreds of U.S. Olympians who will have earned more via sponsorship deals than they could have imagined when they devoted their lives to sports that don’t typically make you rich or famous.

LA28 organizers, Team USA and Comcast have set an ambitious domestic corporate sponsorship goal of $2.5 billion, nearly a billion dollars more than Paris’s haul, which outpaced Tokyo’s by 70 percent. “It’s big and bold, but that’s what we’re about,” LA28 chief commercial officer Chris Pepe told Sportico last year. “We feel really good about where we are today.”

The cocktail of fortune and glory might be too much to pass up for Team USA’s senior citizens, who can’t afford to waste time feeling their years. Those four years go by faster than you think.