Last summer’s starry handover to the L.A. 2028 Olympics was a who’s who of local performers, including Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—plus a parachuting Tom Cruise. And looking ahead toward the actual Games, there’s one other Los Angeles icon you can almost surely add to that list.
It’s a “pretty fair bet” that Kendrick Lamar will be “involved in the Olympics in Los Angeles in some way.” That’s according to an Associated Press interview with LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman, whose talent agency counts the Compton rapper among its roster of musicians.
Whether that amounts to a full-blown performance (like 2022’s very-Compton-inspired Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium) or something else entirely, we’ll have to wait and see. But—at least at this point in pop culture—having Lamar involved in a global showcase of L.A. certainly seems like a no-brainer to us.
Wasserman also addressed the impact of this January’s Eaton and Palisades Fires on L.A.’s Olympic plans, saying that the disaster will factor into the organizing committee’s “core philosophy going forward.”
“The rebirth, the rebuild, maybe reimagining L.A. 2.0—and the Olympics as a catalyst for all those things—we think is really part of our ethos,” he said.
But Wasserman also pointed out that “from purely an Olympics perspective we got very lucky” when it comes to the post-fire status of the city’s venues. Though op-eds and cable news talking heads have doubted L.A.’s ability to host the Games in another three-and-a-half years, the vast majority of the venue clusters for the 2028 Olympics remain far from the burn areas; Riviera Country Club and the Rose Bowl are the two potential venues closest to where the fires burned, and neither were damaged. (It is, however, worth noting that due to the massive infrastructure needs to rebuild in Pacific Palisades, it’s unlikely the expansion of the city-owned Convention Center in Downtown L.A.—which will host fencing, judo, table tennis, taekwondo and wrestling regardless—will be completed in time for the Olympics.)
Finally, the LA28 chairman also addressed how federal politics will impact the Games—or rather how he thinks they won’t. Wasserman assured that “America will be open and accepting to all 209 countries for the Olympics,” and that he didn’t anticipate any problems as far as visas and participation—despite international concerns over U.S. travel and tourism at the moment.