LOS ANGELES, The 2028 Summer Olympics are supposed to be Los Angeles’s moment. Two years out, some city officials are wondering if the Games could leave the city broke.

At a city council budget session last week, officials raised pointed concerns about whether LA28, the private organizing committee running the Olympics, has done enough to shield taxpayers from cost overruns. One official floated the word that nobody in city hall wanted to hear out loud: bankruptcy.

“Bankruptcy cannot be the legacy,” the official said, according to reporting the event generated across local outlets.

The core dispute isn’t complicated, even if the contract language around it is. LA28 and the city have been negotiating for years over who absorbs the bill if the Games run over budget. The organizing committee insists it can cover costs through sponsorships, broadcast rights, and ticket sales. City officials aren’t so sure, and they want that protection written into binding agreements before the torch gets anywhere near Los Angeles.

Still, LA28 has consistently pushed back on characterizations that the Games pose serious financial risk. The committee points to its private funding model, which was central to the city’s bid from the start. Unlike Paris in 2024 or Tokyo in 2021, LA28 was structured to avoid public subsidies. That was the pitch. The question now is whether the structure holds under pressure.

It might not.

Olympic costs have a way of expanding far beyond initial projections. The Oxford research group that tracks mega-project overruns found that every Summer Games since 1960 has gone over budget. Every single one. The average cost overrun runs well above 100 percent. Los Angeles boosters like to note the 1984 Games here turned a profit, but that was a different city, a different global economy, and an era before the security, infrastructure, and media logistics that modern Games demand.

The city’s current exposure isn’t fully clear, which is part of what’s driving the alarm. Negotiations between LA28 and city officials over a binding financial backstop agreement have dragged on, and the details of what the city would owe if sponsorship revenue falls short have not been made public in full. That opacity frustrates council members who say they can’t protect constituents without knowing what the actual liability looks like.

Security costs alone are expected to run into the billions. The federal government will cover some of that, but the split hasn’t been finalized. Same with transportation upgrades, venue prep, and the public services the city will need to ramp up across multiple competition sites from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to venues in Long Beach and downtown.

The LA Times reported that the wrangling between LA28 and the city over financial terms remains unresolved, with officials warning that the current trajectory isn’t sustainable for a city already dealing with budget shortfalls and the long shadow of January’s Palisades and Eaton fires.

That context matters. Los Angeles entered 2026 with serious fiscal pressure already baked in. The wildfire recovery costs are enormous, the city’s budget gap runs into the hundreds of millions, and the homelessness crisis hasn’t gone away. Committing public resources to backstop a private Olympic committee, even implicitly, is a harder sell in that environment than it was when the bid was first awarded.

The thing is, backing out isn’t really an option at this point. The International Olympic Committee has its own contractual protections, and the reputational and legal cost of pulling out would be severe. Los Angeles is locked in. The only real leverage city officials have is in the negotiation over the financial agreement, which is exactly why they’re pushing so hard now, before construction deadlines and event contracts make any pushback meaningless.

Council members want an enforceable cap on city liability. They want transparency on LA28’s revenue projections. And they want guarantees that if the organizing committee falls short, the gap doesn’t quietly land on Angelenos already stretched by rising costs and recovering from disaster.

Whether LA28 agrees to those terms, and how much detail they’re willing to share, will define the next several months of pre-Olympic negotiations. Summer 2028 sounds distant. With venue timelines, permitting, and procurement cycles, the decisions being made right now are the ones that lock in the financial architecture of the entire event.

If city officials don’t get the protections they’re asking for soon, their leverage disappears. And the bill, whenever it comes, will land somewhere.