Los Angeles Olympics: Venues You Can Visit and Tour Now

Los Angeles has hosted the Summer Olympics twice already — 1932 and 1984 — and is set to host a third time, a feat shared only with Paris and London. That alone makes the city's Olympic story worth tracing on the ground rather than just reading about it. The International Olympic Committee awarded LA the Games in both eras largely because the infrastructure already existed or could be built efficiently, a pattern that's repeating with LA28.

What makes Los Angeles different from most former host cities is that its venues didn't get abandoned or demolished after the closing ceremony. Compare that to Athens, where several 2004 venues sit empty and fenced off, or Rio's crumbling 2016 facilities. The Coliseum has been in continuous use for nearly a century. The Rose Bowl still hosts a major college football game every January. That continuity is the real reason LA's Olympic history is something you can visit rather than just read about on a plaque.

The 1932 Games and the First Olympic Village

The 1932 Summer Olympics arrived in the middle of the Great Depression, and organizers worried few nations would even show up — only 37 countries sent athletes, down sharply from 1928. LA responded by building the first purpose-made Olympic Village, a cluster of temporary cottages in Baldwin Hills that housed male athletes (female competitors stayed at a hotel, a detail that tells you plenty about the era). The Coliseum, already a decade old by then, was expanded to hold more than 100,000 spectators for the occasion. Nothing physical remains of that original village today, but the concept it introduced — a self-contained athlete community — became standard practice for every Games since.

The 1984 Games and Their Legacy

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics mattered for a different reason: money. LA was the only bidder, so organizers had use to refuse building expensive new venues and instead use existing college stadiums, arenas, and the Coliseum again. The result was the first Games to turn a significant profit, reportedly more than $200 million, which funded the LA84 Foundation — still active today, supporting youth sports across Southern California. The Soviet-led boycott thinned the competition in some events, but the financial model is the real legacy. It's the direct template LA28 organizers point to when they say the next Games will rely on venues that already exist.

Unlike many former Olympic host cities, Los Angeles makes it fairly easy to stand inside real competition venues from both past Games. You won't find a dedicated "Olympic museum campus" the way Lausanne has one, but you also won't be looking at fenced-off ruins. The trade-off is that most of these sites function as working stadiums and arenas first, tourist attractions second — so access depends on what else is scheduled that day.

The Coliseum is the only LA venue tied to all three Olympic Games, while most others served one or two.

Los Angeles Olympic venues compared: Games hosted, location, and access

Tour availability and hours change with event schedules; confirm current access before visiting any venue.

Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum

The Coliseum is the centerpiece, and for good reason: it hosted the 1932 and 1984 Games and is slated to host events again for LA28, making it the only stadium in the world to serve three Olympiads. The peristyle end still bears the Olympic torch structure, and the cauldron is visible from outside the stadium walls on Exposition Park's north side. A Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum tour typically walks you through the field level, press areas, and tunnel entrances used by athletes — similar in format to stadium tours at Lambeau Field or Fenway Park, though shorter. The Coliseum also serves as USC's home football stadium, so public access gets restricted on game days; check the current schedule before planning a visit, since tour availability shifts around USC's season and any other scheduled events.

Rose Bowl and Other Historic Venues

The Rose Bowl in Pasadena hosted soccer finals in both 1932 and 1984 and is one of the most recognizable stadiums in American sports regardless of its Olympic ties. It sits about 20 minutes northeast of downtown LA by car, separate enough from the Coliseum cluster that you shouldn't try to combine both in a single rushed afternoon. Stadium tours here cover the tunnel, press box, and field, and the venue doubles as a flea market site on select Sundays, which is worth knowing if you want to avoid crowds or, conversely, want to combine both. Other 1984 sites worth knowing about include Pauley Pavilion at UCLA, which hosted gymnastics, and the Forum in Inglewood, which hosted basketball — both still operating as active sports and concert venues rather than museum pieces.

One thing that separates LA28 from recent Games in Tokyo or Rio is how little new construction is planned. LA28 organizers have leaned hard into the 1984 playbook: use what's already standing. That means a lot of the venues slated for the next Olympics are places you can walk into right now, years ahead of the opening ceremony, which isn't something you could say about Olympic Park in London before 2012 or most of Beijing's 2008 sites.

Stadiums and Arenas You Can Tour

SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, opened in 2020, is on the LA28 venue map for opening ceremony and other events, and it already runs public stadium tours covering the field, locker rooms, and its enormous video board. Crypto.com Arena downtown — current home to the Lakers, Clippers (through recent seasons), and Kings — is pegged for Olympic basketball or similar indoor events and sits inside LA Live, making it easy to combine with a downtown hotel stay or a Grammy Museum visit next door. UCLA's campus, including Pauley Pavilion, is also expected to host events again, continuing a role it's played since 1984. None of these require any special access beyond a normal stadium tour booking — you're not getting inside secured construction zones, because there mostly aren't any.

How Existing Venues Shape the Next Games

Reusing venues isn't just a budget decision — it changes how a visitor can engage with the Games years in advance. Compare this to Paris 2024, where several temporary venues went up and came down within the same year, leaving almost nothing to visit beforehand. In LA, you can watch a Lakers game at the same arena slated for Olympic basketball, or tour SoFi Stadium on a random Tuesday in the off-season. The honest downside: because these are active commercial venues, none of them are staging anything Olympic-specific yet, so don't expect dedicated LA28 exhibits or branding during a regular visit. That will likely change closer to the Games, but for now you're visiting the venue, not the Olympics themselves.

Trying to see every Olympic site in LA in one day is a mistake almost every first-time visitor makes. The city's Olympic venues are spread across roughly 30 miles of famously congested freeway, from Pasadena to Inglewood, and LA traffic doesn't care about your itinerary. Budget your time by geography, not by Olympic year.

Grouping Venues by Area

Exposition Park is the natural anchor — the Coliseum sits alongside the California Science Center and the Natural History Museum, so you can turn an Olympic visit into a half-day covering all three without much extra travel. Inglewood is the second cluster, with SoFi Stadium, the Forum, and the new Intuit Dome within a few miles of each other. Downtown LA covers Crypto.com Arena and LA Live, walkable from several major hotels. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena and UCLA in Westwood each stand alone enough that they deserve their own half-day rather than being squeezed into a multi-stop run.

Getting Around Between Sites

Driving is the default, and a rental car gives you the most flexibility, but parking near the Coliseum or SoFi Stadium on event days can run $30 or more and fill up fast. Metro's E Line (Expo) connects downtown to Exposition Park directly, which is genuinely the easier option if you're staying downtown or in Santa Monica — it avoids the parking headache entirely. For visitors coming from outside LA proper, say on a wider Southern California trip that also takes in San Diego or Anaheim's theme parks, treat Olympic sites as a dedicated LA day rather than a detour; the drive times don't favor combining them with day trips elsewhere.

Not every Olympic site in LA is a stadium. The LA84 Foundation's library in Exposition Park holds one of the most complete Olympic research archives outside Switzerland's Olympic Studies Centre, and it's open to the public for research visits — a genuinely underused resource for anyone seriously into Olympic history rather than just the photo opportunity. Several street murals and public artworks from the 1984 Games still exist around the city, including pieces near the Harbor Freeway that were part of the original Olympic arts program, though they've faded and aren't well signposted.

If you're building a broader LA itinerary, pairing Olympic venues with nearby attractions makes more sense than treating them as a stand-alone tour. Exposition Park's museums, a USC campus walk, or a Downtown LA food tour around LA Live all fit naturally around the venue visits already described. For travelers also weighing side trips to Santa Monica's pier, Malibu's coastline, or even Palm Springs for a desert contrast, slot the Olympic sites in as a single dedicated day near the start of your trip — not as an afterthought squeezed between beach days. When you're ready to book, look for Coliseum and SoFi Stadium tour listings, or a broader Exposition Park combo ticket, and compare current options and prices before you commit to a specific day.