9 Olympics ticket drop tips from locals who braved the first LA28 sales

If you’re not already exhausted from trying to land half-decent seats for a 70mm IMAX screening of The Odyssey, it’s time to add another highly competitive ticket-buying challenge to your itinerary: Drop 2 for the 2028 Olympics.

Start feverishly refreshing your email this Thursday and Friday, because that’s when notifications should filter in to let you know whether or not you’ve been chosen for LA28’s second ticket drop, which runs from August 10 to 20 (registration closed on July 22). If you’re picked, you’ll be assigned a time slot to try your luck at securing a spot for dozens upon dozens of competitions set for L.A.’s third Summer Games.

But if you participated in—or just followed the online chatter around—LA28’s first ticket drop in April, you probably already know that it’s not quite that simple: Yes, there are hundreds of events on sale, some of which have $28 tickets available, but many of the premier events feature eye-popping prices or, for the folks with later time slots, low-to-no availability. After braving the gauntlet during this spring’s initial ticket drop and presale, our staff at Time Out L.A. has some firsthand tips to share ahead of Drop 2. (And for the record: We 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 to do it all over again—because, yes, in addition to this latest sale, there’ll be yet another drop in 2027—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 running 12-ticket limit per account across all ticket drops, 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; in fact, if you’re passionate about one event but so-so on the rest, it might be smartest to quickly check out your tickets for that one event you’d like to secure and then more leisurely peruse the others.

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, a few (seemingly vibe coded) user-friendly schedule sites were passed around on social media during the first drop, but they all seem to consistently get taken down within days. Regardless, the spreadsheet 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 during the spring: 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. (In fact, LA28 says that 95% of all sub-$100 tickets for the first drop—including half a million $28 tickets—were claimed during the five-day locals presale that preceded the general sale period.) 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 in the upper tiers behind the end lines were still plentiful days into the first ticket drop.

This is all assuming you can find any open tickets for some events. LA28 has promised that Drop 2 will include refreshed inventory across all sports—but all of those tickets will be released at the very start of the drop rather than trickled out over the 11-day period. And you’ve got competition: More than 12 million people have registered so far to vie for a chance to buy tickets. In other words, getting lucky and drawing an early time is everything if you’re after blockbuster events.

Here’s what that meant in action in the spring: 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 wasn’t any clear indication at the time whether more inventory would open up as the presale period progressed; my mom and wife each had time slots on the following days, but ticket supply continued to dwindle across all sports, and the opening ceremony remained sold out (aside from a few accessible seats). Now, we know with certainty straight from LA28 that additional tickets will not be released later on in Drop 2.

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 enter the virtual queue and 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 if your heart’s set on something else: 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 next 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 during Drop 1 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 with around 30 Olympic venues in the L.A. area. 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 about two years away; LA28 has already confirmed that there will be another ticket drop in 2027 and—for better or worse—the launch of an official resale platform next year, as well. For this latest sale, anyone who entered the draw for Drop 1 and didn’t max out their 12-ticket allotment was automatically entered into the drawing for Drop 2; that’ll likely be the case for next year’s drop too, but we’ll have to wait and see. And if you just want to soak up the Olympic atmosphere any way possible, you can consider signing up as a volunteer (though there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to see any gameplay) or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, shelling out for hospitality packages.

As for that resale market, there’s always a small chance that prices could come down just ahead of an event. Let’s look to the recent World Cup as an example; ticket prices were steep, and while they never hit a point I’d call “cheap,” post–group play prices did fluctuate—sometimes in the buyer’s favor—depending on the matchup. And that’s for one stadium hosting one event every few days. The Olympics has more than 800 ticketed sessions, and inevitably some desperate secondhand ticket sellers will opt to lower prices in the days or hours ahead of an event.

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