After Paris Olympics shined, Los Angeles in 2028 brings new and returning sports, plus a fresh look

PARIS (AP) — The Olympics will always have Paris. Next up for the Summer Games: Los Angeles 2028.

The baton will be handed from one third-time Olympic host city to another at the closing ceremony Sunday in Paris, and much will be different in four years’ time.

New sports will make their Olympic debuts, picked by organizers in LA who also are bringing back others that left the program more than 100 years ago.

While Paris had the Seine River, LA has the Pacific Ocean and its beaches.

Paris’ unmatched historic buildings gave the city a cinematic look. LA’s streets are a living history of film and television.

Here’s a look at some things that will be different about the next Summer Games.

Flag football, squash and obstacle racing. Yes, “American Ninja Warrior”-style obstacle racing, to replace the horses and pep up modern pentathlon.

Sports that get invited into the Olympics typically are played across the world. In the modern Olympics, however, they also must be wanted by the host city.

Flag football is a good fit for Los Angeles organizers, who last year told IOC members before they voted that it represents “the future and the tip of the spear for American football’s international growth.”

Squash will join tennis and badminton as racket sports at the Games. Could padel or pickleball one day follow?

Squash lost out in several previous campaigns and, like flag football, now goes Games to Games with no guarantee of staying for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

Modern pentathlon has been an Olympics staple since 1912 but often has seemed close to being ousted. Equestrian is being replaced as one of the five disciplines as requested by the IOC after a horse was abused in Tokyo three years ago.

In comes obstacle racing in LA, aiming to make the sport more accessible and relatable.

Lacrosse last was played at the Olympics in 1908, cricket not since 1900.

Both return in 2028 with eager support from Los Angeles organizers and in viewer-friendly short formats; Lacrosse in a six-a-side version, cricket in the aggressive, hard-hitting T20 version that does not require five days per match.

Lacrosse pays respect to the Indigenous roots of the sport: “It is truly authentic to the land we are on,” LA 2028 chairman Casey Wasserman said Saturday.

Cricket has been coveted to connect especially with the more than 1.6 billion people in India and Pakistan.

“They are going to be paying attention to the Olympics like they never have,” Wasserman said. Cricket surely will be kept in 2032 by Brisbane, which is home to one of the sport’s most storied venues.

Baseball and softball have perhaps the most unusual modern Olympics story: out after the 2008 Beijing Games, back in at Tokyo in 2021, out in Paris, back in LA. Well, Oklahoma City, in softball’s case.

Home to women’s softball in 2028 is Devon Park that stages the Women’s College World Series each year, about 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean.

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has said he's open to allowing Major League Baseball players to participate in the LA Games, but significant challenges remain. Insurance policies for players like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, whose contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, may be the biggest sticking point.

The next Summer Games start two weeks earlier than this one, with an opening ceremony on Friday, July 14.

There’s no river in LA to match Paris’ athlete parade on boats on the Seine, though it will use two stadiums instead of one: both SoFi Stadium and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will be in play.

That plan means flipping the schedule of the modern Summer Games.

Track and field is at the Coliseum — as it was in 1932 and 1984 — and now moves up a week, replacing swimming as the front-loaded anchor sport. That is because So-Fi must be converted into a spectacular temporary venue for swimming with seats for 38,000 fans. Races will move back into the second full week of action.

The July 30 end date in Los Angeles is the first time a northern hemisphere Summer Games will finish so early since the 1924 Olympics closed July 27 in Paris.

The Paris Olympics often looked incredible on screen. Los Angeles practically invented the look of modern cinema and television and is a creative hub of music and fashion.

The message here to LA is consistently: Don't try to copy Paris.

“Paris is the most beautiful city in the world,” Wasserman said Saturday. “The 2028 Games will be authentically Los Angeles.”

The IOC's head of Olympic broadcasting, Yiannis Exarchos, said LA “cannot redo a city (Paris) with a history of 500 years. LA speaks about the future, about new frontiers, about technology."

Road events such as marathons and cycling can show “where a big part of the mythology of the 20th century has been created, because of Hollywood,” Exarchos said in an interview.

“This is where I am more intrigued. I find interesting to see how we can recreate the television geography of LA.”

AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Norway's Anders Berntsen Mol serves against Spain at Eiffel Tower Stadium in a quarterfinal beach volleyball match at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — The last time Khadija Ahidid saw her son, he came to breakfast in 2021 looking “homeless” with big hair so she offered to give him $20 so he could go get a shave or a haircut that day. Hours later, he shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in the college town of Boulder.

She saw Ahmad Alissa for the first time since then during his murder trial on Monday, saying repeatedly that her son, who was diagnosed after the shooting with schizophrenia, was sick. When one of Alissa’s lawyers, Kathryn Herold, was introducing her to the jury, Herold asked how she knew Alissa. Ahidid responded “How can I know him? He is sick,” she said through an Arabic interpreter in her first public comments about her son and the shooting.

Alissa, who emigrated from Syria with his family as a child, began acting strangely in 2019, believing he was being followed by the FBI, talking to himself and isolating from the rest of the family, Ahidid said. His condition declined after he got Covid several months before the shooting, she said, adding he also became “fat” and stopped showering as much.

There was no record of Alissa being treated for mental illness before the shooting. After the shooting, his family later reported that he had been acting in strange ways, like breaking a car key fob and putting tape over a laptop camera because he thought the devices were being used to track him. Some relatives thought he could be possessed by an evil spirit, or djinn, according to the defense.

No one, including Alissa’s lawyers, disputes he was the shooter. Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the shooting. The defense says he should be found not guilty because he was legally insane and not able to tell the difference between right and wrong at the time of the shooting.

Prosecutors and forensic psychologists who evaluated him for the court say that, while mentally ill, Alissa knew what he was doing when he launched the attack. They point to the planning and research he did to prepare for it and his fear that he could end up in jail afterward to show that Alissa knew what he was doing was wrong.

Alissa mostly looked down as his mother testified and photographs of him as a happy toddler and a teenager at the beach were shown on screen. There was no obvious exchange between mother and son in court but Alissa dabbed his eyes with a tissue after she left.

The psychiatrist in charge of Alissa's treatment at the state mental hospital testified earlier in the day that Alissa refused to accept visitors during his over two year stay there.

When questioned by District Attorney Michael Dougherty, Ahidid said her son did not tell her what he was planning to do the day of the shooting.

She said she thought a large package containing a rifle that Alissa came home with shortly before the shooting may have been a piano.

“I swear to God we didn’t know what was inside that package,” she said.

Dougherty pointed out that she had told investigators soon after the shooting that she thought it could be a violin.

After being reminded of a previous statement to police, Ahidid acknowledged that she had heard a banging sound in the house and one of her other sons said that Alissa had a gun that had jammed. Alissa said he would return it, she testified.

She indicated that no one in the extended family that lived together in the home followed up to make sure, saying “everyone has their own job.”

“No one is free for anyone,” she said.

FILE - Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, accused of killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket in March 2021, is led into a courtroom for a hearing, Sept. 7, 2021, in Boulder, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, Pool, File)