BRISBANE, Australia (AP) — Ready. Set. Wait. It’ll be another year or two before construction begins on the main Olympic stadium for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics.
And this is racing mode.
It’s taken almost four years since the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2032 Summer Games to Brisbane to finalize a cohesive venue plan, and now the countdown is serious for the 7.1 billion Australian dollars (US$4.4 billion) construction program.
Stephen Conry, chairman of the Brisbane 2032 independent infrastructure coordination authority, on Wednesday said “the likely date or year for shovels in the ground for the (main) stadium would be 2026, ’27” after the design and approvals phase.
“There’s a lot of work to be done when you start spending billions of dollars on infrastructure,” added Conry, who led a 100-day review of venue options and reported back this month to the state government. “We have over seven years, plenty of time to build a stadium. We’ll have it ready in 2031."
Conry joined Andrew Liveris, president of the Brisbane 2032 organizing committee, in pitching the Olympic construction and legacy plan to the Infrastructure Association of Queensland on Wednesday, a day after state Premier David Crisafulli unveiled the latest concepts.
A 60,000-seat stadium built in inner-city parkland, a sailing venue on the Whitsunday islands near the Great Barrier Reef and a crocodile-inhabited rowing venue i n central Queensland are part of the program that Crisafulli launched with a theme that seemed universal among politicians and citizens: just get on with it.
The original bid idea floated by then-Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to renovate a 130-year-old cricket stadium known as the Gabba to become the 2032 centerpiece was scrapped by her successor Steven Miles a year ago. Miles lost government late last year to Crisafulli, who has broken an election promise of no new stadiums.
Rather than shrink the scale, his government expanded it to cities and sites up and down the Queensland coast, factoring in tourism potential. Some of them — the rowing for instance — may ultimately be rejected by international sports federations. But it's on the drawing board. The state government also aims to bring in private-sector funding for an indoor arena that will be outside the Olympic scope but could possibly become a venue for events in 2032.
There's also the inclusion of a 25,000-seat aquatic center that will become home to a national academy in the Victoria Park precinct.
“We are a gold medal factory,” Liveris said of Australia's national swimming program. “For goodness sake, let’s give our swimmers a chance to make us proud on the world stage as they did in Paris and same with our Paralympians.”
Critics have said the new main stadium will decrease green space and add to traffic congestion, and have questioned the budget for a stadium at Victoria Park that was initially proposed in 2023 at a cost of A$3.4 billion ($2.15 billion) but has already risen to almost A$3.8 billion ($2.4 billion).
The Queensland and Australian governments are funding and building the stadiums and the Brisbane Olympic organizing committee is responsible for delivering the Games.
“Yesterday we got the stage. Finally, we have a plan,” Liveris said. “I have confidence that our team can deliver the event, and we have the time to do it. We have been preparing — I know there’s a narrative out there (of) three wasted years — but we've been putting all the planning in place.”
Domestic media polls showed the public supported the Games “overwhelmingly,” Liveris said.
“Even the worst critics have come to the the table and said ‘let’s get on with it,’” he said. “This is a palpable sense of opportunity. This is a gift.”
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AP Olympics at https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
This photo shows the entrance to Victoria Park, where a new 60,000-seat stadium will be built for the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane, Australia Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/John Pye)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
