Who will light the Olympic flame in 2028 L.A.?

Who gets to apply the torch to the Olympic cauldron is kept secret until the moment, but it's fun to speculate.

In 2028, the opening ceremony of the Olympics will be held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the third time (1932, 1984, and 2028).

Presumably, President Trump will enjoy presiding over the festivities (as he also will preside over the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the World Cup soccer tournament, whose Final will be held in Trump-friendly New Jersey only ten miles from Trump Tower).

In 1984, President Reagan read a brief statement to declare his hometown Los Angeles games open. The entire ceremony turned out to be a highly popular evocation of American patriotism that fit in well with Reagan’s re-election campaign. Reagan’s Morning in America campaign theme seemed to be exactly what the public wanted. The next morning, anti-Reagan pundits who had been scoffing all year to the effect of, “C’mon, no way, are voters going to fall for this actor twice!” were sounding much abashed. Conventional wisdom shifted that week to Reagan’s re-election being a cinch. (It was.)

The climax of the opening ceremony is the lighting of the Olympic flame in the stadium’s cauldron using a flame that had been carried by torch from Olympia, Greece. The Olympic flame that burns throughout the Games was invented for Amsterdam in 1928 and reused at Los Angeles in 1932. German Jewish archaeologist Alfred Schiff, the uncredited adviser to German Olympic supremo Carl Diem, then invented the torch relay that brought the flame from the ancient stadium in Olympia, Greece to Berlin in 1936.

Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, began the tradition of honoring an athlete by having him light the flame at Helsinki in 1952.

The method of transferring the flame from torch to cauldron varies, with venues competing to put on a spectacular show. For example, Barcelona in 1992 used an archer:

Paris 2024’s balloon-like cauldron was a tribute to the Montgolfier Brothers in Paris in 1783 inventing human flight, a worthy achievement for the French to pat themselves on the back over.

The 1984 L.A. ceremony was less creative, but solid: various old-time celebrity Olympians, whose identities had been kept secret to build interest, took turns carrying the torch around the track, and then Rafer Johnson jogged the torch up the long staircase to the cauldron.

Why Rafer Johnson? Well, in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he carried the U.S. flag in the opening ceremony and then won the (then) most prestigious gold medal, the decathlon, in the Olympics core sport, track and field, to be crowned the world’s greatest athlete. He narrowly defeated his UCLA teammate C.K. Yang of American ally Taiwan in a contest that Americans found heart-warming, in part for Cold War reasons. (Rafer also was a starter for coach John Wooden’s UCLA basketball team.)

Then Johnson remained in Southern California doing a little movie acting and a lot of good works, such as playing a big role in getting the Special Olympics going.

He was one of three celebrity bodyguards (along with raconteur George Plimpton and football star, actor, and minister Rosie Grier) for Robert F. Kennedy on the night of RFK Sr.’s assassination on Wilshire Blvd. The three risked their lives by tackling Sirhan Sirhan, with Johnson wrenching the smoking gun from the assassin’s hand.

I can recall the next morning at age 9 listening to various radio stations report on the tragedy (in part to finally find out whether Don Drysdale had, the same night, broken the baseball record with his sixth straight shutout), and one of them announced, “We have the name of the arrested suspect: it’s … Rafer Johnson!” and me thinking with annoyance, “No, it’s not Rafer Johnson, the gold medalist. I already heard on a different station that Rafer grabbed the gun from the shooter.” But then I reflected that the reporter who erred was in a frantic hurry, so it’s not surprising he made a mistake. At least ever since that June 1968 morning, I’ve been both skeptical of the press and mildly empathetic toward their shortcomings.

Also, at age 50 in 1984, Rafer was both venerable but still spry enough to make it up the steps.

Finally, with the Coliseum being, more or less, in the South-Central ‘hood, the organizers definitely didn’t mind a black honoree. And, indeed, despite many predictions of disaster, the 1984 L.A. Games went surprisingly smoothly.

The city-owned Coliseum had played a major role in integrating the NFL in 1946 when the Rams moved to town. A black city councilman pointed out that the city owned the stadium, so why should it put up with hosting the segregated NFL? Other councilmen came to agree. Branch Rickey, America’s most respected sports executive, had already hired Jackie Robinson, a star on the undefeated 1939 UCLA Bruins football team, to break the color line in baseball. So the Rams quickly pleased the city council by signing Robinson’s former UCLA teammate Kenny Washington. (The third star black 1939 Bruin, Woody Strode, had become a favorite tough guy character actor in John Ford Westerns, and who beat out Rafer Johnson to play Kirk Douglas’s toughest opponent in Spartacus. If Quentin Tarantino ever wants to make a biopic, Strode would be ideal for him.)

So, Rafer Johnson wasn’t a sensational surprise pick like Muhammad Ali was in Atlanta 1996. (People hadn’t expected the doddering Ali, because how could he run up the steps to the cauldron? It turned out: you have somebody else do the hard part and just have Ali step out of the shadows and take the hand-off.)

Rafer, in contrast, was a solid pick: not galvanizing, but worthy.

Since then, however, sentiment tends to have swung away from athletes in sports where the Olympics are their biggest stage (such as track and field) toward honoring athletes in bigger sports. This benefits basketball and tennis players.

Assuming they don’t come up with some highly creative way to light the cauldron requiring a specific skill (e.g., a skateboarder flings a flaming frisbee), likely candidates will have most of these traits:

Continued beyond paywall, where, for once, I make a prediction: