LA28 has banked more than 12 million ticket registrations for the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games, up from five million in February, and it has done so two full years before anyone lights the cauldron. The number was confirmed this week as the organisers opened a Visa presale, according to TheTicketingBusiness and LA28's own newsroom. Twelve million people have handed over their details for the chance, and it is only a chance, to buy something.
Registration is not a purchase. It is not even a promise. It is a form. And LA28 has quietly turned that form into the most valuable asset in the entire operation.
Twelve million people, one very orderly queue
The headline figure covers fans in more than 200 countries and all 50 US states, as NBC Los Angeles reported. During Drop 1 earlier this year, roughly four million tickets were sold, and about 75% of those were claimed by locals in Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. Ninety five percent of Drop 1 inventory was priced at $100 or less, with half a million tickets going at $28.
Drop 2 runs from 10 to 20 August and is powered by AXS and Eventim. Here is the part worth studying: fans do not simply log on and fight. They are randomly selected for a purchase window, notified by email between 6 and 7 August, and given a slot that stays open for 48 hours. Buyers can take up to 12 Olympic event tickets plus up to 12 football tournament tickets, with a four ticket cap per ceremony counting towards the overall 12.
| Stage | What happened, or will |
|---|---|
| February 2026 | Five million ticket registrations recorded |
| Drop 1 (earlier in 2026) | Around four million tickets sold, 75% to LA and Oklahoma City locals |
| Drop 1 pricing | 95% of tickets at $100 or less, half a million at $28 |
| 29 July 2026 | Registrations pass 12 million, Visa presale opens |
| 6 to 7 August 2026 | Drop 2 buyers notified of their allocated time slot by email |
| 10 to 20 August 2026 | Drop 2 sales window, 48 hour slots, run by AXS and Eventim |
| 2027 | Verified resale network launches, Paralympic tickets go on sale |
The queue is not the problem. The queue is the product
Most organisers treat the waiting room as an unfortunate necessity, the digital equivalent of a rope barrier and an apologetic steward. LA28 has done the opposite. By registering demand first and then rationing access to the checkout in 48 hour windows, it has converted a stampede into a schedule.
That is timed entry ticketing wearing a very expensive tracksuit. The mechanics are identical to what a museum uses to stop 400 people arriving at 11am, or what a trade show uses to stagger badge collection so the registration desk does not collapse at 08:45. You cap how many people can transact at once, you tell them exactly when their turn is, and the pressure evaporates. Nobody refreshes a page for two hours because nobody needs to.
Twelve million registrations and four million tickets sold is not a conversion problem. It is a demand map that most organisers would pay a fortune for, and LA28 got it by asking politely, in advance, with a form.
What this means for event organisers
You are not selling 12 million tickets. You are probably selling somewhere between 200 and 2,000. The maths scales down more neatly than you would expect.
The first lesson is that registration should start long before sales do. An interest list is not a vanity metric. It tells you which sessions are oversubscribed before you have committed to a room, which regions justify a travel bursary, and whether your early bird tier is priced sensibly or is quietly leaving money on the floor. LA28 knew it had five million interested people in February. That is not marketing fluff, that is capacity planning.
The second lesson is about what you actually ask. A registration form that captures nothing but an email address is a missed opportunity dressed up as a courtesy. Custom registration forms that ask about job role, sessions of interest, dietary needs, accessibility requirements and travel origin turn a list of strangers into a plan. LA28 can say with confidence that three quarters of Drop 1 buyers were local, which changes everything about how it markets Drop 2. Can you say the equivalent about your delegates?
The third is that scarcity handled badly becomes a customer service incident. Random slot allocation with clear email notification is boring, transparent and hard to game. It also means your inbox is not full of people asking why the site fell over. If you run multiple events a year, the same registration and allocation logic can sit across all of them, which is the sort of thing our event platform is built to handle without a separate build each time.
Paris invented this queue, and London learned it the hard way
The 48 hour purchase window is not an LA28 original. Paris 2024 ran almost exactly the same system: around three million people registered for its first ticket draw, and successful applicants were handed 48 hour slots spread across several weeks in early 2023, as the IOC documented at the time. It was criticised for being complicated. It was also considerably less painful than what came before.
London 2012 is the cautionary tale. Its first ballot drew 1.9 million applicants against more than 20 million ticket requests, and roughly 1.2 million of those applicants walked away with absolutely nothing, as the BBC reported at the time. Over half of the 650 sessions were oversubscribed. The system was defensible mathematically and a public relations disaster practically, because applicants found out they had lost only when their bank account stayed stubbornly full.
The difference between 2012 and 2026 is not technology. It is sequencing. Register everyone, tell them where they stand, give them a specific window, and the same scarcity produces a fraction of the fury.
Watch this space
Two things worth diarising. First, LA28 says a multi platform verified resale network arrives next year, alongside Paralympic ticket sales. Given the regulatory heat around resale on both sides of the Atlantic right now, an Olympics running its own controlled resale rails will be watched extremely closely by every legislator currently drafting a resale bill.
Second, the Community Ticket Programme has named its first recipients: ten local organisations sharing 1,000 free tickets to Olympic swimming and flag football, funded by an inaugural $5m donation from the Los Angeles Rams. Free allocation programmes are the bit of ticketing that never makes the headlines and always makes the difference to how a games is remembered.
None of this requires an Olympic budget. It requires deciding that the form people fill in months before they can buy anything is not an administrative step but the foundation of the whole sale. Twelve million people just proved they will fill it in. The only question is whether your event is asking them the right things when they do, and whether your ticketing costs still make sense once the volume arrives.
