LA 2028 in Long Beach: Seven Venues on One Waterfront, and How to Stay Online

Seven venues. One waterfront. If LA28 has a zone that behaves like a traditional Olympic park, this is it.

Long Beach gets rowing, sailing, open water swimming, water polo, artistic swimming, beach volleyball, handball, shooting and sport climbing, plus blind football, sitting volleyball, para rowing, para paddle and para swimming across the Paralympic programme. Several of those venues are within sight of each other. In a Games spread over 25 zones and most of Southern California, that concentration is unusual enough to change how you plan a trip.

The cluster, and the two on the water

Four of the seven venues are on or beside the Long Beach Convention Center site, which is what makes this zone unusual:

• Long Beach Arena holds handball and sitting volleyball. It held volleyball at the 1984 Games.
• Long Beach Aquatics Center is a temporary open-air stadium built in the convention centre lot for artistic swimming, water polo and para swimming.
• Long Beach Climbing Theater, also temporary and also in that lot, holds climbing and para climbing.
• Long Beach Target Shooting Hall sits inside the convention centre itself, the same building that held fencing in 1984.
• Alamitos Beach Stadium, a temporary build at the western end of the beach, takes beach volleyball and blind football.

Then, further east along the water:

• Marine Stadium takes rowing, sprint paddle, para rowing and para paddle. It was the first manmade rowing course in the United States, built to stage the rowing events of the 1932 Games, and 2028 will be its first Paralympic Games.
• Belmont Shore takes open water swimming, rowing coastal beach sprints and sailing.

Planning a day here

The concentration is the opportunity and the trap. You can watch handball in the morning and climbing in the afternoon on foot. Pairing rowing at Marine Stadium with an early afternoon session at Alamitos Beach means planning the journey along the water first.

LA28's own guidance is to search for sessions inside the same zone and to stay near the zone you will visit most. Long Beach rewards that approach better than anywhere else on the map, as long as you check where inside the zone each venue actually is.

Metro's 2028 Games plan covers the wider region with extra bus service, park-and-ride hubs and venue shuttles. Long Beach is at the southern end of the Metro A Line, so it is reachable by rail from downtown Los Angeles, but that ride is long. If your tickets are concentrated here, staying here is the sane choice.

What the day uses

• Mobile tickets, one per session, and this is the zone where people buy multiple sessions in a day.
• Getting between venues, which here means walking directions and shuttle timings more than rail.
• Photos and clips, at higher volume than indoors, because the settings are better.
• Group chats and translation, same as anywhere.

That is 1 to 3 GB across a full day, and a few days in the zone fits inside 5 GB for most people.

Start from the referral link for these rates.

Setting up before you fly

1. Buy a US plan and wait for the email saying your QR code is ready on the website.
2. On home Wi-Fi, view the code and install the profile. It activates when you arrive.
3. When you land, set the Lotsotravel eSIM as your active data line in Settings.
4. Keep the home SIM on for calls, texts and two-factor codes.
5. Turn data roaming off on the home line so it stays clear of US networks and their daily fee.

The same plan works if your tickets also take you to Inglewood, downtown or Exposition Park. Everything else is in our LA 2028 eSIM guide.