A Goldman M&A Banker Helped Bring the Olympics to Los Angeles
Odd Lots
In this live episode of Odd Lots recorded at the Future Proof Festival, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway interview Gene Sykes, co-head of Gl
Key takeaways
- The 2028 LA Olympics are fully privately funded with no public subsidies, relying on existing sports infrastructure.
- LA will host athletes at UCLA, eliminating the need for a new athlete village.
Main topics
- Private funding model for the 2028 Olympics
- LA's existing sports infrastructure utilization
Notable quotes
"The Olympics are the one sports experience that skews toward women more than men."
Conclusion
Gene Sykes presents a compelling case for LA's 2028 Olympics as a model of
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. Speaker 3 (0:04) My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Speaker 2 (0:07) Day. Speaker 4 (0:08) Stories that move markets. Speaker 2 (0:10) Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Speaker 4 (0:14) Impact politics, change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world. And how you think about your bottom line. Listen to The Big Take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Speaker 1 (0:34) Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Speaker 5 (0:49) Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And Speaker 6 (0:53) I'm Joe Weisenthal. Speaker 5 (0:54) Joe, we are here in lovely Huntington Beach at the Future Proof Conference. I love coming to Speaker 3 (0:59) this conference Speaker 5 (1:00) so much. Speaker 3 (1:01) You Speaker 5 (1:01) can't complain. The beach is right there. They Speaker 6 (1:03) do such a good job. Every time I'm here, the only thought I have is they have brought heaven on earth. And the only mystery I have is why there are people, you know, you think about like the Great Migration West. It's like... Imagine stopping in Nebraska. You could have gone a little bit further and you could have been in California. And it's like it was right there. And the question I have is why doesn't everyone live here? Speaker 5 (1:27) OK, well, we made it to California. It's our fourth year at this particular event. And we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We recorded an episode live on stage with Gene Sykes. He is the co-head of Global M &A at Goldman Sachs, a longtime partner and also the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. So take a listen. Speaker 7 (1:47) Gene, thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. Speaker 6 (1:51) Let's start really simple. We can save the tough questions for the end, but let's start really simple. You wear many hats, Goldman, the Olympics. What are you up to now? Tell us who you are, maybe. Speaker 7 (2:03) Okay, I'm still a Goldman Sachs partner after many, many years. I think I've been a partner at Goldman Sachs for half my life, and I work on technology and media. healthcare and other things. And because I've been around for a long time, I get to do more or less what I want, which is to give people advice who need advice and value it and work with all of our teams and spend a lot of time mentoring people. So that's the golden part of my time. The other half of my time or more is spending time in everything related to the Olympic and Paralympic ecosystem. So I was the head of the bid when we bid for the games for Los Angeles. Originally for 2024, we were awarded the 2028 Games, you know, less than two years. We'll have the Olympic and Paralympic Games right here in Southern California. But then four years ago, I became the chair of the board of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. So I spent a lot more time now thinking about how do we create Team USA so that our athletes are always the highest performing athletes in any of these Olympic or Paralympic events. And then about two and a half years ago. I became a member of the International Olympic Committee. So I sort of see the entire Olympic, Paralympic landscape. When I think Speaker 5 (3:20) about the Olympics, I'm not big into sports, okay? Like, I'm not... I'm not Sidney Sweeney, like sports, sports, sports, sports, right? I just see the Olympics. They're kind of interesting. What counts to you as a successful Olympic Games? Is it keeping the cost down as much as possible? The vibes? What does it actually look Speaker 7 (3:38) like? Successful Olympic Games has to be a Games that everyone says, I'll never forget this. This is an incredible experience. And I only saw it here. This is the only way I can see all of these incredible athletes in these kinds of competitions. and see them in one place at the same time. And when you say you're not a sports fan, how many people are Alyssa Liu fans with figure skating who wouldn't call themselves sports fans? The other thing about the Olympics most people don't realize is the Olympics are the one sports experience that skews toward women more than toward men. Really? Speaker 6 (4:12) I would not have guessed that at all. You know, we obviously just hit the World Cup in the U.S., but that's like one sport. There are probably 12 stadiums or something like that. There's one governing body. Can you give us a feel for essentially the sprawl of the organization and how many different, maybe we call them stakeholders, have to be brought in to make an Olympics go well? Speaker 7 (4:40) Sure. So in contrast to the World Cup, we had 104 matches during the World Cup between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. 16 different stadiums were hosts for the events. It's nothing. Not that much. 600 athletes, let's say. I mean, not that many athletes. By comparison, in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, when you put the two together, we'll have 17,000 athletes. We'll have something like 900 separate events, medal events. It's enormous. We'll sell 15 million tickets between the Olympic and the Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. The World Cup sold six and a half million tickets. So it's a significantly bigger and more complicated experience than the World Cup. You know, it's not everything, but it's maybe 90 % of everything you can imagine in the world of sports. Speaker 5 (5:30) So if there is one thing I know about the Olympics, it's that people like to complain about the cost, right? And empty stadiums and finding uses for all this infrastructure that was built. afterwards. What's the funding mix actually supposed to be for the 2028 LA games? Because I keep reading headlines saying the first privately funded games. I'm not sure that's true. Speaker 7 (5:50) Well, it's essentially privately funded in that there's no government support to put the games on, with the exception of the federal government playing a role in security and security-related logistics, things of that sort. You can't do that without the federal government, with everybody in the world being here. There are 206 countries. that will send teams to the Olympic Games. So it's quite a security event for sure. The idea of the privately funded games in Southern California, we have the best sports infrastructure here of any city in the world. We have more stadia and arenas and world-class places where sports already takes place. So we don't have to build anything. We're not building a village for the athletes, which is what Paris had to do, because we've got such great residences at UCLA. We're going to keep all the athletes at UCLA. And UCLA houses many more students in a regular year than we'll need to house athletes during the games. So this is the ideal setting to have at games like this. And that makes it a lot easier to plan and to execute. Speaker 6 (6:52) I have some friends in LA and they have a house here. And they're like, by the way, we're thinking of renting out the house to people coming. But if you wanted to come, we would let you stay in the house. They would give up the money for you, Joe. They Speaker 4 (7:04) would give up Speaker 6 (7:04) the money, yeah. Speaker 7 (7:05) To my mind, I know Speaker 6 (7:07) it's a good deal, but the flip side is like, oh my God, the traffic and the standing in lines. These are some of my least favorite things to do in the world. Make the argument to me that if I come down to LA for the Olympics, I will actually find it a smooth experience rather than an experience where I'm spending half the day in lines. And then in the week up to it, logging into eight different sites just to be able to buy a ticket. Speaker 5 (7:36) I mean, L.A. traffic is bad at the Speaker 7 (7:38) best of times, right? Well, I don't know. At the best of times, it's not bad. Yeah, four in Speaker 6 (7:43) the morning, the best of times, it's not bad. Speaker 7 (7:46) To give you some comfort, people said the same thing about the 84 games. When we hosted the games in 1984, a lot of people said, I'm going to leave because the traffic's going to be so bad. And the traffic was totally manageable. The thing about L.A. and traffic is if you tell people in advance something is happening, stay off the roads, and they all know about it, they know where it's going to be and they know when it's going to happen, they do. People behave based on what they know and what they're expecting to happen. That plus the fact that you're going to have a lot of very elaborate planning for how you get traffic moving around through what will be called Olympic lanes. Today they're... High occupancy vehicle lanes, HOV lanes. Oh, Speaker 6 (8:30) yeah. Am I going to have to