Q&A: Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt

When organizers this week revealed the initial schedule for the 2028 Olympic Summer Games, there were two notable sports listed outside of Southern California.

The softball and canoe slalom events will take place more than 1,300 miles east of Los Angeles, in Oklahoma City, under the direction of Michael Byrnes, president and general manager of the Triple-A Baseball Oklahoma City Comets.

Canoe slalom events are scheduled to take place from July 14–22 at the Riversport OKC Whitewater Center. Softball will be at Devon Park — home of the Women’s College World Series — from July 23–29. The tournament will start with a round robin preliminary round from July 23–27 before the bronze medal game on the 28th and the gold medal game on the 29th.

While Oklahoma City is only hosting two events, it will see Olympic competition every day of the 16-day 2028 Olympic Summer Games. SportsTravel caught up with OKC Mayor David Holt last week at the SEICon event in Las Vegas to discuss how his city is preparing with less than three years until the Opening Ceremony, and what the world can expect from his city in 2028.

SportsTravel: How big of a deal is it for Oklahoma City to host two Olympic sports in 2028?

Mayor Holt: It’s a testament to the investments we made in infrastructure over decades. And there’s some poetry to it too, because the softball stadium actually was seeded with surplus money from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But it also is a testament to partnership and communication and collaboration over several years to lead up to this point. It’s not just as simple as having the venues, although that was certainly necessary.

ST: What does hosting the Olympics mean to the community?

MH: There are two levels on what it means. The two sports have 200,000 tickets, we think, between softball and canoe slalom. And we’d like to build out a program where we could accommodate other people who maybe didn’t get a ticket, but still want to feel the energy of the Summer Olympics and have a festival at our Scissortail Park or something. Create the kind of things you tend to experience when you go to Olympic host cities. It’s worth noting that canoe slalom was nine or 10 days in Paris, and the softball tournament is a week. The Olympics are two weeks. So there will be a multi-hour Olympic event in Oklahoma City every day of the Olympics. This isn’t a one-off thing. There will be some soccer matches, for example, around the country. So it’s not like we’re the only city outside of Southern California hosting an event. But we’re the only city outside of Southern California hosting an entire sport from beginning to end. We really could welcome hundreds of thousands of people. So that’s obviously a major visitor opportunity for us. A major opportunity to leave an impression with all of those national and international visitors. Secondly, hosting Olympic events becomes a part of your brand and your identity, and it positions you as credible for other events and other spectacles down the line. It’s also about elevating our city into a new conversation. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for the whole region.

ST: Why do you think the LA28 committee chose Oklahoma City to host softball and canoe slalom?

MH: I think LA did it for any number of reasons. Most notably, sustainability — not having to invest in facilities that had no long-term future. But it also shares the Olympics with a broader spectrum of the country without really costing LA core sports. Softball is uniquely popular in our part of the country. We’re the softball capital of the world. We have the largest stadium in the world. And I think canoe slalom is something that can be introduced and positioned for this part of the country. Certainly we’ve already invested in a facility, so we would like for it to get a broader level of interest.

ST: If somebody told you 20 years ago that Oklahoma City was going to host a canoe slalom event at the Summer Olympics — before Riversport existed — what would you have thought?

MH: Olympics aside, we are a world capital for paddle sport. We have facilities that are not replicated in very many places. They’re not one of a kind, but they’re rare. You can do flat water on the river and you can do whitewater adjacent to that on the Riversport course. So we’ve already hosted major international competitions and Olympic Trials. But yeah, it’s pretty crazy. It all started with just putting dams on the river so it had water in it. If you dig up old pictures, you’ll see a ditch with no water in it. It was a wasteland and we just wanted to have a pretty river to look at. And some philanthropy in our city, working in conjunction with rowing enthusiasts — which, who even knew those people existed until all this — turned it into a rowing destination. It required philanthropy at first to build the boathouses to really prove it out. But once they did, we got involved as a city and invested in the lights. We’re still the only course in the world with permanent lights. Having night races is a cool element that exists only in OKC and then obviously adding the whitewater component so we can do it all. We’re a world capital for paddle sports and I think it’s so new that it will probably take this Olympic event for that to really crystalize for our own residents and for this part of the country.

ST: Do you have any kind of economic impact estimate on what the Olympics will bring to Oklahoma City?

MH: Usually you hire consultants to do that kind of thing and I don’t think that’s been done yet. I think we will definitely view it as significant, but I would also argue it’s on two levels —one of them is quantifiable and one of them is not. That unquantifiable element may be just as significant, if not more so, than the quantifiable one. For example, what is the Thunder worth to us? You can go look at sales tax receipts on game nights around the arena and that’s one answer. But we have always viewed it as completely changing the identity of the city. And the fact that every time I have a conversation with an investor or a job creator or a potential resident in our city, it probably opens with the Thunder and that has a value that I can’t put a number to. That probably appeals to me even more so than the straight economic impact value of those two weeks during the Olympics, although we will quantify that and I’m sure it will justify whatever expense we have to go through. But for me, the brand of having hosted Summer Olympic events and the memory that people will have gold medals put around their necks in Oklahoma City … that’s what is most meaningful.

ST: What do you expect from the people of Oklahoma City? What is the atmosphere going to be like for all the competitors, especially Team USA, in 2028?

MH: On the softball side, it’s going to be insane. Our fans know softball. They turn out for the Women’s College World Series. The U.S. team is being coached by the OU coach, Patty Gasso. So that’s a no-brainer. That’s going to be an electric atmosphere. And obviously a very pro-USA atmosphere. Canoe slalom does not have a lot of American athletes historically. There is an American young lady, Evy Leibfarth, who won bronze in Paris. So certainly we’ll try to rally around her. She’s still very young and will certainly be expecting to compete in Oklahoma City. I think with canoe slalom though, we’re not necessarily expecting an influx of new American strength in that sport. I think we’ll be really focused on how we can deliver an event presentation — working with the International Canoe Federation and the USOPC and LA28 — that brings energy regardless of what your rooting interest is. And I have a little bit of experience with this because in Paris I attended all of the canoe slalom events, and they had 10,000 fans and they had a DJ and it was electric and it was actually reminiscent of being at a Thunder game. It was fun to watch, even if you had walked in the venue not really knowing exactly how all this works. So I think that’s what we’ll strive to achieve with canoe slalom.