Los Angeles has two years until the 2028 Summer Olympics open, and some city council members are already using the word nobody at city hall wanted on the record: bankruptcy.

At a recent budget session, officials pressed hard on whether LA28, the private organizing committee steering the Games, has done enough to protect taxpayers if costs spiral. One official put it plainly. “Bankruptcy cannot be the legacy,” the official said, a line that traveled quickly through local coverage of the meeting.

The dispute at the center of this isn’t hard to follow. LA28 and the city have been locked in negotiations for years over a simple question: who pays when the bill comes in higher than expected? LA28’s position is that sponsorships, broadcast rights, and ticket revenue will cover it. City officials don’t find that reassuring, and they want contractual protection locked in before the torch relay gets anywhere close to Los Angeles.

LA28 keeps pushing back. The committee’s defense rests on its private funding model, which was the whole point of the city’s bid. Unlike Paris in 2024 or Tokyo in 2021, the LA28 structure was built from the start to run without public subsidies. That’s the promise. Whether that promise survives contact with the actual cost of running a modern Olympics is the open question.

History isn’t encouraging. The Oxford research group that tracks mega-project overruns found that every Summer Games since 1960 has gone over budget. Every one. The average overrun runs well above 100 percent. LA boosters point to 1984, when the Summer Games here actually turned a profit. Fair enough. But 1984 was a different city in a different global economy, one that didn’t face the security footprint, infrastructure demands, and media logistics that a 2026-era Games requires. That comparison doesn’t hold up.

Still, it keeps getting made.

The city’s real exposure right now is genuinely unclear, which is a large part of why council members are sounding alarms. Negotiations between LA28 and city officials over a binding financial backstop haven’t been completed, and the full terms of what the city owes if sponsorship revenue falls short haven’t been disclosed publicly. That’s a problem for council members who say they can’t tell their constituents what they’re actually on the hook for.

Security costs alone are projected to reach into the billions. The federal government will absorb some portion of that, but the final split hasn’t been set. Same story with transportation upgrades, venue preparation, and the expanded public services the city will need to provide across competition sites spread from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to venues in Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles.

The LA Times reported on the alarm that city officials raised over what it described as potentially crippling Olympic costs, a story that landed during an already tense budget season for a city dealing with competing fiscal pressures.

None of this means the Games can’t come off. They probably will. But the pattern here is familiar to anyone who’s watched Olympic host cities over the decades. Initial bids look manageable. Costs grow. Commitments made in the bidding phase turn out to be optimistic. The city ends up absorbing more than it planned to. That happened in Tokyo in 2021. It happened in cities before that.

Los Angeles in 2028 wants to be the exception. It has structural reasons to think it can be. But 100 percent average cost overruns, unresolved security funding negotiations, and a financial backstop agreement that still isn’t finalized aren’t details you can explain away with a reference to 1984.

City officials want answers before the clock runs out. Two years isn’t much runway.