Parsons confident Los Angeles 2028 will take the Paralympic Games to a new level
International Paralympic Committee (IPC) President Andrew Parsons expects the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games to deliver the highest level of sporting performance and competitiveness in the history of the movement. In a message published on 14 August 2026, two years before the start of the Games, Parsons emphasized that Paralympic sport is changing rapidly as an increasing number of elite athletes train in professional environments and have access to advanced sports science. According to the IPC, it is precisely the combination of higher-quality development programs, the professionalization of preparation and the sports facilities in Los Angeles that should bring the best competitors even closer together. Parsons is not speaking only about organizational standards, but above all about results on the track, in the pool, in arenas and at other competition venues. His assessment is that LA28 will show how quickly the boundaries of elite Paralympic sport are shifting.
Los Angeles will host a record 4,480 para athletes from approximately 165 National Paralympic Committees from 15 to 27 August 2028, the IPC announced. Competitions will be held in 23 sports, and the program will include 560 medal events, which organizers describe as the largest Paralympic program since Seoul 1988. Para climbing will have a special place, as it will be part of the Paralympic Games for the first time and become the 23rd sport on the LA28 program. For Los Angeles, this will also be a historic first: the city hosted the Olympic Games in 1932 and 1984 and will host them for the third time in 2028, but it has never previously organized the Paralympic Games. For that reason, the sporting ambitions highlighted by Parsons overlap with the organizers' efforts to ensure that the city's first Paralympic edition leaves a lasting international mark.
Paris 2024 as a benchmark for how much competition has already increased
Parsons bases his expectations primarily on data from Paris 2024, where the level of results already demonstrated how much standards have changed. According to IPC data, 175 world records and 218 Paralympic records were broken at those Games across 22 sports. In Para athletics, more than 40 world records fell during the competition, and the IPC also states that 32 medal events in that sport were decided by margins of less than one tenth of a second or ten centimeters. Such margins are particularly important because they show that progress is not limited to a few exceptional individuals, but that the depth of quality within individual classifications and events is also increasing. In practice, this means that placings are increasingly decided by details of training, technique, equipment, tactics and performance under pressure.
In its post-Paris analysis, the IPC went a step further, stating that in many events, results that won gold at the Athens 2004 or Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games would no longer be sufficient even to qualify for the Paris 2024 final. Such a comparison cannot be applied equally to every sport and every classification, but it illustrates well the direction in which elite Para sport has developed over the past two decades. Increasing professionalization enables athletes to plan training loads in greater detail, use biomechanical analyses, achieve higher-quality recovery and follow more specific strength and conditioning programs. In the IPC's announcement, Parsons identified access to top-level sports science as one of the main reasons for the acceleration in results. For LA28, he therefore expects not only new records, but also a greater number of events in which the differences between medal winners will be minimal.
This is also important for the way the Paralympic Games are presented to a global audience. Parsons emphasized that Paralympic sport is, above all, elite sport and, as an illustration, cited the speeds and times achieved by para athletes in sprinting and swimming. His message is aimed at changing a perception in which sporting value is not viewed through the prism of disability, but through results, competition and the difficulty of performance. In recent years, such an approach has been increasingly supported by data on audiences, media reach and interest in the Paralympic Games. Los Angeles 2028 should therefore be a test of whether the growth in sporting performance can simultaneously further expand the movement's global visibility.
A record 4,480 athletes and the largest medal program
The LA28 program confirms that growth is not measured only by expected results. In June 2025, the IPC confirmed that 4,400 athlete quota places had been allocated for the 22 originally approved sports, the same as at Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2020, while the subsequent inclusion of Para climbing increased the total quota to 4,480. Of that number, 2,268 places are allocated to male athletes, 2,007 to female athletes, while 205 places are gender-open or not predetermined by sex, according to the official IPC program. Medals will be awarded in a total of 560 events: 267 men's, 247 women's and 46 mixed or open. The IPC also points out that 17 sports have gender balance in their medal programs, while 16 sports will offer an equal number of quota places to men and women, the highest number to date.
For comparison, Paris 2024 had around 4,400 athletes and 549 medal events across 22 sports. After the Games, the IPC reported that 4,400 athletes from a record 169 delegations competed in Paris. According to current plans, Los Angeles should have a slightly higher number of athletes, one more sport and eleven more medal events. The number of National Paralympic Committees expected by organizers, around 165, is currently a projection and may change before the qualification process is completed. However, the already confirmed quotas show that LA28 will not merely be a continuation of the Paris model, but an expanded version of the Summer Paralympic Games with a broader range of competitions.
Para climbing on the Paralympic stage for the first time
The most visible program innovation will be Para climbing. The IPC accepted the sport following a proposal by the LA28 Organizing Committee, and its inclusion marks the first time that a host organizer has added a sport to the Paralympic program under this model. Eight medal events are planned for its debut, four each for men and women, with a total of 80 athletes. A maximum of ten competitors may participate in each medal event, which will make qualification highly selective. According to the current LA28 schedule, Para climbing competitions are expected to take place from 24 to 27 August 2028, during the final four days of the Games.
The introduction of the new sport has broader significance because it comes at a time when the Paralympic program is trying simultaneously to expand its audience and maintain strict standards of classification, international representation and competition quality. The number of places alone shows that Para climbing is not coming to Los Angeles as a demonstration addition, but as a fully fledged medal sport with clearly defined men's and women's events. Organizers will stage it at the Long Beach Climbing Theater, according to the published venue plan. This will make Long Beach, alongside other Paralympic competitions, one of the key areas of the program in the southern part of the wider Los Angeles metropolitan area. As the detailed schedule may still change before the Games, final times and operational details remain subject to change.
Competitions will begin even before the opening ceremony
In June 2026, LA28 published a more detailed version of the Paralympic schedule that provides for competition across more days than at previous editions. According to the organizers, wheelchair rugby is expected to begin on 13 August 2028, two days before the opening ceremony, while boccia is set to begin on 14 August. The opening ceremony is planned for 15 August at the stadium that LA28 identifies in official documents as 2028 Stadium, while the closing ceremony will take place on 27 August at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Organizers state that this will be the first edition of the Paralympic Games at which competitions will begin before the opening ceremony. Such a structure increases the number of days during which Paralympic sport is present in the city and on television schedules, although the timetable remains subject to changes all the way until the conclusion of the Games.
Competitions will be spread across approximately 20 venues within seven competition zones in the Los Angeles area. LA28 states that all venues will be within a radius of approximately 56 kilometers, or 35 miles, which should simplify the movement of athletes and officials in a city known for large distances. Para athletics in the stadium, swimming in Long Beach, Para triathlon at Venice Beach and road Para cycling with the start and finish near the Los Angeles Zoo are just some examples of how organizers are distributing sports across existing locations. The LA28 plan is based on the use of existing and temporary facilities, with no new permanent sports venues being built specifically for the Games. For the Paralympic Games, this creates an additional organizational challenge because accessibility must be integrated into transport, accommodation, training, spectator areas and the daily functioning of the entire system, not only into the competition venue itself.
Growth of the global audience further raises expectations
Parsons' assessment of LA28 does not relate only to what will happen at the competition venues. After Paris 2024, the IPC published a Nielsen Sports study conducted among 15,000 people in 11 countries before and after the Games. According to the research, 80 percent of respondents were aware of the Paralympic Games, with only the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup achieving higher levels of recognition among major sporting events. Around 41 percent of respondents said they were interested in following the Paralympic Games. The IPC interprets these results as confirmation that sporting quality has become one of the main drivers of international interest in the Paralympic movement.
Paris' media results also established a high benchmark. According to IPC data published in 2025, the Paris Games were covered by a record 225 media rights holders, online platforms and digital, social and audio services, while 12,941 hours of Games-related content were broadcast globally. For the first time in history, all 22 Paralympic sports had at least some form of live coverage, while online searches related to the Paralympic Games surpassed one billion during the Paris period. This is important for Los Angeles because expectations are now also measured by the ability to distribute the sport globally across television and digital platforms. Parsons therefore expressed the expectation in his latest message that LA28 will deliver full stands and an even greater international reach through broadcasting and streaming.
Parsons enters his final presidential term with LA28 as a key milestone
Andrew Parsons will arrive in Los Angeles during his third and final four-year term as head of the IPC. At the IPC General Assembly in Seoul in September 2025, he was re-elected president with 109 of 177 valid votes, defeating South Korean candidate Dong Hyun Bae, who received 68 votes. Parsons was first elected president in 2017, after previously serving as IPC vice president and leading the Brazilian Paralympic movement. During his presidency, the Summer Games in Tokyo and Paris were held, and LA28 will be the final Summer Paralympic edition within the term for which he was elected in 2025. The outcome in Los Angeles will therefore also carry institutional significance for the legacy of his leadership.
Following his re-election, Parsons emphasized his desire to complete projects begun during previous terms and open new development paths for the Paralympic movement. In that context, LA28 comes at a time when the IPC is trying to connect several goals: elite sport, greater gender balance, broader media accessibility and social impact. Research commissioned by the IPC after Paris showed that following the Paralympic Games can also influence attitudes toward people with disabilities, particularly among people who were not strongly interested in Paralympic sport before the Games. Los Angeles organizers are therefore preparing not only a major sporting event, but also a global platform whose impact will be measured far beyond the results tables. That is precisely why the sporting quality on which Parsons insists so strongly has a broader significance: the more convincing the competition is as elite sport, the stronger its ability to attract audiences who previously did not follow the Paralympic Games.
There are still almost two years until the start of the Games, and the key qualification cycles have yet to determine most of the names that will compete in Los Angeles. The detailed schedule and certain operational elements may also still change, something LA28 explicitly states in its published documents. The basic outlines are known, however: a record quota of 4,480 athletes, 23 sports, 560 medal events, the debut of Para climbing and a program that will run from competitions before the opening ceremony through to the conclusion on 27 August 2028. Tickets for Paralympic competitions are expected to go on sale during 2027. For the IPC, the next major indicator of success will be whether Los Angeles can turn the growth in results and global interest from the Paris cycle into an even more competitive and visible Paralympic Games.
Sources:
- International Paralympic Committee β Parsons' statements on the expected level of sporting performance at LA28, data on records from Paris 2024, the expected number of athletes and global interest (link)
- International Paralympic Committee β official medal event program and athlete quotas for LA28, including Para climbing and gender-balance data (link)
- LA28 β details of the Paralympic schedule, venues, 560 medal events, the start of individual sports before the opening ceremony and Para climbing (link)
- International Paralympic Committee / Nielsen Sports β research on global awareness of the Paralympic Games and audience attitudes after Paris 2024 (link)
- International Paralympic Committee β data on the record global media coverage of Paris 2024 and the growth of digital interest (link)
- International Paralympic Committee β Andrew Parsons' re-election for a third and final presidential term in 2025 (link)