The Olympic Flame Will Pass Through All 50 States on Its Way to Los Angeles

Every U.S. state will get a turn with the Olympic flame before the Los Angeles Games open on July 14, 2028. LA28 announced the plan Tuesday at Atlanta City Hall, and the city that hosted the 1996 Olympics will be the flame’s first American stop when it arrives from Greece in the spring of 2028.

LA28 says this will be the first Olympic torch relay to reach all 50 states. The flame will be lit in Olympia, as it is for every Games, and organizers plan to publish the full route in 2027. News on torchbearer nominations, and on any further sponsors, is due before that.

Atlanta’s 1996 Games were the last Summer Olympics held in the U.S., and the city is home to Coca-Cola, one of the relay’s four presenting sponsors and the one with by far the longest Olympic history. Janet Evans, the four-time Olympic swimming champion who carried the torch in 1996 and is now LA28’s chief athlete officer, was at the announcement, along with Lonnie Ali, the widow of Muhammad Ali, who lit the cauldron that summer.

“Atlanta was proud to carry that flame in 1996. We will be proud to welcome it back,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in LA28’s announcement.

The flame for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City also set off from Atlanta, on Dec. 4, 2001, and went on to cover more than 13,500 miles and 46 states with 11,500 torchbearers, the closest any relay has come to the full set.

Who Gets to Carry It

LA28 says members of the public will be able to become torchbearers through a nomination process, but it hasn’t said when that opens, how many places there will be or how they will be shared out. What it has confirmed is that the four presenting sponsors, Coca-Cola, JPMorganChase, Allstate and Xfinity, will hand-pick some of the torchbearers and have the flame brought past some of their own businesses.

For 1996, Coca-Cola, which sponsored that relay as well, was given 2,500 of the 10,000 spots organizers first planned, with 5,500 set aside for “community heroes” picked by local judging panels, according to The Washington Post‘s guide to the relay at the time. By the time the flame reached the stadium, more than 12,000 people had carried it over 16,000 miles and 84 days, through 42 states, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this month.

The 1984 relay, the last one to finish in Los Angeles, went a step further and sold the road itself. Its Youth Legacy Kilometer program charged $3,000 per kilometer, with each buyer choosing who ran their leg and the money going to youth sports programs at Boys Clubs, Girls Clubs and YMCAs, UPI reported when the plan was unveiled in 1983. AT&T, which ran that relay, also lined up about 200 experienced runners, 90 of them from its Corporate Cup team, to carry the torch through the emptier stretches of the country.

That flame left the United Nations in New York on May 8, 1984, with Gina Hemphill and Bill Thorpe Jr., grandchildren of Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe, running the first kilometer together. It spent 82 days crossing roughly 9,000 miles and 33 states before Rafer Johnson lit the cauldron at the Coliseum. Eight days later, Joan Benoit won the first women’s Olympic marathon in the same city in 2:24:52.

The Road to LA

The relay will be crossing the country in the same spring as the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in St. Louis on March 25, 2028, where three men and three women will earn their places on the team, and where the field will have had to meet tighter qualifying standards just to start.

The Paralympic flame will come from Stoke Mandeville, the English village where the Paralympic movement started, and its relay gets underway once the Olympics finish. LA28 has not yet named its first U.S. stop. Los Angeles will be hosting its first Paralympics that summer and its third Olympics, after 1932 and 1984.

The competition schedule is already set, with the marathons on the final weekend of the Games and all four rounds of the women’s 100m on a single day, and tickets are on sale. The torch relay’s full route through all 50 states is due in 2027.