Yeah, about that.

The reality of the 2028 ticket rollout is looking a lot less populist and a lot more plutocratic. While $28 tickets technically exist, they appear to be for events like preliminary round field hockey at 9 AM on a Tuesday. Want to see gymnastics, track and field, or basketball — you know, the events people actually care about — you're looking at VIP packages running upward of $8,500. And even those aren't guaranteed unless you're willing to fork over the cash early in a murky, multi-phase purchasing system designed to extract maximum revenue while maintaining the illusion of fairness.

This is the oldest trick in the government-adjacent playbook: announce a headline number that sounds great, bury the real cost in the fine print, and count on people not doing the math until it's too late.

The Olympics have always been an exercise in public cost, private profit. Host cities routinely blow past their budgets — taxpayers foot the bill for infrastructure, security, and logistics — while the IOC and its partners rake in billions from broadcast deals and sponsorships. The least they could do is make the actual events accessible to the people subsidizing the whole spectacle.

Instead, we get a tiered system where ordinary families are priced out of marquee events and told they should be grateful for the privilege of watching water polo qualifiers.

Look, nobody's entitled to courtside seats at the gold medal basketball game. But when organizers lead with a $28 price tag as their marketing centerpiece, they're making an implicit promise. And when the purchasing experience reveals that promise to be largely decorative, people have every right to feel played.

The 2028 Olympics will be a spectacle. It'll just be one most people watch from their couch — which, ironically, might be the better deal anyway.