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Past the halfway mark of the Olympic quadrennial, LA28 has passed its own halfway point for ticket sales.

LA28 announced Friday it sold more than 6 million tickets during its first two drops, accounting for more than half of the expected Olympic ticket availability.

The remainder of an estimated 10.5 million Olympic tickets will move to first-come, first-served sales beginning in 2027. Additional inventory across every sport will be added during the next stage and ticket limits will be lifted, but LA28 did not announce the opening date.

“Overall the level of enthusiasm, the interest in the Games, the excitement to commit this far out from the Games has all been really affirming for how LA28 is coming together and the excitement everyone’s feeling about it,” said Allison Katz-Mayfield, LA28’s senior vice president of Games delivery revenue.

More than 700,000 of one million $28 tickets were sold during the first two drops. While fans have clamored for tickets, many were disappointed and frustrated with high prices and limited availability that seemed to sell out almost instantaneously. Each LA28 ticket drop came with the fine-print condition of “subject to availability.”

LA28 wanted to be “conservative” with the initial inventory available during the first two drops, Katz-Mayfield said, because organizers didn’t want to sell tickets only to discover later that fans might be stuck with limited visibility of an event. For example, Crypto.com Arena’s footprint will be changed to accommodate artistic gymnastics, with up to six apparatuses on the floor along with areas for judges, broadcast positions and media. The seating plan, which will be different than ones used for Lakers games or concerts, is still being developed. The same goes for the planning of temporary venues.

“It’s a fan-focused approach from my perspective,” Katz-Mayfield said. “We don’t want to be in a position where we sell something that doesn’t equate to the experience that someone is expecting to have.”

LA28 said more tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis for every sport next year as organizers refine venue layouts. Tickets that appear unavailable one day could go on the market weeks later as organizers gain a clearer picture of setups. With first-come, first-serve purchasing, the ticketing platform will remain open continuously through the Games.

“If you’re one of those people that has a very, very specific idea of what they want and they don’t want to move off that at all … then continue to check back because we’ll have tickets on sale through Games time,” Katz-Mayfield said. “So you can check on that first day. But you could also check two months later, and it could be different.”

New sports remained a hit for fans, who scooped up all available tickets to softball, lacrosse, flag football and squash during the second drop, LA28 reported. All tickets available for Oklahoma City’s softball and canoe slalom events were sold through for both drops. More tickets for those events will be added in 2027.

Although many fans have their hearts set on a single, high-demand Olympic event, others might be open to discovering different sports during the Paralympics. Tickets for the Paralympics will also go on sale in 2027, beginning with a lottery for assigned time slots, similar to the first Olympic ticket drops. About 25% of the total 14 million tickets between the Games are earmarked for the Paralympics, which will be in L.A. for the first time.

The Paralympics are typically priced at much lower prices than the Olympics. The Paris Olympics had single tickets as high as $1,065 (980 euros in July 2024) for swimming and track and field and as low as $26 across all sports. Half a million tickets for the Paris Paralympics were $16 and half of all tickets were priced less than $27. There were also Paralympic ticket packages for multiple sports and families. The strategy paid off with approximately 2.5 million tickets sold, the second-most ever for a Paralympic Games, and a record 12 million total tickets sold between the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics.

Despite starting earlier than previous Games, LA28 said it is already on pace to surpass Paris’ sales record after the 2024 Games sold 5.39 million tickets through their second drop in May 2023. Paris sold 9.5 million Olympic tickets total.

Fans who registered for Olympics tickets will already be registered for the Paralympic lotteries and LA28 is working to open registration specifically for the Paralympics.

“[Don’t] forget how great the Paralympics are,” Katz-Mayfield said, “and how much opportunity there’s going to be there to see different sports, new sports, be a part of the Games, and see world-class athletes compete, maybe in a way that you haven’t seen before if you’ve only seen the Olympics.”

Selling millions of tickets before schedules or matchups are even set has “given [LA28] a lot of confidence in where we’re at today,” Katz-Mayfield said. The early ticket sales have given the private organizing committee a strong foundation for one of its largest revenue drivers.

Ticketing and hospitality are expected to cover almost $2.5 billion of LA28’s total $7.1-billion budget for the Games. It is the second-largest source of expected revenue to help cover what LA28 has promised will be a privately funded Games.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Paul Grinvalds has completed 114 marathons in all 50 states, but he still wilts when he races in temperatures beyond 60 degrees.

It’s the same for most runners, as the body can’t cool down during exertion, and heat makes that even harder.

“One thing about marathoners is typically we’re kind of stubborn,” said Grinvalds, 68, from West Des Moines, Iowa, who finds even temperatures in the 50s a bit warm. “So if we have a goal and it’s hot, a lot of times we’re still going to try to do that goal, which is just stupid because you’re almost guaranteed to have a very painful experience.”

Such an experience can also be dangerous, a reality that marathon organizers are having to confront as climate change, caused mostly by the burning of fuels like coal and gasoline, pushes temperatures up. To improve the chances of having the 26.2-mile race in cooler weather, organizers are shifting race dates, starting earlier and even giving options for participants to cut their runs short.

Starting in 2027, the Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis-St. Paul will shift its more than 40-year tradition of holding the race on the first Sunday in October to later in the month. That decision comes after cancellation of the marathon in 2023 because of record heat and humidity, and starting temperatures near 70 for the 2025 race.

Organizers of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, marathon last year similarly moved their annual race from August to September after canceling the 2024 race due to hot conditions. And other races, including the Air Force Marathon in Dayton, Ohio, the Little Rock Marathon in Arkansas, and the Long Beach Marathon in Southern California, all moved their start times to earlier in the morning in search of cooler temperatures.

In Los Angeles in March, warm conditions prompted race organizers to give runners the option of stopping after 18 miles and still receiving a finishers medal. Less than 5% of participants opted for the shorter finish and only 14 of roughly 27,000 runners were treated at a hospital, with all released the same day. Still, the move led to some online derision.

“We welcome the feedback and it’s certainly something that caused a lot of discussion, but when we’re grading ourselves on it, it has to do with how safe our runners were on the day of the event and we’re very happy with the outcome,” said Meg Treat, a spokesperson for the marathon.

At the Twin Cities Marathon, race director Ed Whetham called the decision to cancel the 2023 marathon “devastating” for runners and the organization. Whetham said it prompted an extensive analysis of weather patterns that resulted in the decision to permanently delay the race by a couple weeks.

That analysis showed that by holding the race later in October, runners would have a far greater chance of optimal conditions. Given that snow sometimes falls in the Twin Cities in late October, there is a greater chance of chilly conditions, but Whetham said, “We’ll take a 39-degree start over a 70-degree start.”

Temperatures are expected to keep rising

The contiguous U.S. just had its warmest July ever recorded, and the Earth had its hottest year on record in 2024. The World Meteorological Organization forecasts that between 2025 and 2030 the Earth’s average global temperature will likely rise by more than 2.7 compared to the 1800s.

The warming is already making conditions worse for most marathons, according to a study of 221 races by the climate research group Climate Central. By 2045, optimal conditions for recreational runners — in the low 40s — would be less likely at 46 of the 51 U.S. marathons analyzed.

“The ability to go outside, to exercise, to take advantage of your human body and being healthy, that’s something that’s getting challenged by climate change,” said Andy Pershing, who led the Climate Central research.

Jessica Murfree leads a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill lab studying climate change’s effect on sports. She said organizers of marathons, bicycle races and other competitions — from tennis to college football — increasingly must consider changing event dates and times and adopting other safety measures, as climate change makes the weather hotter and more volatile.

Murfree said the concern extends beyond organized sports to whether people can even get outside on increasingly warm days, pushing people to exercise indoors or opt for activities like swimming.

“If we can’t walk, if we can’t exercise or go for runs, it’s too hot, can we still stay physically active while remaining cool?” she asked.

Marathons are especially hard in warm weather

Any kind of exercising in the heat can be challenging, but running a marathon in warm, humid conditions is especially difficult because it’s hard to prevent overheating when a person keeps pushing themselves for hours. And the faster a person goes, the more heat their body produces.

Chris Minson, a University of Oregon professor who researches how people can adapt to extreme heat and other environmental conditions, said the optimum temperature to run a marathon is about 50 degrees. As the temperature creeps into the upper 50s and 60s, the body has a tougher time supplying blood to muscles while also keeping the body cool.

“As you get to warmer temperatures you end up having a bigger competition between blood supplying your muscles to keep running, to keep nutrition going, and blood flow to your skin for thermal regulation,” Minson said.

Minson said it takes a tremendous amount of energy to run quickly. But of that energy, only about 25% is used to move the body forward. The rest goes to deal with the heat that is created by rapid movement.

Even worse than high temperatures is high humidity, which prevents sweat from evaporating and cooling the body.

Minson adds, though, that by regularly exercising in warm weather, people can acclimate to high temperatures and perform better in the heat, though likely not as well as they would in cooler conditions. Athletes who acclimate to high heat also can perform better in lower temperatures than if they hadn’t exercised in warm weather, he said.

Some athletes like John Seals even run in the midday heat and endure a sauna after a workout to acclimate their bodies. That all forms part of Seals’ training for an annual 135-mile ultramarathon held in July in Death Valley, California.

“We had a heat wave this week and for me, that’s a great thing,” said Seals, of West Des Moines.

Still, running in the heat can be dangerous without taking precautions.

Douglas Casa, a kinesiology professor who leads the Korey Stringer Institute, which studies sudden deaths in sports, said the Twin Cities Marathon’s change was prudent, especially considering the way in which many runners approach races.

“If someone was smart enough to say, ‘OK, it’s a little hotter today than usual, I’m going to run a 7 minute mile instead of a 6:30 mile,’ then they won’t get any hotter than normal,” Casa said. “It’s just that runners are sometimes very locked into what they normally do and what their goals are.”

McFetridge writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.