News that Pomona will host cricket matches at the 2028 Olympics was announced Tuesday. Established in 1922, the fairgrounds have seen parades, concerts, presidents, horse racing and of course the Los Angeles County Fair.
The fairgrounds have had national sports, in the form of the NHRA Winternationals drag races. International sports too, via events in the Modern Pentathlon World Cup in 2017, which drew 140 athletes from 138 nations, and again in 2018, both times when Los Angeles was a host city.
But the Olympic Games will be on a whole other level.
“Pomona’s never had the Olympics,” Mayor Tim Sandoval muses to me earlier this week over tacos. “Never had it in ’32. Didn’t have it in ’84.”
Those are the two previous times L.A. was host city.
But Pomona will have the Olympics in ’28. Better late than never.
As Sandoval said in the official announcement: “This is a huge honor for our city. We look forward to welcoming athletes and spectators from all over the world.”
Cricket, the world’s second most-popular sport after soccer, will be new to most of us. It seems genteel. Is it at all like lawn bowling? The city’s Palomares Park has had a lawn bowling court for decades.
It’s too bad lawn bowling isn’t an Olympic sport or Pomona would be ready.
As you’ll recall, the L.A. County Fair now takes place in May — this year’s run is May 2-26 — and shouldn’t directly conflict with the summer Olympics from July 14-30, 2028.
Where on the fairgrounds will the Olympics take place? Where you’d expect: the dirt and grass infield that once saw horse racing and now hosts concerts.
“A temporary purpose-built structure” will go up somewhere in the infield, a fair spokesperson tells me Thursday.
It seems possible to me that spectators will watch from the 8,000-seat grandstand, but the specifics are under the control of LA28, the host committee. And it’s a big infield.
Built in 1932, the grandstand happens to be undergoing renovations this year and will be closed during the fair. Home Arts, typically housed in the grandstand’s exhibit area, will instead be in Expo Hall 5. Concerts will take place in the northern part of the infield, away from the grandstand.
Back to the mayor.
In 2028, Sandoval will be in the final year of his third term. Elected in 2016, he was re-elected in 2020 and 2024. But he might not be done.
A city charter amendment enacted by voters in 2022 limits every City Council member to three consecutive terms — from that point forward.
“I could run two more times,” Sandoval, 54, explains. “I’m leaning toward running one more term, and that’s it. Which would be four terms in total.”
So during the Olympics in Pomona, cricket will be played and, perhaps, the mayor will be running.
Shoeless Val
Actor Val Kilmer had no dress socks to go with his suit before going before the Ontario City Council in 2013 to promote his one-man show, “Citizen Twain,” in that city. As recounted here April 9, Kilmer asked a Chaffey High teacher to buy him socks to go with his dress shoes.
Socks appear to have been only the final leg, so to speak, of his footwear issues.
Adrianne Woodward of Upland tells me her brother, Tony, was working at Chaffey in security at the time. (The standoffish Kilmer’s instructions to the security staff: “Keep the kids away from me.”)
Kilmer “also needed shoes to go with the black socks,” Adrianne reports, based on what Tony relayed to her, “because he demanded that one of the staff assigned to assist him trade shoes with him.”
Imagine having a campus visitor, a famous actor no less, demand the shoes off your feet. But the plea must have been effective with the staff member who gave up his shoes.
Perhaps Kilmer really laced into him.
Paper flowers
The Riverside Woman’s Club hosted me as its speaker Tuesday in fine style. Each table’s centerpiece had flowers fashioned from newspaper pages (ours). Made me feel right at home.
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When Bryce Harper stepped to the plate Tuesday, the Phillies slugger had two custom-made bats at the ready, one pink, one blue. He chose blue, thus revealing the gender of his fourth child. What’s the local angle? “At least it didn’t start a fire,” Levi Weaver of The Athletic’s baseball newsletter The Windup cracked. He hyperlinked to news about, yes, San Bernardino County’s 2020 El Dorado fire, in which a gender-reveal smoke bomb torched close to 23,000 acres.
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