L.A.’s next mascot: don’t turn Olympics into eagles-only

L.A.’s 2028 – With the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics mascot still months away, the debate now isn’t just about design—it’s about whether the games will default to the same familiar bird imagery. The column looks back at how past mascots were created, why L.A.’s Sam the Eagle ar

Love ya, Jackie and Shadow. But no more bald eagles as Olympic mascots, period.

On drafting boards and computer screens, a menagerie of creatures—real and imaginary—has been created, discarded, eliminated, and cast aside. In the end, only one winner will be revealed as the official mascot for the 2028 Los Angeles summer Olympics. Its debut could still be six months away.

This question comes with a certain irony for Los Angeles, because when L.A. hosted the summer Olympics before—back in 1984—the mascot didn’t wait. Sam the Eagle stepped out four long years before the games began. The national bird was transformed by a Disney artist. and to some eyes it carried a slight resemblance to an earlier Disney avian character. a parrot. Peter Ueberroth, head of the L.A. Olympics committee, dismissed the comparison, saying “fuzzy duck” was not an apt description for Sam.

So why did Sam arrive so early, back in 1980, while the world is still waiting on 2028’s figure?

First, Sam was probably stealing a march on Russia. The United States had boycotted the 1980 Moscow games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, in 1984, the Soviet Union retaliated by staying home from L.A. The Moscow closing ceremonies were on a Sunday, Aug. 30, 1980, and within hours, Sam the Eagle stepped out.

Sam’s entrance came with a showman’s flourish and a clumsy reality check. Escorted by actor and perpetual emcee Bob Hope, Sam descended the L.A. City Hall steps—seven and a half feet of him. tall as a Lakers center but clumsy as a swan on dry land. He tried a show-off spin, got his bird legs tangled, and took a tumble. Staffers had to help get him back on his fuzzy feet.

Second, the extra lead time gave Sam a chance to make money. L.A.’s 1984 games promised they would not cost Angelenos even so much as change for a penny. That meant the games depended on private money, including a licensing deal involving Sam.

L.A.’s Olympics were the first to end up in the black. The L.A. games banked about a quarter-billion bucks. Montreal’s mascot—Amik, the industrious Canadian beaver—still needed 30 years to chew through the billion dollars in red ink that the Montreal Olympics cost.

Sam’s value came from being a properly promoted Olympic-licensed property. As a nameless licensee told The Times in 1984. a properly promoted Sam “could do $200 million.” A pledge of at least $4 million allowed sponsors to use Sam in ads and promos. Sam and Ronald McDonald co-starred in a commercial.

But the licensing system also carried its own strict boundaries. Olympic-sponsor hierarchy was guarded like vestal virginity. When an L.A.-based chicken chain. Pioneer. bought a few hundred thousand plastic toy Sams from an official Olympic licensee—the ranking below sponsorship—to give away with buckets of chicken. McDonald’s and the L.A. Olympic committee asked a federal judge to stop it. The judge refused to end the toy Sam giveaway. but ordered Pioneer to stop using the Olympic rings and L.A.’s star-in-motion symbols.

That early rush for Sam didn’t mean the process was simple. By 1980. random Americans had already offered their own notions for a mascot. but in the end. it was a pro: a Disney artist named Bob Moore. Moore rummaged through California’s animal and vegetable kingdoms. naming rabbits. turtles. frogs. and even a cactus. but none of them filled the mascot-sized hole.

Moore tried a bison, using the shaggy American prairie symbol. Even Moore couldn’t make the bison work. “A four-legged creature is hard to make look right because he has to stand up and do things. ” he told The Times—athletic things. like performing a pirouette. And so Sam it was: an eagle that was more comical than menacing. built to be a happy raptor. not a threat.

The earliest Olympic mascot wasn’t even formally a mascot. Schuss—a stylized Z-shaped figure on skis—was created on an overnight deadline for the 1968 winter games in Grenoble, France.

In 1972, Waldi was the pastel dachshund for Munich. But more than 50 years later. the most lasting. haunting image from Munich isn’t Waldi at all—it’s a ski-masked Palestinian extremist outside the Israeli athletes’ quarters. That terrorist massacre by Black September militants killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and one West German police officer. Five of the attackers were killed.

Some mascots just don’t translate. The Atlanta 1996 mascot. the blue blob originally named Whatizit for the reaction it generated and later just Izzy. seemed like a flop-sweat companion to the way it landed in people’s eyes. Yet the Atlanta Paralympics mascot, unlike its Olympic counterpart, was dazzling: a phoenix rising from its own ashes.

London’s 2012 Wenlock was a bottom-heavy cyclops figure named for an English village that held a kind of Olympic competition in 1850. The column argues it would have been more loved if Wenlock had been a warlock, a creature spun from the Merlin of Arthurian legend.

It all comes down to merch, the argument goes—what sells, what sinks, what stinks.

And with the 2028 choice still undecided, there’s a belief that time remains to rescue L.A. 2028 from another anodyne, wholly wholesome Sam clone.

Picture the possibilities: an angel on a surfboard; an angel in board shorts on a surfboard jumping a great white shark; and an angel in board shorts on a surfboard jumping a great white shark while taking a perfectly legal toke. The point, though, is that the toke—something Olympic visitors might want to try—won’t make it. Mascot judges would score it a 0.0 on a family-values rating system. with maybe one judge. perhaps a Cheech and Chong fan. giving a 0.1.

Instead, the plea is for a mascot with character, stamina, and initiative—lovable but with a potential for fierceness and a proven fan base.

A runner-up is offered: one of the Monrovia bears. Adept at suburban sidewalk loping, very cute, and comfortable in a hot tub—perfect for swimming events and, after-hours, for partying.

But there’s a clear frontrunner in this view. She’s lithe. She’s tough but charismatic. She climbs, crawls, leaps, runs like the Santa Ana wind. She’s overdue for a star on the Walk of Fame—“obv.”

Her face on Olympic tickets will sell thousands. Part of the money she makes has to go to wildlife preservation.

The column ties the idea to a specific legacy: her spiritual granddaughterhood to P-22, Griffith Park’s photogenic mountain lion—P-2028.

The cat’s meow.

For Los Angeles, it’s a familiar tension: the city knows how to chase spectacle. The question now is whether it will chase the same symbol again—bald eagles, safe echoes, easy merch—or whether it will pick something that feels like it belongs here, with teeth and a future attached.

Los Angeles 2028 Olympics mascot Sam the Eagle P-2028 mountain lion mascot Olympic licensing sports merch Bob Moore Peter Ueberroth