LA 2028: Olympic cricket tournament will be played in a California fairground as New York overlooked

The cricket tournament at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 will be played at a temporary stadium in Pomona, a southern Californian city about an hour's drive from the athletes' village.

A source close to the LA 2028 organising committee told BBC Sport that a number of potential venues were explored during the planning stage.

That included holding the event in a city on the East Coast of the United States, such as New York, where time zones would be more appealing to the sizable television market in India.

However, it was said to be a "priority" for organisers to keep the six-team event at a venue within Los Angeles County which also met financial and logistical criteria.

A desire for cricket's top players to stay at the athletes' village, based at the University of California, and rub shoulders with fellow Olympians meant other venues were overlooked.

That included the Oakland Coliseum, the former home of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which is being adapted for cricket and will host games in Major League Cricket - the country's T20 franchise league - later this year.

The site chosen for the event in Pomona is the Fairgrounds, officially know as Fairplex, which has held the Los Angeles County Fair since 1922 and is a year-round venue for concerts, trade shows, sports and cultural events.

A purpose-built cricket stadium will be constructed on the site for the Games and then disassembled after the event has finished, in a similar manner to the ground used in New York for last year's T20 World Cup.

LA 2028 officials are understood to have visited the site in Pomona two months ago for a final inspection before an agreement was reached with the non-profit organisation who administer the 500-acre site.

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