Picture this moment.
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum: Sunday July 30, 2028. A hot summer evening in the “City of Angels”. This night, is the closing ceremony of the 2028 Olympics, and the handover of the Olympic Flag to the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, is followed by the raising of the Australian flag, as a massed marching band plays Advance Australia Fair. After the flag is raised, the crowd (nearly 80,000 strong inside the LA Coliseum) simply looks skyward.
Queenslanders watching at home (on a late Monday afternoon: July 31, 2028) is hoping their gamble pays off: after all, they remember the kangaroos Sydney sent to Atlanta in 1996, Vanessa Amarosi getting rained on at the 2002 Commonwealth Games closer in Manchester (and her redemption in Birmingham in 2022… that got overshadowed by the passing of Olivia Newton-John), and even our effort at Hampden Park in 2014 to sell the world on the Gold Coast’s Commonwealth Games four years later.
For Queensland, this is more than a handover. It’s the beginning of the most important period for tourism promotion in our state’s history: one that had it’s seeds sown as the world recovered from a pandemic.
2028, has already been a year with our eyes on the sky in the Sunshine State.
The handover in LA… is just icing on the cake.
