Half-day seminar Oct. 19 at USC brings LA28, Sydney 2000 and resilience leaders together with the venue, event and race operators preparing for the next two years. Tickets are $45.
Sept. 30, 2026 — Reliance Risk North America, a Joffe company, has opened registration for LA28 Games Ready: Risk, Leadership, and Operational Resilience, a half-day seminar for the people responsible for venues, courses, crowds and medical response as Los Angeles prepares for the 2028 Games. The seminar runs Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Trojan Grand Ballroom at the University of Southern California.
The program is built around practitioners who have already done this work at a Games, and it is organized as four sessions:
Keynote: Preparing for LA28 — Health, Safety and Operational Readiness. Presented by Bob Howarth, Vice President of Health & Safety, LA28. A session on how the organizing committee is thinking about readiness, and what it will expect from the venues and operators around it.
Lessons from Sydney 2000: What the Evidence Can Teach LA28. Presented by Wayne Middleton, CVE, Principal Consultant, Reliance Risk, former Head of Safety for Sydney 2000 and former Director of Safety for Salt Lake City 2002. What the data from a completed Games says about planning assumptions that held and the ones that did not.
Beyond the Games: Building Venues That Are Ready for Disruption. Presented by Adam Lynch, resilience and business continuity specialist, Reliance Risk. Designing operations that absorb a disruption on an ordinary Saturday, not only during a marquee event.
Roundtable: What Does a Games-Ready Venue Look Like? A facilitated discussion with all speakers. Alex Keen of Keen Independent Research serves as master of ceremonies, and Chris Joffe opens and closes the day.
“Our mission is to make communities safer. The room we want is the one where a race director, a stadium operations lead and a city emergency manager hear the same lessons from people who have already run a Games, and then compare notes over a drink,” said Chris Joffe, founder and CEO of Joffe Emergency Services and partner of Reliance Risk North America. “We have almost two years left. That is a gift, and we intend to use it.”
The seminar is open to anyone accountable for the safety of large gatherings: endurance and mass-participation event organizers, course and route safety leads, event medical and paramedic providers, stadium, arena and collegiate venue operators, emergency managers, security and public safety teams, business continuity specialists, and public agency partners. Road races carry the same staffing, medical, crowd flow and continuity questions that Games venues carry, on the same streets, in the same years — and the operators who compare notes early tend to be the ones with room to adjust later.
Tickets are $45 and seating in the ballroom is limited. Registration and the full program are at joffeemergencyservices.com/la28-games-ready.
About Reliance Risk North America, a Joffe company
Reliance Risk North America makes communities safer at scale. The firm helps venues identify vulnerabilities, strengthen preparedness, and build confidence across security, emergency management, business continuity and crisis leadership — for stadiums, arenas, road races, festivals and public agencies across North America. It pairs the venue and major-event practice Reliance Risk built across Australia and New Zealand, including Sydney 2000, with the operating capability of Joffe Emergency Services, which has supported gatherings and around 2,000 schools in the U.S. and a small handful internationally over almost 20 years. The net-net: the people who plan the safety of a Games are the same people who will help you plan yours. More at reliancerisk.us.