Watching the World Cup this summer, our team kept circling the same question: what would an event like that mean if the material in it came from local suppliers? It stayed with us. And it got us wondering how we might serve the next one.
Lucky for us, the next big sporting event is coming to California. The 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games are being built differently from most of the ones before them. Los Angeles is leaning on venues that already exist rather than putting up a ring of new stadiums, which means the material story is not really about concrete and steel going into the ground. It is about overlay: the seating decks, walkways, cladding, wayfinding, hospitality builds, and temporary structures that appear for a few weeks and then come apart again.
That is an unusual materials problem, and it happens to be one that wood is unusually good at. What follows is a thought experiment rather than a proposal. If California wanted the Games built from California wood, instead of importing wood or other materials from out of state, what would that actually take?
Summary
- LA28's reliance on existing venues shifts the material question from permanent structure to temporary overlay, which is where wood competes best.
- The most recent Games, Milan Cortina 2026, built with traceable wood from certified Italian forests, right down to lounge furniture made by vocational students from bark beetle damaged timber.
- California imports roughly 80% of the solid sawn lumber it uses, while forest restoration work is already bringing down high quality material that a building industry here would want.
- The species coming out of that restoration work are well suited to overlay, cladding, decking, and finish applications.
- The barrier is not supply. It is coordination, lead time, and being able to document where the material came from.
What the Most Recent Games Did With Wood
The idea is not speculative in the way it might sound. The most recent Games used timber deliberately and at scale, and what makes the example worth studying is that the wood carried a provenance story as well as a load.
Milan Cortina 2026, this past February, put traceable and responsibly sourced Italian wood at the center of its construction, drawn from certified forests in the Trentino Alto Adige region. The detail worth stealing is smaller than the buildings. Fourth year woodworking students at a vocational school in Tesero designed and built the furniture for the cross country ski stadium lounge, using local certified wood that had been damaged by bark beetle. Material with a problem attached went into a high value, highly visible application instead of being written off.
The wood there was doing two jobs. It was structure and finish, and it was the story the building told about itself.
Where the Wood Would Actually Go at LA28
Because LA28 is not building a new skyline, the honest answer is that most of the opportunity sits in things people touch rather than things that hold the roof up. That is not a downgrade. Overlay is high-visibility, high-volume, and short-lead, which is a demanding combination.
The realistic list looks something like this. Seating decks and riser cladding. Handrails, guardrails, and barriers. Walkway and platform decking. Exterior cladding on temporary structures and hospitality builds. Wayfinding, signage substrate, and the countless linear feet of screening and fencing that surround a venue during a Games. Interior finish in athlete, media, and hospitality spaces. Benches, tables, and site furniture across the venue footprint.
All of it is appearance-grade or near it. All of it is specified late, built fast, and removed on a schedule. And all of it is a category where the species California can actually supply are a good technical match rather than a compromise.
The Part That Makes This a California Story
California imports about 80% of the solid sawn lumber used in the state. The California Board of Forestry's 2019 annual report puts that figure on the record, and research from the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station on trade flows in the Pacific Coast region points to the same reliance on wood brought in from other states.
Meanwhile, forest restoration and forest health work across the state is removing material to thin overstocked stands and reduce fire risk. A good deal of what comes out of that work genuinely cannot be manufactured into a wood product, and is pile burned or converted to energy because that is what it is suited for. But a portion of it is high quality specimen material, and that is the part with a building in it.
California has spent a great deal of time and money managing forest health and overcoming supply issues. What has been overlooked is the power to connect our built environment more directly to the forest stewardship economy. The aim is not to find a use for everything that comes down. It is to intercept the good material and get it to a building industry that wants it.
Put that beside the import figure and the Games become an interesting thought experiment. A global event, held in a state with high quality material already coming off its own restoration work, built out of lumber trucked in from Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. If there were ever a project where the provenance of the wood was worth more than the wood, this is it.
What You Could Specify, Realistically
This is where a lot of well-meaning local-material ambitions fall apart, because someone specifies a species the region cannot actually supply and the whole thing becomes a substitution request.
What California mills can supply follows forest restoration work, meaning the material coming out of projects that thin overstocked stands and reduce fire risk. In practice that predominantly means pine, spruce, true fir, incense cedar, and a range of hardwood species. A number of forest health projects also fell Douglas fir and redwood, two of the most sought-after species in the state, so both are available as well.
Incense cedar in particular is worth naming for a project like this. It is California's cedar, it grows through the Sierra Nevada and the inland ranges, and it brings natural decay and insect resistance, dimensional stability, a straight even grain, and an aroma nobody forgets. For exterior cladding, screening, decking, and site furniture that has to sit outside through a Southern California summer and then come apart intact, it is close to purpose-built.
Availability shifts with which restoration projects are running and what is moving through the mills at a given time, which is why a specification like this gets built against current capacity rather than against a catalogue.
The Real Obstacle Is Not Supply
An event at this scale does not fail to use local wood because the trees are missing. It fails on three other things.
Volume certainty. A venue package needs a commitment that a given quantity will exist on a given date, and no single small mill can underwrite that alone.
Lead time. Overlay is specified late and installed on a hard deadline. A twelve week kiln queue at one mill can sink a package that four mills together could have delivered comfortably.
Documentation. If the provenance is the point, then the provenance has to be provable. "California-grown" written on a spec sheet is worth very little without a record behind it.
Every one of those is a coordination problem rather than a forestry problem, which is precisely the gap CA Wood Supply Group was built to close. We work as a single point of contact across a group of vetted California mills and manufacturers, so a buyer commits to one relationship and one delivery schedule instead of assembling a package mill by mill. Material moves through a documented chain of custody, so the origin claim is something you can show rather than something a client has to take on faith. And we can provide cost estimates and lead times from a cut sheet or a line item order request, which on a project with a fixed opening ceremony is the part that matters most.
Why This Is Worth Thinking About Even If It Never Happens
Nobody needs the Olympics to make this work. The value of running the numbers on a project this size is that it makes the smaller version obvious. A university expansion, a county building, a corporate campus, a hospital, a stadium refit: each of them buys the same categories in smaller quantities, on the same kind of schedule, with the same appetite for a material story they can put in front of a board.
Every one of those projects is currently importing wood that California could be supplying itself, at a markup, from three states away. The Games are just the loudest possible illustration of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CA Wood Supply Group supplying the LA28 Olympics?
No. This post is a thought experiment about what local sourcing could look like on a project of that scale, not a description of work underway.
Can California mills actually handle a project that size?
No single mill could. A coordinated group is a different question, because the volume is aggregated across multiple producers and one party stays accountable for the whole package. That is the entire premise of the model.
What species would a project like this use?
The ones coming out of forest restoration work: predominantly pine, spruce, true fir, incense cedar, and various hardwoods, with Douglas fir and redwood available from forest health projects. Species get matched against current mill capacity rather than picked from a fixed list.
Is temporary construction really a good use of wood?
It is one of the better ones, provided the material is designed to be recovered. There is already an established industry built around wood recovered through deconstruction, called reclaimed wood, and material from the Games would carry an especially compelling story into every project it becomes part of afterward. Wood is one of the few structural materials that can survive that cycle intact, and become more meaningful because of it.
How would anyone verify the wood was actually from California?
Through a documented chain of custody that tracks material from the forest project through the mill to the job site, which is what makes the origin claim usable in a spec rather than just a marketing line.
California grows the wood, and restoration work is already bringing good material down. What is missing is the connection between that work and the people specifying buildings, and the state imports most of what it uses in the meantime. Whether or not a single board of it ever reaches an Olympic venue, that is a solvable problem, and it gets solved one specification at a time. If you have a project where local material would mean something, tell CA Wood Supply Group the species, volume, and timeline, and we will come back with what is possible.