Opinion | How Docs Can Volunteer for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles

In this exclusive video interview, Jeremy Faust, MD, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, sits down with Jonathan Finnoff, DO, chief medical officer for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), for a discussion on lessons learned in Paris, providing care for elite athletes, and how doctors and other medical professionals can get involved in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Watch part 1 and part 2 of this interview.

The following is a transcript of their remarks:

Faust: I could not help but notice a very viral story out of Paris about a U.S. athlete who basically implied that there was better healthcare in the Olympic Village than there is at home. Going around and getting like a free pap smear and all kinds of things.

What was your reaction to that, and how are we preparing for hosting the games in 2028?

Finnoff: So, a few different things.

I would say that if you’re looking at the average person walking the street here in the U.S., the access to free healthcare at the Olympic Village is beyond anything that anybody in the world is going to normally have. Everything you have access to and it’s all free.

However, I think that that athlete — I would love to have a chat with them, because there’s probably resources that they have that they’re unaware of. We provide Elite Athlete Health Insurance to our top about 1,500 athletes, and it’s a Cadillac program that’s better than what you could get through a workplace, because the athletes are not our employees and so we don’t have to follow the same federal guidelines and we’re self-insured. We give them better insurance than you can get any other time.

We have medical network partners where we will fly the athletes to those medical network partners and they get free healthcare. We put them up for free. Anybody who is EAHI eligible — so that Elite Athlete Health Insurance — also has access to the medical network. All of those athletes have access to the sports medicine clinics at the training centers. All the national governing bodies have medical teams working with them, so the medical infrastructure around our elite athletes is actually pretty amazing.

But some of our athletes still don’t understand all the resources that they have. And so that’s something that we are working on is, how do we do a better job onboarding people, educating them on their resources, and making it so there are no barriers to them accessing those resources?

We also have a medical assistance fund and a mental health assistance fund where any out-of-pocket expenses get reimbursed. So it’s really pretty impressive.

Faust: Alright, thanks for addressing that.

Now as we go to 2028, we will be hosting the Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles. I imagine that at every Olympic Games, something happens where you learn something and say, “Oh, I have to make a note of that for next time.” What’s something that you’ve learned so far in the Paris experience that you’ll say, “Here’s something that we’ll do a little differently, a little better when we host in L.A.?”

Finnoff: Two things. Number one, the USOPC does not run the L.A. Games. That’s the LA28 Organizing Committee. And so I will not even really be involved other than maybe just giving them my opinion. They will have their own medical team welcoming the world — the 206 nations — to L.A. and providing healthcare to all of them. I’ll be the chief medical officer for Team USA going there.

So for Team USA specifically, there are actually a number of different things that we learned, some of it being from an infectious disease standpoint, some of the complexities and logistical challenges that we have to try to keep our teams healthy, and what we need to have in place — so extending some of the resources that we had. We had a baseline, but I would like to have more resources to be able to support those athletes in need.

I think that we’ll change some of the ratios of our staffing. We bring orthopedic surgeons, sports medicine physicians, physical therapists, athletic trainers, chiropractors, massage therapists, and psychological services providers along with our exercise physiologist, strength and conditioning, and sports nutritionists. And I feel like all of those are important, but we keep really good data on how much each of those different resources is being used. We’re looking at that and looking at the ratio of our staffing versus the utilization of those different things, so we’re going to make some adjustments based on that.

And then strictly an interesting logistical one for me — myself and Amber Donaldson, who is the medical director for the Games, and I serve as the chief medical officer — we had a time when our overlap with the games, both of us were not there for a very short period of time. Always one of us has to be at the Games whenever there’s an athlete there. And so that’s something that we’re going to make sure does not happen in the future.

So it’s a big, huge time commitment, but we’re there and we love what we do.

Faust: I told all of your colleagues, if you need any ER [emergency room] doctors, I know a few and we’re ready to serve, but I know there’s a process for that. People have been asking and we’ll refer them to the different opportunities to get involved. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Finnoff: Yeah. So from a volunteer standpoint, the best way of considering getting involved in the Games — with Games on home soil at L.A., since they’re welcoming the 206 nations there, they have to have a huge medical infrastructure in place. They have to staff all the venues, they have to staff the polyclinic, they have to have crews for ambulances and stuff. And it’s way beyond what the normal capacity is in L.A. They’re going to need thousands of medical volunteers.

That’s probably the easiest way to go to the Games is to volunteer through LA28, so I’d check on their website.

If you want to come through the USOPC, then we want to have physicians who are board certified in their base specialty and in sports medicine, minimum of 3 years of experience in elite sports, having gone through the volunteer process at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic training centers and done really well and gotten great ratings, and then gone to some minor games. So the Youth Pan Am Games, the Pan Am Games, the Beach Games, and then if they’re doing great through all of that, then we invite them to the Olympic Games and Paralympic games.

Faust: Alright. So it sounds like my best chance to make it is as an athlete, and those odds are zero. I think I’m in trouble.

Alright Dr. Finnoff, thank you so much for joining us today and for all your work in this really interesting and excellent cause.

Finnoff: It’s my pleasure, Jeremy. Thanks for your time.

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