Honda Motor becomes the official automotive partner of LA28 and Team USA through 2028, filling the category vacated by Toyota after Paris. American Honda President Kazuhiro Takizawa announced the deal Thursday at the company's Torrance headquarters, twelve miles from SoFi Stadium. Financial terms were not disclosed; founding partner packages for LA28 are structured at $200 million to $250 million in cash and value-in-kind over the four-year cycle.
Toyota ended its Olympic sponsorship after Paris 2024, walking away from a partnership that began in 2015 and cost the company an estimated $835 million across three Games. The exit followed internal pressure in Japan over the Tokyo 2020 return-on-investment and a strategic pivot toward direct team sponsorships in Formula 1 and endurance racing. Toyota's final Olympic activation in Paris included a 2,000-unit fleet deployment; Honda will be expected to match or exceed that figure in Los Angeles, where the company already supplies vehicles to the Lakers, Dodgers, and Rams under separate deals.
The Honda deal is the fifth founding partnership announced for LA28, following Delta, Comcast, Salesforce, and Cisco. Organizing committee CEO Reynold Hoover has said the target is ten to twelve founding partners total, each granted category exclusivity and on-site activation rights. The remaining slots are expected to include financial services, consumer packaged goods, telecommunications, and a second technology platform. Three categories are in advanced negotiations, according to two people familiar with the structure. LA28 is required to raise $6.9 billion in private revenue; the Games receive no direct federal funding.
Honda's timing reflects confidence in the U.S. market despite the company's struggles in China. North American sales accounted for 41 percent of Honda's global operating profit in fiscal 2024, and the automaker has committed $11 billion to EV production in Ohio and Indiana through 2027. The Olympic partnership gives Honda a platform to showcase hybrid and electric vehicles to an audience the IOC projects at 5 billion viewers globally. Toyota's exit also cleared the way for Honda to negotiate without triggering ambush marketing concerns from the IOC's legacy automotive relationships.
The deal structure includes Team USA rights, a shift from Toyota's TOP sponsorship, which covered the global Olympic movement but required separate negotiations with national committees. Honda will activate around track and field, swimming, and gymnastics—sports where U.S. athletes are projected to win 50-plus medals in 2028. The company is already a U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee sponsor; the LA28 agreement consolidates and extends that relationship through the Paralympic Games in September 2028.
LA28 is also negotiating automotive fleet agreements with EV manufacturers for the 15,000-vehicle operational pool required to move athletes, officials, and media. Those deals will be structured separately from the founding partnership and are expected to include Rivian, General Motors, and possibly Lucid. Honda's founding partner status gives it branding priority but does not guarantee exclusive vehicle supply.
Watch for three developments: the announcement of the financial services founding partner, likely a U.S. bank competing with JPMorgan and Bank of America, expected by March 2025; the structure of Honda's Team USA athlete ambassador program, which will be unveiled at the Olympic trials in June 2025; and the resolution of the remaining founding partner slots, which LA28 aims to close by the end of 2025 to lock in revenue ahead of venue construction timelines. The next founding partner announcement is scheduled for late January.
The takeaway
Honda fills Toyota's Olympic auto slot at $200M-plus; five founding partner spots remain as LA28 targets $6.9B private raise.
la28olympicssponsorshiphondatoyotaautomotive
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.