The Trick to Going Unnoticed
After years of hard diplomacy in the federal government, LA28’s Head of Protocol knows her measure of success comes down to one thing: invisibility.
Imagine a national flag flying upside down by accident at a major sporting event. The outrage would be immediate, the headlines blazing. Now take that reaction and multiply it across hundreds of nations. That’s the standard Laura Bowen Wills holds herself to as Head of Protocol for LA28. “If anything goes wrong with a flag, it is going to be the news,” she says. “The athletes and the events themselves will get overshadowed by it.” The color palettes have to be precisely accurate, from the large flags ascending above athletes on podiums to the small ones they wave during the opening ceremony.
It’s an attention to detail Bowen Wills has sustained throughout her career. Before joining LA28, she spent more than two decades in the U.S. Department of State planning international events—including three NATO summits and multiple G8s and G20s—that had no margin for error.
When the White House called and asked her to assemble 52 world leaders in a city in three months, she made it happen. For someone used to accelerated timelines, two and a half years to prepare for the Olympics and Paralympic Games feels, in her words, almost spacious. “I’m used to spinning and moving quickly to respond to whatever the White House needs," she says with a laugh. "This is a much larger event than I’ve ever done before, but the runway is longer than I’m used to.”
Ask most people what protocol means, and they’ll say etiquette. Bowen Wills is quick to correct that, noting that protocol is a set of formal rules intended to create fairness and equity—in this case, among nations at the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Protocol is a “universal language,” as she puts it, one that’s spoken by every country and observed at major international gatherings from Presidential summits to the LA28 Games.
“There’s this feel-good collective push that I’ve just really been embracing.”
At LA28, that language is organized around three pillars: flags and anthems, international dignitary management, and domestic dignitary management. In terms of visuals, flags and anthems have the highest stakes, but dignitary management isn’t exactly easy. It involves coordinating the arrivals, departures, seating, and precedence order of every head of state attending the Games. “The sequence of how it unfolds is really important,” she says. And domestic dignitaries include congressional leaders and the state and local officials whose partnerships have made the LA28 Games possible in the first place.
Together, these three pillars represent something larger than logistics. They represent the promise that every nation—regardless of size, power, or politics—will be treated with the same dignity. And, of course, the best protocol is the kind nobody is aware of. "If everything goes right, they don’t see us," she says.
What has surprised her most about LA28 isn’t just the scale or the complexity, but rather the mission. Presidential summits are hard diplomacy, where world leaders gather to navigate tensions and negotiate agreements. The LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, on the other hand, are “soft diplomacy," she says. "They’re an uplifting mission to bring the world together for a higher purpose." The rules may be the same, but the feeling is very different, and for someone who spent nearly a quarter century in the machinery of American foreign policy, it’s been unexpectedly energizing. "There’s this feel-good collective push that I’ve just really been embracing," she says. And when the LA28 flame is lit and the world is watching, Bowen Wills and her team will be everywhere and nowhere. Because if they’ve done their jobs well, “no one will notice us,” she says.
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