By 2028 that capacity will grow with a 30,000-seat baseball stadium rising on the former Tropicana site. With baseball and football seasons complementing each other, Vegas will soon have, as Hill puts it, “a pro sports game every other day.”
Even Downtown, long the nostalgic counterpoint to the Strip, has been pulled into the current. At Stadium Swim inside Circa Resort & Casino, sports fans can swim in six heated pools arranged like an amphitheater and order bottle service while watching the Golden Knights on a 143-foot screen. Below it, the “world’s biggest sports book” towers three stories high, packed with punters perched on the edge of blue banquettes, betting slips and tablets in hand.
Sports books were once side acts, but they’re now where Vegas’s two identities—sports and spectacle—meet. “Sports betting used to be an amenity; now it moves the needle,” says Lamarr Mitchell, director of trading at BetMGM, where home-game nights mean standing-room-only crowds.
That, Hill says, is the point: Sports doesn’t replace Vegas’s foundations—it supersizes them. The morning after the race, I step out of the Bellagio. Raiders fans in black Crosby jerseys have already taken over for the Sunday game. I spot a group in F1 team caps strolling by. Were they at the race? “No,” one says, pointing to a rooftop bar, “but we had the best seats in the house.” After the checkered flag, they squeezed in dinner at Mother Wolf, partied at Liv, then hit Eggslut for a bacon, egg, and cheese brioche that was, as they put it, “fucking great.”
Suddenly my own choices—race, then bed—feel painfully underwhelming. After all, it’s still Vegas, where the game may end but the show never stops.
This article appeared in the March 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
