Why fewer cities are game to host the Olympics | Alexandre Faure

Paris marks a shift in the way the IOC awards hosting rights for the Olympics.

The way cities host the Olympic Games is changing.

Staging the event has become such a burden, fewer cities are interested in going to the trouble.

It has meant the International Olympic Committee has had to find a new way of making the games attractive to potential hosts.

In 2017, Paris and Los Angeles were nominated to host the 2024 and 2028 Games. This double nomination was unprecedented and has profoundly challenged the Olympic bidding system.

The system was based on a competition between several cities which applied 10 years before the event and took part in a ballot within the IOC to choose the winner seven years beforehand.

Then, in 2021 in Tokyo, the IOC announced a change, moving towards a targeted dialogue with a favourite city. In 2032, that city would be Brisbane.

The new system means cities have longer to prepare. While Paris has had seven years to deliver the Games, Los Angeles has 11, as does Brisbane.

It’s hoped the new bidding system will counter the declining appeal of the Olympics and the decreasing number of candidate cities, and give the IOC greater control over which cities and countries apply.

Olympic movement less attractive

For 2024, four European cities and two American cities competed: Paris, Hamburg, Rome, Budapest, Los Angeles and Boston. Under the bidding system for the host city, there can only be one city per country recognised by the IOC.

Boston withdrew when the bid committee was challenged by a series of local opponents on several fronts, but particularly on planning and traffic issues.

Indeed, the opposition movement to Boston 2024 [1] was an expression of a vibrant local democracy and of local people taking responsibility for the political agenda.

In Europe, Rome, Hamburg and Budapest withdrew for different reasons, but with the same dynamic of citizens taking back control of the political agenda.

Rome withdrew [2] after a change of mayoralty. Hamburg’s [3] bid was withdrawn after a referendum found the population didn’t trust the local authorities’ ability to carry out a mega-project without a cost blowout.

Budapest’s [4] bid was withdrawn by the national government because of the fear of an emergence of a local movement opposing national policies, embodied by a party initially built around a rejection of the Games.

Paris and Los Angeles subsequently found themselves alone in negotiating with the IOC for the 2024 and 2028 Games.

These two cities, and Paris in particular, drew up their bids to respond to the many criticisms levelled at the games such as the spiralling cost of infrastructure, the inflation of costs linked to organisation, the awarding of games to dictatorships, and criticism of the event’s carbon footprint.

Opening Olympism by denying its values

Since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has been looking for new ways to develop.

The Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s was characterised by intense competition between the two blocs: the West and the East.

Confrontations between the two, as well as demands from the countries of the global South, led to successive boycotts of Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984. The number of candidate cities dropped.

The IOC then turned to challengers to organise the games.

First in Asia with emerging economies such as South Korea (Seoul 1988), followed by regional metropolises seeking to become global cities: Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000.

The games came back to the site of the ancient games, Athens in 2004, as a symbol, but also as a reward for the democratic dynamic of a country recovering from a military dictatorship.

After the success of these games (apart from the particularly costly legacy of Athens), the Olympic movement was again attractive and the competition to obtain the games fierce. At the same time, the IOC continued to seek to extend its influence and spread the Olympic brand to new markets.

Awarding the games to Beijing in 2008 was controversial with legitimate questions over China’s human rights record. This was exacerbated by preparations in which local populations were displaced [5] to make way for Olympic facilities.

The Beijing Games were an opportunity to highlight the situation of the Tibetans [6], who have been subjected to an ethnocidal policy for several decades. In 2022, the Winter Games then highlighted the genocidal policy towards the Uyghur population [7] of Xinjiang in far western China.

Both times, the opening up of the Olympic Games to China put into question the values of contemporary Olympism, whose promoters are seemingly at ease with accommodating authoritarianism. This was also the case in Sochi in 2014 and Rio in 2016, where murderous pacification policies [8] followed the organisation of the event.

Back to basics for the IOC?

Beijing 2008, Sochi 2014, the Shanghai World Expo, the Dubai World Expo and the FIFA Men’s World Cup in Qatar have all added to the criticism of mega-events.

Organisers’ compliant attitude toward authoritarian regimes, legitimising their politics and politicians and the events’ harmful environmental and social [9] repercussions, have all attracted criticism.

Questions arise over greenhouse gas emissions, forced relocation of populations, the impact on wildlife and habitats, conditions for workers and crackdowns on protest. It’s difficult to accurately assess their impact because the institutions behind them are opaque and do not allow reliable data to be collected.

Faced with all these questions and challenges to mega-events, Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles, like London, appear to be an attempt by the IOC to reconnect with successful recipes.

These four cities have all hosted multiple Olympic Games since 1896. All four are financial, political, media, cultural, intellectual and tourist centres without equal [10].

Most importantly, they possess most of the infrastructure and facilities needed to organise the games, without the need to build or carry out excessive construction work.

They are the rare territories capable of continuing to host mega-events while limiting public expenditure and the environmental impact.

The future of the IOC and its system for nominating host cities is not certain. After Tokyo abandoned the classic bidding system in 2021 and the timetable for delivering the games was changed from seven to 11 years, it is likely that other changes will be made.

A number of avenues are emerging, all of which lead to several possible scenarios.

It is conceivable that, after Brisbane in 2032, the games will only be staged in historic Olympic cities on a regular basis, to avoid budgetary excesses.

The alternative is to open the doors to countries and regions that have hitherto been forgotten (India, Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa, Hispanic America, Central and Eastern Europe).

Or, the games could be held in several cities simultaneously, something FIFA has already decided to try with the 2030 World Cup [11] being hosted by multiple countries.

Then there is the dilemma facing the Winter Olympics. As the planet heats up, suitable venues will likely decline.

(Author: Alexandre Faure obtained a PhD in urban studies from EHESS in Paris and is a research associate at the Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS. He is the founder of the Olympic Games and Global Cities research programme and has been deputy secretary of the Greater Paris Development Council since 2023.
This research was undertaken with the financial assistance from the Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS.)

[Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info]