Why Fewer Cities Are Game to Host 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 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 after a change of mayoralty. Hamburg’s bid was withdrawn after a referendum found the population didn’t trust the local authorities’ ability to carry out a mega-project without a cost blowout.

Budapest’s bid was withdrawn by the national government because of the fear of an emergence of a local movement opposing national policies, embodied by a party initially built around a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 to make way for Olympic facilities.

The Beijing Games were an opportunity to highlight the situation of the Tibetans, 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 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 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 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.