Explained: How does a city actually get chosen to host the Olympic Games?
“The winner is Sydney.”
Those immortal words, spoken by former International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch in 1993, are now part of Australian folklore.
So are the wild scenes in the Harbour City that greeted the announcement, as thousands of Sydneysiders - politicians, athletes and regular folk alike - drank in the news that their city would be the centre of the sporting universe for two weeks.
Things are a bit different these days.
It’s been a long time since a host city has gone remotely bonkers after being announced as the winning Olympic bid. In fact, the hosts of the next three Summer Games - Paris (2024), Los Angeles (2028) and Brisbane (2032) - didn’t really ‘win’ in the traditional sense of the word. They were simply the only ones left in the race.
So how did we reach this unusual point in Olympic history, where host cities are essentially chosen by default? And has an adjustment to the bidding and selection process precipitated this change, or is it broader than that?
Most relevantly for this week, how did the 2024 Olympics end up being held in Paris?
In the very first edition of Olympics Explained, we’ll talk you through the answers to all these questions and more.
How is an Olympic host city chosen these days?
In theory it’s fairly straightforward.
Any city - or, thanks to a 2019 amendment that we’ll get to in a moment, multiple cities, regions or countries - can enter into a dialogue with the IOC about potentially hosting the Olympic Games.
After an indeterminate period of time, during which IOC members can see and interrogate all the details of the relevant bid, the small group of officials who are part of the IOC’s Future Host Commission make a recommendation to the executive committee, who then put forward a preferred candidate to be voted on at the next IOC Session (an IOC Session is basically like an Annual General Meeting).
In theory they can actually put forward more than one candidate to be voted on, but that hasn’t happened so far.
All IOC members have one vote in a secret ballot, and if the proposed host receives a majority of the votes, then it is locked in as the host of whichever Games it was bidding for.
That’s simple enough, right?
But what happens if the preferred candidate doesn’t receive a majority of the votes?
That’s a great question. Having pored over many documents provided by the IOC - all part of its mission to achieve a transparency that was sorely missing from the process for most of its existence - I can honestly say it is not at all clear what the answer is.
The chances of a majority of IOC members voting for no host city at all, instead of one recommended to them by the executive committee and the Future Host Commission - both of which are mostly made up of IOC members themselves - are admittedly pretty remote.
But the fact it isn’t even covered as a possible scenario in the countless pages produced to promote this new, supposedly fairer way of selecting Olympic hosts, suggests the IOC might not be so keen to know what its broader membership thinks about the preferred candidate proposed by its head honchos.
Was this the process they used for Paris 2024?
No.
This process was first used to select a host for the 2032 Olympics, which were awarded to Brisbane after a vote was held at the 138th IOC Session in Tokyo ahead of the 2021 Olympic Games.
The new bidding process was officially introduced in 2019.
How did it work before that?
Previously, a handful of candidate cities were officially invited to bid to host the Games after having their initial proposal reviewed by the IOC. They would then go through an exhaustive process, lasting more than a year, where Olympic officials would evaluate the bids across a myriad of factors, before culling the lowest-ranking cities.
There would then be a vote at the IOC Session held seven years prior - for example, the vote for the 2020 Olympic hosting rights was held in 2013. One city would be eliminated after each round of voting, with the winner of the final voting round declared the successful bidder.
So that’s how Paris ended up hosting the 2024 Games?
Not exactly. The process above was basically thrown out the window thanks to the unprecedented events of 2017.
Five cities made the initial shortlist to host the 2024 Olympics, but by the time the vote was due to be held, all but two of them had withdrawn their bids. Hamburg (Germany), Rome (Italy) and Budapest (Hungary) all changed their minds due to local campaigns against the bids, a change in fiscal conditions, or both.
This left Paris and Los Angeles as the last bids standing. Rather than going head-to-head, IOC officials convinced the rival bids to cut a deal - Paris gets the 2024 Games, and LA gets the 2028 Games.
There was initial resistance but eventually a deal was struck, with the decision effectively rubber-stamped at an Extraordinary IOC Session at the organisation’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
What’s with all the people not wanting their own city to host the Olympics - don’t they like fun?
It took a while, but eventually concerned citizens have cottoned on to the fact that the downside of hosting the Olympic Games might outweigh the upside. Financially speaking, at least.
Despite countless studies being commissioned to try prove the boon that hosting a major international event would provide a city’s economy, the extraordinary costs involved in hosting the Olympics simply became too much of a turn-off for residents and small-time local government officials. Eventually, the big end of town was convinced too.
The final nail in the coffin was probably the 2016 Games in Rio which, coupled with the FIFA World Cup held in Brazil two years earlier, led to a huge backlash from a local population that was dealing with significant economic and social issues, not least of which was widespread poverty.
Sure, the Games themselves during this period were still a great success by many measures, but the financial and political costs were starting to spook potential bidders.
As a result, the changes introduced in 2019 had a heavy focus on lowering the cost of hosting the Games, mainly by selecting cities with plenty of the appropriate existing infrastructure. No major stadiums have been built for the Paris Olympics, nor will they be for the LA Games in 2028.
By the time Brisbane started having discussions with the IOC about hosting the 2032 Games, there was a collective sigh of relief within the Olympic movement that any city at all was still willing to put its hand up.
Just who is on the International Olympic Committee, anyway?
This is where things get really interesting.
There are 105 IOC members and no less than 10 of them have the title of His/Her Royal Highness, His/Her Serene Highness or, in the case of the Emir of Qatar, plain old His Highness.
The former president of Croatia is a member, as is the current president of FIFA. There’s also space for an Oscar winning actress, and the wife of India’s wealthiest person.
Suffice to say, it’s an eclectic bunch of people.
There are no rules limiting the number of members that can come from one country, or laws insisting that all countries have one representative. For example, Japan has four members and Great Britain, Germany and Italy have three, while Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, has none.
There are, however, IOC members from tiny nations such as Palau (population 18,000), Aruba (population 100,000) and Liechtenstein (population 40,000 - including Princess Nora, who is one of the aforementioned Serene Highnesses).
Crucially, the IOC is at paints to point out that members are not delegates of their country, as is the case for other international organisations such as the United Nations. In fact, it’s actually the reverse; IOC members serve as messengers from the Olympic movement to their countries.
Why do the Olympics keep going to countries that have hosted the Games before?
This is a great question, and again, it’s one that the IOC does not really address in any of its official documents.
The selection criteria are incredibly vague - one German official labelled the process “incomprehensible” while a politician from that country said the system “can hardly be surpassed in terms of non-transparency”.
Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles had all held the Games before being awarded hosting rights again in recent years, although in fairness to the city of love, its most contemporary Olympic dalliance was 100 years ago.
Considering a significant number of fans who attend Brisbane 2032 will have clear memories of Sydney 2000 - even though many of us will remember being told that seeing the Olympics in Australia was a once-in-a-lifetime deal - a pattern does emerge of countries that could easily be perceived as safe choices being consistently preferred to edgier nations that have been knocked back countless times in the past few decades.
The Olympics have still never been to Africa or the Middle East, and there have been plenty of unsuccessful bids from Eastern Europe and South-East Asia in recent times.
Given the unrelenting push into major sporting events by oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, you’d imagine this will eventually change, but in the past 15 or so years the IOC has been curiously resistant to exposing itself to risk when it comes to choosing host cities for the Summer Games.
Ultimately it may not be endless pits of money in the Persian Gulf that change this. More likely, it’ll be the IOC’s ongoing existential crisis.
The Olympic movement is desperate to remain relevant in a crowded sporting market, but so far this has manifested in significant updates to the sports played at upcoming Games - breakdancing makes its Olympic debut this year, while cricket, lacrosse, flag football and squash will all feature in Los Angeles.
It seems only a matter of time before the IOC’s expansion strategy switches focus to actual physical expansion.
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