Regional voting played role in Pyeongchang selection

Posted on : 2011-07-08 15:07 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Pyeongchang’s victory will reportedly impact future bids, reshuffling potential for Africa, Asia and Europe
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By Kwon Oh-sang, Senior Staff Writer 

  

It is hard to see Pyeongchang’s overwhelming victory as merely the result of its credibility. In the international sporting world of Olympic bidding, a heartless logic not unlike warfare reigns supreme. One benefit that Pyeongchang’s victory brings other countries, however, is the chance to win the next Olympics, or the Olympics after next.

AP reported from Ittigen, in Switzerland, on July 7 that the Swiss Olympic Committee, as if it had been waiting for Pyeongchang to be chosen as host for the Olympics, had announced plans to open committees to evaluate St Moritz, Davos and Geneva as candidate cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics on August 11.

Switzerland, which has no less than five members on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), more than any other country, had already been openly opposing Munich’s bid for a few months in order to boast its own chances of winning the games of the 124th Olympiad. Foreign news agencies have also reported that Quebec will soon announce whether or not it is to make a bid for the Winter Olympics. Two Canadian IOC members took part in the vote.

A considerable number of countries will be opposing Munich’s bid, directly or indirectly. These include Rome and Madrid, which entered early into the battle to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, and Amsterdam, Warsaw, Toronto and Philadelphia, which have not given up their own aspirations of hosting the games.

Italy has four IOC members, second only to Switzerland, while Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States have two, one, one and three respectively.

In this scenario, Annecy and Munich constituted competitors that threatened to scatter the European vote. France, meanwhile, is painting a larger picture of its own: hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics. France was the home of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man who founded the Olympics, and hosted the 2nd (1900) and 8th (1924) games. 2024 marks 100 years since Paris last hosted the Olympics. The city failed, however, to win bids in 1992, 2008 and 2012.

Durban, the city that provided hope to Pyeongchang, also has hopes of its own for 2024. Its bid is justified by the fact that hosting the games would be a first for the African continent, just as Rio’s 2016 games are the first for South America. Despite the fact that South Africa has just one IOC member, it is likely to have gained strength from Pyeongchang’s bid this time.

Other countries in Asia, however, have sustained more damage from Pyeongchang’s success. There is no way that Tokyo, which is attempting to win the 2020 Summer Olympics, will welcome Pyeongchang‘s victory. Consecutive hosting of the Olympics in the same continent is almost unheard of. China, which hoped, like Kazakhstan, to host the next Winter Olympics, was hostile to Pyeongchang’s bid but had insufficient voting power to overturn the general trend.

Pyeongchang’s overwhelming victory was the result of such careful calculations of international interests surrounding Olympic bids.

  

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