The deadline to bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games closed at midnight November 14, 2013 with six cities entering the competition.
It was twice the number of cities that had applied to hold the 2018 Winter Games and the International Olympic Committee officials made no effort the following morning to hide their exuberance over the thought of Oslo, Stockholm, Krakow, Beijing, Lviv, Ukraine and Almaty, Kazakhstan spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a bidding war for the right to spend tens of billions more on hosting the 2022 Olympics.
“Rising interest in Olympic Winter Games” trumpeted an IOC press release listing the candidate cities.
“These cities and their supporters clearly understand the benefits that hosting the Games can have and the long lasting legacy that a Games can bring to a region,” IOC president Thomas Bach said at the time. “Indeed, while recent Games have left an array of sporting, social, economic and other legacies for the local population, many cities that did not go on to win the right to host the Games have also noted benefits as a result of their bids.”
It would take less than just seven months for three of those cities and their citizens and civic leaders to come to a very different understanding of the economic legacy of hosting the Games.
By the time the IOC elected the 2022 host city in Kuala Lumpur on July 31, 2015 four of the original six cities had withdrawn from the bidding, Oslo, Stockholm and Krakow citing concerns about the rising costs of the Games, a lack of public support, and IOC arrogance, leaving IOC members with two controversial choices–Beijing and Almaty, cities in countries governed by authoritative regimes with poor human rights records.
“For a variety of geopolitical reasons, of two bad choices Beijing looked at the better of the two,” said Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, a University of Toronto professor who has written extensively about the Olympic movement.
The Olympic Games open Friday in Beijing, the most controversial host city since at least Moscow, site of the boycott-marred 1980 Games, if not the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
The Games have refocused global attention on China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group with a population of 12 million, and in Hong Kong. China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, U.S. secretary of State Antony Blinken said constitutes “genocide and crimes against humanity.”
“In choosing China to host another Games, the IOC has tripped on a major human rights hurdle,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director.
The IOC’s choices were narrowed in part by its own hubris as well as a growing number of cities coming to view recent Olympic history as a series of cautionary tales.
Beijing’s selection came just four days after Boston withdrew as the U.S. candidate to host the 2024 Summer Games and marked a low point in the IOC’s global influence and the end of three decades of bidding competitions that left most winning cities stuck with billions in debt and sports facilities that became obsolete from virtually the moment the Olympic flame was extinguished.
“The perceived arrogance on top of the concern of the cost really torpedoed bids in which voters had a say,” said Victor A. Matheson, a Holy Cross economics professor and co-author of “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.”
The withdrawal of Oslo, the front runner for the 2022 Games, in October 2014 against the backdrop of widespread public opposition to the Olympics was especially embarrassing for the IOC. Oslo scored significantly higher than Beijing and Almaty in quality and feasibility study by the IOC, finishing atop eight of 14 categories and tying Beijing for the highest score in three other areas.
“Norway said no to being the IOC’s trophy wife,” wrote Eirik Bergesen, a former Norwegian diplomat. “Which means the Winter Olympics is left with what is quickly becoming its dictatorship default.
“Only by learning from the Oslo Olympic process can the Games be rescued.”
Indeed IOC officials and Olympic historians agree that the 2022 bidding process coupled with the overlapping 2024 host city competition served as a wake-up call for the IOC.
“We had to go through this,” Gerhard Heiberg, an IOC member from Norway, told the country’s public broadcasting company. “We need to get a slap in the face at regular intervals.”
The fallout from the 2022 and 2024 host city debacles would lead to a major IOC overhaul of the bidding process that resulted in Los Angeles being awarded the 2028 Games without a bidding process.
“They really did change course in the wake of all these countries pulling out and of course we saw with LA,” Matheson said. “The fact that LA was awarded 2028 Olympic Games without the 2028 Games ever going out for bid is a testament of how worried they were about what happened in those two cycles of bidding.”
But in November 2013 the IOC headed into the 2022 bidding process full of confidence.
“The strength of the field, which includes a strong mix of both traditional and developing winter sports markets, highlights the keen interest cities around the world have in the Games and the lasting benefits and legacy they can bring to a region,” the IOC said in a statement at the time.
That strong field, however, lost two candidates in the first seven months of the bidding process and less than a year after Bach and the IOC boasted of the rising interest in hosting the 2022 Games, the field had dwindled to two.
“It hit them pretty fast,” Matheson said referring to the IOC. “This is a pretty quick train wreck for them. They really did go from six bidders down to two pretty quickly. This didn’t happen over the course of a couple of decades. This happened over the course of a year.”
Funding the Games, however, had been a runaway train for decades for host cities.
An expensive proposition
Four of the seven host Winter Olympics host cities between 1992 and 2014 lost money on the Games. Those same seven Games had an average cost overrun of 125.1 percent, according to a study by Oxford University.
The average cost of hosting the five Winter Games between 1998 and 2014 was $18.95 billion in 2021 U.S. dollars, according to research by Matheson and Robert A. Baade, a Lake Forest College economics professor. Take away the $59.7 billion the Putin government spent on the 2014 Olympics in Sochi and the average is still $8.75 billion. And Baade cautions “the advertised number was $51 billion (in 2014 dollars) but I think those of us who work on the Games would argue the number much higher than that, in the neighborhood of $70 billion or so.”
“The problem is fundamentally people are generally just not that interested in hosting the Games,” said Derick Hulme, a political science professor at Alma College and author of “The Political Olympics: Moscow, Afghanistan, and the 1980 U.S. Boycott.” “Hosting the Games is not what it used to be in terms of perceived benefits and the Winter Olympics are even more problematic. We’re seeing the effects of climate change and that has effected the willingness to bid on the game. they’ve become less financially attractive and they’ve become far more risky.
“So the pool of potential bidders isn’t what it used to be.”
Which is why IOC officials were especially encouraged by the 2022 candidacies of Oslo and Stockholm and two countries with rich Winter Olympic histories. Oslo hosted the 1952 Winter Games and the 1994 Olympics were held in Lillehammer, Norway. Stockholm hosted the 1912 Summer Olympics.
Stockholm dropped out of the 2022 bidding after just 64 days when a majority of the city council announced it opposed holding the Games. Krakow withdrew in May 2014 after nearly 70 percent of the voters rejected the Games in a local referendum.
Lviv dropped out in June citing events surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just days after the Sochi Olympics and eventual Russian annexation of Crimea.
“That’s not really the IOC’s fault that Putin decided to bask in the glow of the fine Winter Olympics in Sochi by invading his neighbor a month later,” Matheson said.
There would, however, be plenty of blame directed at the IOC after Oslo pulled out in October 2014.
The Oslo city council held a September 2013 public referendum on hosting the Games with 55 percent of the voters supporting a bid. But by June 2014 support for the Olympics had slipped to 24 percent in nationwide polling and three of the country’s four political parties announced they were opposed to the bid.
“The main reason why Oslo withdrew the application was that a number of polls had shown that the majority of Norwegians were negative to host the Olympics,” Harry Arne Solberg, a sports economics professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said in an email. “This pattern had been stable over a long period.”
Arrogance may have doomed Norway’s bid
But what finally doomed the bid was an exposé in a Norwegian newspaper detailing 7,000 pages of leaked IOC demands of the government and local organizing committee.
“Stupid stuff,” Matheson said.
Among the IOC demands was a meeting with the King of Norway before the opening ceremony followed by a cocktail reception afterward with the Royal Palace or the local organizing committee picking up the bar tab. There were demands that Bach receive ceremonial welcome events on the airport runway when he arrived in Oslo and separate airport entrances and exits for IOC members. The demands also included welcome greetings from the local organizing chief and hotel manager in each IOC member’s hotel room along with seasonal fruit and cakes, minibars stocked with Coca-Cola products and special travel lanes restricted to IOC member transport.
“IOC members shall be greeted with a smile when arriving at their hotel,” according to the demands. “Meeting rooms shall be kept at exactly 20 degrees Celsius at all times.
“The hot food offered in the lounges at venues should be replaced at regular intervals, as IOC members might ‘risk’ having to eat several meals at the same lounge during the Olympics.”
Norwegians, said Siv Jensen, minister of finance at the time, “shake their heads over the pompousness” of the IOC demands.
The report came as the majority Conservative Party considered a bid whose public cost had been reduced from $2.37 billion to $1.9 billion. Even with the reduction, the Conservatives decided against supporting the bid. On October 1, Oslo pulled out of the competition.
“The Norwegians love (the Olympics),” Matheson said. “But they really didn’t like the arrogance of the IOC combined with the idea of the IOC (saying) ‘Oh, here why don’t you host our event for us on your dime, we’ll collect all the TV money, you can sell the tickets that are, depending on what happened, an eighth of the cost of the event.’”
Bach and other IOC officials made no attempt to hide their anger at the Oslo decision in the following days.
“A missed opportunity” for Norway, Bach said.
Given the additional costs and logistical nightmare of putting on Games in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, Norwegian officials are more likely feeling like they dodged a bullet, Olympic historians and economists said.
“I think at this point there are probably few regrets at not being the host,” Hulme said. “I think that there’s not a sort of regret anxiety here.”
The IOC is “certainly quite (ticked) off about the ever growing number of referendums happening in the bid cities,” said Lenskyj, author of “The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach. “That’s a problem. That’s a bad look. Thomas Bach said I don’t know why they have to keep having referendums for something seven years in advance as if that’s too much democracy at work.”
The 2024 bidding process
The bidding process for the 2024 Summer Olympics followed a similar pattern to that for the 2022 Games. Hamburg, Rome and Budapest joining Boston in dropping out citing economic concerns and public opposition. Again left with just two cities standing and concerned with losing either Paris or Los Angeles in future bid cycles, the IOC awarded both the 2024 and 2028 Games in September 2017.
“So there’s been a waning interest in the Olympic Games and that waning interest has resulted in what was an unprecedented thing, the IOC awarding the next to summer Olympic Games to Paris and LA for the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games and that is an indication of how things have changed,” Baade said.
Brisbane was awarded the 2032 Summer Olympics in a similar selection process last July.
Since the 2022 bid process the IOC has “virtually done away with the voting procedure,” Lenskyj said. “They just tap a city on the shoulder and say you’re it, like Brisbane for 2032. So they’ve hedged their bets with three future Games, three Summer games completely pinned down.
“So this wheeling and dealing in terms of bids and voting has been replaced by a totally top-down authoritarian process which nobody seems to be objecting to and it was sort of rationalized that this is a new way of doing things and that we won’t make cities spend lots of money preparing bids and we’ll do it our way
“(But) it’s definitely about the IOC saving face. They might spin it that way, spin this kind of we’re going to have a different kind of bid process where we look at the bids and we tell them right off the bat if they haven’t got a hope and then we’ll help the remaining ones to prepare the best possible bids.
“There won’t be futile bids in the future.”