While most of the world's attention is beginning to shift to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a piece of significant news about the 2022 Winter Games came out yesterday. When the deadline passed for cities to announce their intentions to bid, six cities threw their hat into the ring. That's now down to five, as Stockholm, Sweden has withdrawn.
Sweden has traditionally been among the top nations in the Winter Olympics, and understandably so. yet Sweden has never hosted the Winter Olympics. In fact, the only Olympics ever held in the country were the 1912 Summer Games, which were in Stockholm. A successful bid in 2022 would've made Stockholm the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games.
When the initial list of candidates was announced, Stockholm was viewed as one of the favorites. Except the city's legislature doesn't want to provide the financial guarantee necessary to move forward with the bid. Their rationale (which I find shotty at best) is that the millions they would've had to spend on facilities could be better spent elsewhere. Specifically, they don't see the need for a bobsled/luge track in Sweden (Sweden's good at every other winter sport, so those facilities weren't seen as a problem).
All of this is good news for Oslo. Oslo was viewed as the top candidate and early favorite when the six cities were announced, and the absence of Stockholm makes things look even more favorable for the Norwegian capital. Just like it was pretty much assumed the 2018 Winter Games would be in Pyongchang, South Korea, which won easily on the first vote, it seems highly unlikely that the 2022 Games will be held anywhere other than Oslo.
Not only does Oslo have the best and most technically-sound bid (not to mention how cool a Winter Olympics in Norway would be), each of the other bids has some limitations that will be difficult to overcome. The other bidding cities are Almaty, Kazakhstan; Beijing, China; Krakow, Poland; and Lviv, Ukraine.
Let's start with why Beijing won't host the 2022 Winter Olympics. The most obvious reason is Pyongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020. They're not going to have three consecutive Olympics in Asia, let alone the Far East. Throwing in the fact that Beijing hosted the Summer Games in 2008, and that would be four out of eight Olympics in the Far East, including two trips to Beijing. The mostly-European IOC won't let that happen. They're especially not going to give a Winter Games to the same city that hosted a Summer Games 14 years earlier. I'm not saying that'll never happen, but the gap won't be that close when/if it does.
Moving on Almaty and Lviv. They're hurt by Sochi. Sochi is, obviously, in Russia. Kazakhstan and Ukraine are both former Soviet republics. That would be like going from the U.S. to Canada eight years apart (which has been done, most recently with Salt Lake City and Vancouver). Kazakhstan and Ukraine have never hosted the Olympics (Summer or Winter), although some of the soccer games in 1980 were held in Kiev, which would likely outweigh the Sochi factor. But with the Olympics making their first trip to the area this year, I'm not sure the second trip would come this quickly. I do think both bids are strong enough to make the cut as finalists, though, and one likely will be. If I had to make that choice, I'd say it'll be Almaty. They've bid a number of times before and deserve to make the final cut.
That leaves us with Krakow. Krakow is the sentimental favorite among the other four, as the bid is a testament to the memory of late Polish President Lech Kaczynski. Kaczynski announced in March 2010 that he would like to see a Polish bid for the 2022 Olympics, then died a month later in a plane crash that also took the life of the President of the Polish Olympic Committee. Polish officials went along with Kaczynski's dream and submitted a bid for Krakow. But here's the interesting part, Krakow would co-host with the Slovakian city of Jasna. It would be the first Olympics ever staged in two countries, not counting 1956, when the Summer Games were held in Melbourne, but the equestrian events took place in Stockholm.
I'm not exactly sure how the co-hosting thing would work, and I'm sure that might be a bit of a concern for some IOC members, as well. That might be the only thing holding the Krakow bid back. Although I do think that Krakow will be a finalist. Kaczynski had a lot of friends at the IOC, and honoring his memory is the right thing to do. But it might not be enough to bring Krakow over the top. Not with such an overwhelming favorite, which has been an Olympic host before and will make an exceptional one again.
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