The IOC Stopped Running Bidding Contests, and It Was Not Modesty

The old system was producing no bidders

For decades the Olympic host election was a public contest: cities campaigned for years, produced bid books, hosted evaluation visits, and lost in a televised vote.

By the mid-2010s it had stopped working, and the failure was not subtle. Referendums rejected bids in one European city after another. Candidates withdrew mid-process. The 2022 Winter Games came down to two applicants after everyone else left.

The reasons were structural. A public campaign costs enormous sums and produces, for all but one city, a public defeat — a mayor who has spent years and millions and lost. And the visibility of the process made it an easy target for domestic opposition, because a bid is a single identifiable thing to vote against.

So the IOC had a supply problem: a product with no buyers.

The two-stage dialogue

The 2019 reform replaced the contest with a conversation.

A Future Host Commission conducts Continuous Dialogue — open, non-committal discussions with interested parties about hosting any future Games, with no edition specified and no commitment on either side.

When the Commission identifies a viable proposal for a specific edition, it moves to Targeted Dialogue: detailed planning, feasibility work, and financial and government guarantees, conducted with the intention of recommending that candidate to the Executive Board.

The Board then puts the recommendation to the Session.

Which means there is usually nothing to choose between

The consequence is that the Session is generally asked to approve a candidate rather than to pick one.

There is no losing city, because the process does not create losers publicly. A party that will not succeed is told during Continuous Dialogue, quietly, before anything has been announced or spent.

That is the reform’s real achievement and its real problem, and both should be stated.

The achievement: hosting became discussable. A city can explore the idea without committing to a campaign, without a referendum being triggered by an announcement, and without the humiliation of a public defeat. The IOC’s applicant pipeline recovered.

The problem: the vetting, the comparison and the decision now happen behind closed doors. Under the old system the choice was opaque in a different way — the votes were secret and the lobbying was notorious — but there were at least rival proposals in public, which could be compared and criticised by people outside the room.

Now there is one name, and by the time the public sees it the decision is effectively made.

The seven-year rule is gone, and that matters

The Olympic Charter used to require a host to be elected seven years in advance. That requirement was removed.

Seven years was a planning estimate that hardened into a rule, and its effect was to force a decision at a fixed distance whether or not a good option existed.

Removing it lets the IOC award Games when the right proposal appears — including a decade or more ahead, which is why multiple future editions have been settled unusually early. For a host, an extra few years of lead time is worth a great deal: infrastructure timelines, political cycles and financing all become easier.

It also lets the IOC wait when nothing suitable is available, rather than choosing the least bad option against a deadline.

Not a city any more

A proposal may now cover several cities, a region, or a country.

This is the reform that changes what the Games physically are. The single-host-city model required one place to build everything, which is where the white elephants came from — venues built for one fortnight in a city with no use for them afterwards.

Spreading a Games across a region means using facilities that already exist, hundreds of kilometres apart if necessary. Milano Cortina is two cities and a mountain range. LA28 uses existing venues almost throughout, including a squash court on a film backlot.

That is a substantial change to the Olympic proposition, and it follows directly from the same diagnosis as the rest of the reform: the Games had become too expensive to want, and the fix was to stop requiring cities to build a Games from nothing.

For what the Games contain and how that is decided, see how a sport becomes Olympic, and for the movement’s finances, Olympic prize money.