The Beijing Winter Olympics open in just under two months and are the target of a diplomatic boycott by the United States, with other countries …
The Beijing Winter Olympics open in just under two months and are the target of a diplomatic boycott by the United States, with other countries likely to follow suit. So how did Beijing land the Winter Olympics so soon after it was host to the Summer Olympics in 2008? Doing so makes it the first city in Olympic history to host both the Winter and Summer Games. The answer is simple. Potential cities in Europe—as many as six—dropped out of the bidding in the wake of the doping-scandal-ridden 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The widely advertised price tag for Sochi of $51 billion also frightened away future bidders. When it got down to the voting stage in 2015 in meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the International Olympic Committee was left with only two candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Beijing won 44-40, a close vote that was marred by what some at the time suggested might have been voting irregularities. IOC President Thomas Bach bristled at the suggestion. The list of rejections from cities across Europe is long. Oslo and Stockholm are the two high-profile cities that pulled out during the bidding process. Krakow, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine, also withdrew their bids. Two other areas with potentially strong bids—St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Munich—were rejected by the public in voter referendums. The German rejection was a stinging blow to Bach, who is from Germany. It’s also notable that the IOC headquarters are in Switzerland. Oslo and Stockholm, probably regarded as the preferred venues as the IOC attempted to return the Olympics to traditional European winter venues, pulled out because of costs and politics.
