- Feb 20, 2010
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Re:
I know they'll claim Sochi as a European venue, but realistically we're now talking a minimum of 16 years between accessible Games to the vast majority of wintersport fans - 20 for most Europeans with Torino 2006 being the last time and now 2026 the next even remote possibility, obviously North America had 2002 and 2010 but won't see the Games again until 2026 at the earliest as well.
The cost of the Games is spiralling ridiculously, it seems now they want bids for the sake of the lucrative sponsored building projects rather than for anything else, since bids for places like Munich and Oslo, which would be perfect places for the Winter games and already had the vast majority of the infrastructure in place, just needed to update some facilities (Munich would also have been the first place to host both summer and winter games - and was going to use the Alpine slopes and ski jump at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, put all the Nordic sports at the facilities in Ruhpolding which only just got upgraded, and already has its own facilities for indoor ice arenas), but the cost of the Games spiralling put them out of the running as the public wouldn't back them paying the ridiculous prices demanded by the IOC. Those venues also, crucially, wouldn't be white elephants. The last Winter Olympic venue to become a regular World Cup stop-off in the world of XC and NC is Lillehammer... which already had facilities. In biathlon too, but they've since stopped doing two Norwegian rounds and Holmenkollen won out. In Alpine, it's Kvitfjell... also Lillehammer. That's 1994. That's five sets of Olympic venues (Nagano/Nozawa Onsen, Salt Lake City/Soldier Hollow, Torino/Cesana, Vancouver/Whistler and Sochi/Krasnaya Polyana) that have come onto the calendar ahead of the Olympics at great cost... then disappeared from the calendar straight after, with top level racing immediately returning to more traditional fertile grounds... because the events are going away from where the fans are.
At this point, it's no wonder the only people who are willing to pay for it are places like Russia and China, and the public of traditional wintersport hubs reject the bids as too costly even when their city presents a bid that would cost a tiny fraction of what the Russian, Kazakh, Chinese governments are paying.
Ugh. At least Almaty already has most of the infrastructure in place due to hosting the 2011 Asian Winter Games, they would just need to update the facilities. Beijing is going to have to build the whole load up from scratch just like Sochi. At least they can recycle some of the Summer Games venues for the arena sports like figure skating, ice hockey and speed skating, but they don't have any even remotely up to standard Alpine or Nordic venues nearby, let alone the likes of the sliding tracks.The Hitch said:
I know they'll claim Sochi as a European venue, but realistically we're now talking a minimum of 16 years between accessible Games to the vast majority of wintersport fans - 20 for most Europeans with Torino 2006 being the last time and now 2026 the next even remote possibility, obviously North America had 2002 and 2010 but won't see the Games again until 2026 at the earliest as well.
The cost of the Games is spiralling ridiculously, it seems now they want bids for the sake of the lucrative sponsored building projects rather than for anything else, since bids for places like Munich and Oslo, which would be perfect places for the Winter games and already had the vast majority of the infrastructure in place, just needed to update some facilities (Munich would also have been the first place to host both summer and winter games - and was going to use the Alpine slopes and ski jump at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, put all the Nordic sports at the facilities in Ruhpolding which only just got upgraded, and already has its own facilities for indoor ice arenas), but the cost of the Games spiralling put them out of the running as the public wouldn't back them paying the ridiculous prices demanded by the IOC. Those venues also, crucially, wouldn't be white elephants. The last Winter Olympic venue to become a regular World Cup stop-off in the world of XC and NC is Lillehammer... which already had facilities. In biathlon too, but they've since stopped doing two Norwegian rounds and Holmenkollen won out. In Alpine, it's Kvitfjell... also Lillehammer. That's 1994. That's five sets of Olympic venues (Nagano/Nozawa Onsen, Salt Lake City/Soldier Hollow, Torino/Cesana, Vancouver/Whistler and Sochi/Krasnaya Polyana) that have come onto the calendar ahead of the Olympics at great cost... then disappeared from the calendar straight after, with top level racing immediately returning to more traditional fertile grounds... because the events are going away from where the fans are.
At this point, it's no wonder the only people who are willing to pay for it are places like Russia and China, and the public of traditional wintersport hubs reject the bids as too costly even when their city presents a bid that would cost a tiny fraction of what the Russian, Kazakh, Chinese governments are paying.
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