Giving the Olympics to L.A. and Paris in One Go Won't Be Easy

(Bloomberg) -- Later this week, the leaders of the International Olympic Committee will gather in Switzerland to weigh the merits of breaking with tradition and naming host cities for both the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics. The IOC is evaluating bids for 2024 from Los Angeles and Paris, but settling the host cities for the next decade would buy time for the IOC to address the growing crisis of confidence among civic leaders.

Cities around the world have come to see the Olympic Games as a white elephant. In 2014, Sochi spent a record $51 billion to stage the Winter Games, and today many of the Russian city’s Olympic venues sit empty and unused. The blight is similar in Rio de Janeiro, where organizers of the 2016 Summer Games have struggled months after the event ended, at one point offering creditors used air conditioners in lieu of cash. Potential new hosts are wary. Budapest, Rome, Hamburg and Boston dropped out of contention for the 2024 Games. Oslo, Krakow, Stockholm and St. Moritz abandoned plans to bids for the 2022 Winter Games, leaving the IOC to choose between the Kazakh city of Almaty and Beijing.

The success of a joint award for the next two Summer Games will depend on persuading either Paris or, more likely, Los Angeles to agree to put their plans on hold. In May, when the IOC’s evaluation commission visited Los Angeles to look at its proposed venues, Mayor Eric Garcetti expressed openness to waiting until 2028. “Our committee will look at that at any given time if the rules change,” Garcetti said. The city’s approval, he suggested, would depend on the IOC contributing funds to sustain the bid and to foster youth sports in the meantime.

Securing the support of the IOC membership could also be complicated. Choosing the Olympic hosts is the most prized power of the IOC membership. (The vote is also a valuable thing to sell. In the past, members have taken bribes including college scholarships, cosmetic surgery, and hundreds of thousands of dollars from representatives of aspiring hosts.)

“They’ve still got to get by the membership,” said Canadian lawyer and longtime IOC member Richard Pound. “And they may say, ‘No excuse me, but we are still going through the process that’s in the charter and we’re not prepared to amend the charter.’”

Pound, one of the founders of the World Anti-Doping Agency, was an outspoken critic of the IOC executive board’s decision not to suspend the entire the Russian delegation from the 2016 Games in Rio after revelations of widespread doping at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. “A lot of us are being asked in our own countries what the hell is the IOC doing and we don’t know and that’s not a good situation,” Pound said.

Under the IOC charter, the choice of Los Angeles or Paris is supposed to be decided by secret ballot during a September session in Lima, Peru, with 88 of the 95 members voting. (Representatives from the United States and France don’t vote.) 

The full membership is also scheduled to hear formal presentations from both cities at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July. If the IOC awards both 2024 and 2028 this year, its members won’t pick another summer host until 2025. For some members, this could be their last vote.

The IOC charter states that “save in exceptional circumstances,” the election of a host city takes place seven years before the Games. Modifications to the charter require the approval two-thirds of voting members. “My impression is that they can rubber-stamp this thing,” said Jules Boykoff, a professor of political science at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics. “Then they might go back and fix their charter so that they can do this more freely.” One drawback of the plan, Boykoff notes, is that it may alienate countries that were considering bids for 2028, including Russia.

“This is something new and it has to go according to procedure,” said Nicole Hoevertsz, an IOC member from Aruba. Still, IOC members are cautiously optimistic. “We’ve yet to see the nitty-gritty of it,” said Austin Sealy of Barbados, “But this is an expensive process and handling it this way makes sense from my standpoint.” Hoevertsz also says that IOC President Thomas Bach is taking the right approach.

Even Pound is open to the idea of a tandem award. “As a concept, it’s not all bad,” he said. “We need to think about how we do it for the future. Even the IOC should be able to figure out something in seven years.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Ira Boudway in New York at iboudway@bloomberg.net, Ezra Fieser in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic at efieser@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Janet Paskin at jpaskin@bloomberg.net, Rob Golum