The International Olympic Committee on Tuesday was expected to solidify an unusual plan to award the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics at the same time in September, with one to be hosted by Paris and the other by Los Angeles, reports The New York Times.
Paris is favoured to hold the Games in 2024, the centenary of the last time it hosted the Olympics, while Los Angeles is expected to hold the Summer Games for a third time in 2028. Voting by delegates of the IOC will take place on September 13th in Lima, Peru.
Representatives for the Paris and Los Angeles bids were to make formal presentations to Olympics officials on Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland. French President Emmanuel Macron attended the meetings to rally support for the Paris bid. President Trump did not attend, though he expressed support for the Los Angeles bid on Twitter.
The rare decision to name the hosts of separate Games simultaneously would be an effort by the IOC to counter diminished interest shown by democratic nations in hosting the Olympics amid exorbitant costs, white-elephant stadiums, widespread corruption, rampant doping and limited appeal to the youth audience.
Thomas Bach of Germany, president of the IOC, has called for an overhaul of the bidding process, saying that too many cities spend millions of dollars as candidates only to go away as losers and become reluctant to bid again. The awarding of two Olympics at the same time will alleviate that concern for the Summer Games for at least the next decade.
The eagerness of Paris and Los Angeles, two of the world’s great cities, to host the Summer Games serves as a welcome rebuttal for the IOC to the embarrassing withdrawals of Boston, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg, Germany, as candidate cities to host the 2024 Olympics. Only Paris and Los Angeles remain in the bidding for those Games.
Paris and Los Angeles are also being viewed as cities that might help reform the Olympics by using mostly existing and temporary facilities to reduce prohibitive costs in staging the Games.
While it is impossible to gauge in advance the voting preferences of delegates of the IOC, Paris is considered the 2024 favorite for a number of reasons.
It would be exactly 100 years since it last hosted the Summer Games in 1924. The IOC has also shown a penchant for rewarding cities that continue to bid on the Games after failing to secure them. Since hosting the Summer Olympics in 1900 and 1924, Paris had previously sought without success to host the 1992 Games that went to Barcelona, the 2008 Games held in Beijing and the 2012 Games awarded to London.
The self-regarding IOC also likes to pat itself on the back as a restorative institution and could view the awarding of the 2024 Games as a chance to help Paris continue to recover from recent terrorist attacks.
Paris may also be looked upon more favorably in an international political light at the moment, given that France recently rejected the far-right presidential candidacy of Marine Le Pen while the United States elected the nationalist Donald Trump, who is unpopular in many parts of the world.
By awarding the Games to Los Angeles in 2028 instead of 2024, IOC delegates would guarantee that the Olympics would not come to the United States during Mr. Trump’s presidency.
Some experts, however, believe that Los Angeles has a better candidacy and that there is a risk in giving the Games to Paris in 2024, because financial overruns at this precarious moment for the Olympics could continue to scare off future bid cities.
Paris must still build housing for athletes and the news media with a projected cost of $2 billion. Los Angeles, on the other hand, plans to house athletes in existing dorm rooms at UCLA.
“Minimizing the financial risk – and thereby the likelihood of another budget-busting fiasco that would further frighten potential future bidders – is the best part of a well-conceived L.A. bid that will have no major venue or village construction needs,” wrote Phil Hersh, an influential Olympic blogger who covered 18 Winter and Summer Games as a Chicago sportswriter.
Of course, there would also be a potential risk in naming a 2028 Olympic host now, given that no one can know what the political or economic situation will be in either candidate city more than a decade from now.