Beijing to Host 2022 Winter Olympics
Beijing to Host 2022 Winter Olympics
Published : 31-Jul-2015 11:05
The IOC has just announced that Beijing will be the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics at its annual meeting, in Kuala Lumpur where the host for the results ceremony was Britain's famous triple jumper Jonathan Edwards.
The results came after a paper ballot was needed when the electronic one failed.
It will be the first time a city has hosted summer and winter Games.
It will be the third Olympic Games in a row in Asia, following the decision to stage the 2020 summer games in Tokyo, and the third Winter Olympics in a row to move successively East wards after Sochi in 2014 and South Korea in 2018.
IOC delegates had only two candidates to choose from after four European nations pulled out, in several cases of local referenda, normally siting costs being too high to stage the Games, although when Oslo, which was a third remaining finalist pulled out, Norwegian media also reported on what it considered excessive demands by the IOC. In response IOC officials said the benefits of staging an Olympics greatly exceeded the costs.
As with the last and next winter Olympics, there was going to be controversy too, whichever candidate the IOC had chosen. Kazakhstan has almost no winter sports history and has developed its few new resorts from scratch with oil money rather than organically due to public interest. It has high mountains but low natural snowfall.
Beijing's Alpine events would be staged 100 miles away in a fast developing ski region but like South Korea the mountains are not high making it difficult to find a venue with the vertical to host a Men's downhill (as has been the case for the 2018 Games in South Korea, requiring the creation of a course in an environmentally sensitive area of natural parkland)( and like Kazakhstan it has little natural snowfall, meaning either venue would mean boom times for snowmaking manufacturers.
Unlike Sochi however, dubbed 'The tropical Winter Olympics' both areas are at least normally very cold.
The IOC also decided that the 2020 Youth Olympic Winter Games would be staged in Lausanne in Switzerland, beating in Brasov in Romania.
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