International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Dick Pound told a Speakers Forum corporate breakfast session Thursday in Toronto that the IOC will one day set aside its process of cities bidding to host the Olympic Games and simply declare it’s time to fast-track the Games to Africa or South America.
Pound said, “we’ll have to negotiate at one point that it’s time to go. It will be a policy matter that we want to go to Africa, that we want to go to South America”, places where there have never been an Olympic Games.
Pound added, the Games could be sent to one of them as early as 2016, “but more likely 2020”,
He said Cape Town had a strong 2004 bid and outlasted Stockholm and Buenos Aires to make it to the third ballot before Athens won out over Rome.
He said the soccer World Cup will be a good test run for would-be Games organizers, but that a 28-sport Olympics “is still beyond reach at this moment….you have to balance the risk and reward of going to a place that hasn’t hosted before”.
As for the 2012 Summer Olympic bid, Pound said the 2012 candidates are already vying for votes at next July’s IOC meeting in Singapore, and some failed candidates might want to run again in 2016, making it harder to fast-track an African or South American host “but 2020 could be seen as ‘the time’”.
For the 2008 bid IOC members decided the time had come to send the Games to the world’s most populous country and it was a market IOC sponsors coveted. Pound said Toronto’s failed 2008 bid was technically better than Beijing’s but there was no holding back the tide.
