The election for host city of the 13th Olympic congress in 2009 is quietly hidden in the agenda of this month’s IOC session in Torino, but it is quickly heating up. IOC members will make their decision on February 8th – and they will be choosing the location for what is perhaps the most important Olympic meeting in years to come.
More than a mere session, an IOC congress happens no more than once a decade and was last held in 1994 in Paris.
According to IOC documents “…The Olympic Congress brings together representatives of parties that make up the Olympic Movement, i.e. the IOC, National Olympic Committees, the International Sports Federations, the Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games, the athletes, representatives of coaches, officials and the media as well as other participants and observers.”
This time the IOC has approved eight cities. Still in the running are Athens, Cairo, Copenhagen, Lausanne Switzerland, Busan South Korea, Riga Latvia, Singapore and Taipei. Mexico City dropped out of the running last month.
The large number of interested cities is probably a surprise to the IOC – the last bid was for an IOC session in 2007 where the host city of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games will be elected, and it attracted only three bidders. Guatemala City defeated Durban and Copenhagen in August 2004 but the overall election campaign drew very little interest from the press.
Perhaps the high-profile 2012 Olympic Games bid election held last year at the IOC session in Singapore raised the overall appeal for hosting IOC meetings. Not only did that meeting attract a record number of delegates and members of the media, but it hosted internationally famous people and world leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Hilary Clinton and David Beckham among dozens of others. The Raffles Center in Singapore grabbed headlines around the world.
For 2009 the stakes will be higher. Early conservative estimates suggest that 7,500 people will attend the congress including IOC members, NOC and sports federation representatives, and members of the media, and that number is expected to increase over the next two years. The meeting could be the most important in sports history to date.
On the meeting agenda will be the election of the next IOC president or the acceptance of current President Jacques Rogge for an additional term; a vote on what sports will be added or dropped for the 2016 Summer Games; and the election of the host city for the 2016 Summer Games which is already shaping up to be a battle similar to the 2012 bid. Special congress agenda items will cover issues important to the future of sport and the Olympic movement.
It’s no wonder that several cities want to be part of this event. In many cases countries that aren’t yet capable of hosting the Olympic Games will take this opportunity or others like it to participate and raise their profiles within the Olympic movement.
The campaign for the 2009 Congress kicked off in late October of last year when the IOC published the list of accepted candidates. But the IOC isn’t making it easy for these cities to present themselves in the best possible light – and there must be concerns that the members won’t have enough information to make the best decision.
The IOC has allotted only ten minutes for a single representative of each bid to present shortly before the vote takes place. The presentations will be verbal and will not contain any audio-visual material. Fallout from the bid bribery scandal of almost a decade ago means that bid representatives may not contact any IOC members directly, so in many cases members will have to cast their votes based on what they read in an IOC compiled fact sheet and the bland ten-minute presentations.
Another challenge created by the IOC is accepting bids from nine candidates (of which eight still remain). The IOC will use the same voting procedure that is used to elect Games hosts – a winner is declared after receiving 50 per cent plus one of the number of votes cast. Additionally, IOC members who represent countries that are on the ballot may not cast a vote, which means that on the first ballot less than 100 votes will be split up eight ways. This will result in very narrow voting margins in the early rounds and the possibility of overall favorites falling off the ballot before getting a serious chance.
It is widely accepted that the two leading contenders are Copenhagen and Busan. The drawbacks for the other bids are that Athens’ recently hosted the 2004 Olympic Games, Singapore’s hosting of the IOC session last year, security concerns with Cairo and Taipei, and lack of facilities in Lausanne and Riga. However with the current voting and campaign process this theory may never come to fruition and the competition will still be open to all. Expect a surprise or two.
Regardless of the outcome, it is clear that the IOC needs to reform the site selection process for official meetings now that they are becoming almost as glamorous as the Games themselves.
