Looks like there will only be TWO contenders to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and both are in Asia. Beijing and Almaty.
Quote:
As if the Winter Olympics did not have enough existential problems with concern about rising temperatures and melting glaciers, it now seems that nobody is much interested in staging them even while the planet still has snow.
What once looked like a robust race to host the 2022 Winter Games has turned into a scramble for the escape hatch.
Munich and a Swiss project from Davos and St. Moritz bid adieu to their efforts after public referendums. Stockholm, which was one of the six cities that made a formal application to the International Olympic Committee, withdrew in December largely because of cost concerns. This week, officials in Krakow, Poland, announced that the city would withdraw from the race after nearly 70 percent of voters rejected the plan.
Of the remaining four bids, Oslo is also surprisingly on shaky ground because of faltering political support, and Lviv, Ukraine, is widely considered certain to fall away because of the crisis in the country.
The I.O.C. will announce the final list in July, but it could well have only two options when it votes for the 2022 site next year: Beijing, which hosted the Summer Games in 2008, and Almaty, Kazakhstan, a city of 1.4 million in a nation with an autocratic government and a dubious human rights record that has hosted an Asian Winter Games but never an event of Olympic magnitude.
I remember reading a few months ago, the Beijing bid had next to no chance. But now it looks like they might end up being the odds on favourite to win.
There were US cities prepared to bid including Salt Lake, Lake Tahoe, and Denver, but the USOC decided that the states would not be submitting any bit for 2022
