(ATR) Seasoned Olympic pundits Phil Hersh and Alan Abrahamson question whether the current Olympic model will prove sustainable following the loss of yet another bid city for the Games.
The Budapest City Assembly voted to end Hungary's Olympic aspirations on March 1, the fourth casualty in the race to host the 2024 Summer Games. The city's failed Olympic bid follows fellow European cities Rome, Italy and Hamburg, Germany as well as the original U.S. bid from Boston.
These failures add to a much longer list if the bidding process for the 2022 Winter Olympics is included in the picture, a race that came down to Beijing winning the Games over Almaty, Kazakhstan in what amounted to a limp to the finish line.
Hersh, a veteran Olympic journalist of 30 years, places the blame on misguided pedaling of Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms by IOC president Thomas Bach in his Globetrotting blog.
"How’s that Olympic Agenda 2020 thing working out, Mr. Bach?" Hersh asks at the start of his piece.
"All that hot air about reform and cost-cutting in both bidding for and staging the Games that filled a Monaco conference center in 2014, inflating a balloon of self-congratulations that has been leaking ever since?"
Hersh also questions whether these failures could lead to a shift in bidding procedures by the IOC, namely electing a host city for both the 2024 and 2028 Games at this September's IOC Session in Lima, Peru.
Click here to read Hersh's full Op-Ed on the Olympic bidding process.
Abrahamson of 3 Wire Sports argues that the multiple bidding failures in recent years must lead to a shift in the bidding procedures.
Also a seasoned Olympic veteran who has covered every Olympic bid since 1999, Abrahamson says that the price tag and tax burden placed on citizens of Olympic bid cities leaves an obvious choice to host the 2024 Games.
"Voters in Europe are, in a phrase, pissed off, and the IOC is at an inflection point, the question being whether the members will do the only sensible thing at their assembly this September — that is, pick a privately funded entity, Los Angeles, for the 2024 Summer Games," Abrahamson says. "The only other candidate left is Paris, another government-funded outfit."
"For roughly the past 20 years, the IOC has turned to government-underwritten Games that, time and again, have proven hugely, inappropriately expensive," he adds.
Click here to read the entirety of Abrahamson's analysis of the current Olympic bidding situation.
Compiled by Kevin Nutley
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