Poland is running to host the 2036 Olympic Games

The Krakow-Malopolska effect continues to leave its mark and, three months after the end of the European Games, Poland announced its interest in having Warsaw, its capital, become the venue for the 2036 Olympic Games.

This was demonstrated at the European Congress of Sport and Tourism in the southern city of Zakopane by the President of the Republic, Andrzej Duda: “I would like to announce, after consulting with the Polish Olympic Committee, with the Minister of Sports and with the Government, that our ambition and intention is to start efforts to organize the Olympic Games in 2036″.

In the same speech, Duda explained that the end of a robust infrastructure and modernization plan will coincide with the date of the Games and warned that Olympic officials will send a letter to the International Olympic Committee over the next few days.

Currently, after the amendment to the Olympic Charter, the application process is based on dialogue between applicants and the IOC and not on a struggle with enormous costs between potential hosts, as was the case until a few editions ago. After the talks, the various instances of voting by the members of the IOC will take place. There is still no stipulated date for the appointment.

Nor are the cities that will host the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games known at the moment. The changes to the Charter also included a flexibility in the dates of announcement of the venues, so that the obligation to communicate it, necessarily, seven years in advance was eliminated. Los Angeles and Brisbane, for example, were named 11 years earlier.

“I can promise that we will do everything possible to organize these Games in Poland,” reinforced the president of the Polish Olympic Committee, Radoslaw Piesewicz. For their part, significant support came from the Executive Committee of the European Olympic Committees: “Our Polish friends successfully demonstrated that they have what it takes to organize major international sporting events of the highest quality,” praised Hasan Arat, one of its members.

Nusantara (Indonesia), Guadalajara, Mexico City, Tijuana and Monterrey (Mexico) and Istanbul (Turkey) are the cities that announced their candidacy for 2036. In turn, the list of potential bidders is extensive and includes everything from Cairo, in Egypt, to Copenhagen, in Denmark. The headquarters can be joint between two or more cities.

Among other important precedents in recent history, Duda cited the 2012 Men’s Football Championship, organized in conjunction with Ukraine. Poland never hosted a FIFA World Cup, by chance, and fell in three Olympic votes: two for the Winter Games (2006 and 2022, with Zakopane and Krakow as candidates, respectively) and the rest for the Youth Games (2014, with Poznan as the candidate venue).

Over the course of the century, the IOC turned to new venues in a minority. He did so in the elections of Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008, Rio 2016 and Brisbane 2032. That is, in four of the nine cities chosen, with the asterisk that Australia had already held, in Melbourne, the 1956 Games.