Five Swiss Candidates Announce 2026 Bids

(ATR)Five groups will be battling it out to win the Swiss nomination for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

All five bids involve regions within the country. Swiss Olympic announced that "Swiss Made Winter Games" (western cantons), "Olympic Winter Games 2026 Graubünden and partners" (eastern cantons) and "Central Switzerland 2026" are joined by two other projects reuniting several regions – "Switzerland 2026" and "2026 - Games for our future".

The winner will be vying to become the first Swiss Olympic host since St. Moritz in 1948.

"It’s with great satisfaction that we can see that the process that we have started has attracted projects which are, from the very beginning, of great quality," said Jörg Schild, Swiss Olympic’s president. "We are now going to work together to refine and strengthen them to build more than just a simple candidacy. We want a real national project for the future of our country."

The Olympic committee says sports bodies will decide by September 2017 which city to put forward. But the decision will come only after a referendum is held in the cantons of the proposed candidate.

A favorable vote is not guaranteed. A bid by St. Moritz and Davos for the 2022 Games was rejected by voters in 2013.

Swiss Olympic says one of the main reasons it is bidding for the Olympic Games again is due to the IOC’s new approach to the process, which makes it possible "to balance the operational budget for the Games without any financial participation of the public sector."

It stands to reason that a bid which doesn’t take money out of the pockets of the local population would have a better chance of getting voter approval in a referendum.

Written by Gerard Farek

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