IOC Sets Date for Destiny

(ATR) The IOC could set a new course for Olympic bids when the ruling Executive Board meets June 9 in Lausanne.

As reported May 17 by Around the Rings, the EB will meet to consider a process that will enable the IOC to select Paris and Los Angeles for the 2024 and 2028 Olympics in the same vote Sep. 13 at the IOC Session in Lima, Peru.

The day-long meeting on a Friday will take place at the office tower in Pully, next door to Lausanne, that is the temporary home of the IOC while a new headquarters is under construction.

Media, perhaps numbering into the dozens, will work separately at a press room in the nearby Olympic Museum. IOC president Thomas Bach will hold a press conference set for 6pm to explain what steps the IOC is taking on the 2024 and 2028 question, as well as the 2026 Winter Games.

The EB meeting is the next big step in Bach’s efforts to change a troubled Olympic bidding process that he described in December as generating "too many losers". In March he created a working group of the four IOC vice presidents to review the situation for the 2024 and 2028 Olympics. The group will meet on June 8, the day before the EB convenes, to draft a report for the EB to consider.

The four vice presidents include John Coates of Australia, Ugur Erdener of Turkey, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain and Zaiqing Yu from China.

The report and its recommendations, especially if as expected, call for the awarding of 2024 and 2028, will still need to win approval of the full IOC. That would take place July 13 and 14 at the technical briefing on the Paris and Los Angeles bids in Lausanne for the members. With most IOC members planning to attend, there should be a quorum to conduct a vote on the change.

Approval would clear the way for the IOC to reconvene two months later in Lima to cast the ultimate vote – possibly the first-ever award of two Summer Games at the same time.

The agenda of the June 9 EB meeting will likely preclude two of the 14 current members, Anita DeFrantz and Angela Ruggiero, both from the U.S. and both active in the campaign for Los Angeles 2024. They both recused themselves from the March EB meeting when the agenda turned to matters involving the 2024 bid.

While DeFrantz is an at-large member of the IOC, Ruggiero is on the EB as chair of the IOC Athletes Commission. With no substitutions or proxies allowed in such a case, it means that the viewpoint of the IOC Athletes Commission won’t be considered for the changes on the table at this EB meeting. Even if the vice chair of the Athletes Commission could step in, it wouldn’t work either. Tony Estanguet of France holds that post, the co-president of the Paris 2024 bid.

The EB meeting will also deal with the process of selecting the host of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, which has been delayed as the IOC goes through this overhaul of the bid process.

Plagued by a seemingly unending stream of cities forced to drop out of bidding for the 2022 and 2024 Games, leaving just two cities left for the final vote, the IOC is keen to reverse the trend.

So far only a handful of potential bidders have emerged for 2026, the next bid race following the 2024 contest. Bids from Switzerland, Austria and Canada are possible. Invitations to the world’s NOCs to solicit bids for 2026 would have been already dispatched by the IOC under the previous timetable for bidding. Now that initial process is not likely to get underway until after the 2024/2028 conundrum is settled.

Written by Ed Hula.

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