Will the St. Moritz resort enter the battle for the 2022 Winter Games? As is often the case in Switzerland, the question will be asked to residents. The population of the canton of Graubünden will be asked to decide, by referendum, on March 3, on the advisability of a new candidacy. According to the latest polls, the no vote has a short lead (45%) over the yes vote (42%), but there are still many undecided voters (13%). The Swiss have not abandoned their Olympic ideal. After five successive failures, they still dream of the Winter Games. But they wonder about the wisdom of spending a fortune on a campaign with a necessarily random outcome.
Sign of the times: Austria is asking itself more or less the same question. The hypothesis of a candidacy from Vienna for the 2028 Summer Games has been cited with insistence for several months. But, according toAustrian Times, its cost would exceed 100 million euros. A sum that the country already considers excessive, to the point of questioning the advisability of entering the race.
Are applications now costing too much? In December 2011, the Tokyo 2020 team had to reassure public opinion by vowing to cut the budget of its previous campaign in half. For the 2016 Games, the Japanese had in fact spent 150 million dollars. A month earlier, the Spaniards of Madrid 2020 had made roughly the same speech, explaining their intention to reduce their campaign budget by 30 to 40%, to keep it within a range of 30 to 35 million euros.
At a time when French sport is discussing with extreme caution the possibility of launching Paris into the seemingly furious battle for the 2024 Summer Games, several voices are already being heard to discuss the cost of such a challenge. The last French attempt, Annecy 2018, broke a record: 20 to 25 million euros in spending, for only 7 votes on the day of the IOC members' vote. The calculation is puzzling: around 3 million euros per vote. According to one estimate, the failure of France's various bids for the Games, winter and summer, would have cost more than 120 million euros in 20 years.
The price of an Olympic bid currently varies between 80 and 150 million euros for the Summer Games, 50 to 100 million for the Winter Games. Without being able to break the bank, a city leaves almost beaten in advance, even having put together the best possible file.
Should we therefore give up? Surely not. London 2012 demonstrated it once again: organizing the Games, and making them a success, remains a formidable lever for development and a unique image vector of its kind for a city and a country. But the risk is great, in these times of crisis, of seeing certain nations pack up their projects in the face of the amount of the bill. And it would be perilous for the future of the Games to reduce the race to a matter of big money.
The solution perhaps involves the establishment, by the IOC, of a form of “salary cap”, a capped budget which would avoid excesses and level the playing field. By imposing a sort of “financial fair play” on candidate cities, the Olympic institution would have the merit of refocusing the race for the Games on the essential: the quality of the applications. It would also have everything to gain from seeing so-called “middle” countries, economically speaking, embark on the adventure of a candidacy. Olympic universality would be stronger than ever.
