… But today, the Olympic landscape remains very vague. Exactly one month before the IOC General Assembly vote for the host city of the 2020 Games, scheduled for September 7 in Buenos Aires, the three-way battle between Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo still seems undecided. And the same cloud of smoke surrounds the two other ballots, organized the following days in the Argentine capital, for the new sport in the Olympic program and for the presidency of the IOC. As we attack the last lap, FrancsJeux takes stock of the position in the race of the many contenders.
2020 Summer Olympics. Of the three votes on the agenda of the IOC General Assembly, the choice of the city for the 2020 Games remains the most undecided. Long lagging behind, Madrid has caught up thanks to the visit of the evaluation commission. Spain remains close to bankruptcy, but Olympic experts have ruled that the country's current economic problems are unlikely to prevent its capital from hosting the Games in more than seven years. Not false.
Istanbul was favored by the forecasts until the popular uprising in the spring. Since then, its rating has dropped by a few points. And the numerous doping cases in Turkish sport have not helped matters. But the Turkish capital continues to repeat that its candidacy remains, by far, the most loaded with meaning and the future. A new world for the Olympism to conquer, a bridge between two continents. It's true.
Tokyo has always been in a good place. And the rest. Choosing Japan would, for the IOC, be a guarantee of security, in economic and sporting terms and for the delicate question of transport. But the Asian candidacy struggles to give its file a historical, even symbolic, dimension. And the ghost of Fukushima still hovers over Japan.
New sport on the Olympic program. With the IOC no longer one contradiction away, bringing wrestling back to the 2020 Games after having excluded it appears today to be the most likely scenario. Taken by surprise by the decision of the executive commission of the Olympic institution to propose exclusion, sport was able to react. Its international federation, FILA, changed the rules of the discipline and knew how to operate all the levers. Starting with that of a global mobilization above expectations. Wrestling has never been more popular. She even discovered support that she didn't know existed.
Baseball and softball finish the race in a sprint. Now associated in a common International Federation (WBSC), the two disciplines are actively demonstrating the popularity of their practice, its universality (65 million players) and their youth. But one wonders what logic could push the IOC to put them back in the game after having taken them out, baseball and softball having been Olympic sports until Beijing in 2008.
A historic candidate, and all in all quite natural, squash led a more discreet campaign, at least on the media level. The discipline seems to lack high-ranking support. But approaching the home stretch from a position of outsider has never been a handicap with the IOC.
Advantage in the fight.
IOC Presidency. At the end of July, Thomas Bach seemed unbeatable. It was even said, in the corridors of the IOC, that the German could settle the matter in the first round of voting. Since then, the affair of the report on doping in the former West Germany has had an impact on him. A former long jumper from the FRG, Heidi Schüller, even directly criticized him in a Bavarian newspaper. She assures that Thomas Bach, in his capacity as president of the German Olympic committee, had been aware for a long time of the doping policy pursued for years in the FRG, but that his position as candidate for president of the IOC had led him to keep the silence. Embarrassing.
However, the German remains the favorite. A status all the more logical as the campaign to succeed Jacques Rogge has, for the moment, not allowed any of his five rivals (Richard Carrion, Ng Ser Miang, Sergueï Bubka, Denis Oswald and CK Wu), to really stand out from the crowd.
