In September 2017, at the time of D-Day, history will undoubtedly have swallowed up the incident until it was barely anecdotal. But for now, we have to come to terms with it: the campaign for the award of the Summer Games in 2024 has just experienced its first blunder. Unsurprisingly, it is the work of the most inexperienced of the five competitors: Hungary. A youthful mistake, then.
Recall of facts. Like its four rivals, the Budapest 2024 team is traveling to Prague at the end of last week as part of the General Assembly of the Association of European Olympic Committees (EOC). At the podium, we talk, we exhibit and present. Classic. Behind the scenes, we are busy practicing the delicate art of lobbying. Just as classic. Paris, Los Angeles, Hamburg and Rome are doing it in their own way, with their weapons and their handshakes. Nothing filters. The world of silence. A golden rule imposed on each applicant by the IOC code of conduct.
But, surprise, Budapest deviates from the line. The day after the EOC general assembly, the Hungarian team announced that 16 national Olympic committees from central and southern Europe supported its candidacy. Infamy. She even drives the point home by citing the 16 supporters. FrancsJeux had given the list on the day of the announcement: Albania, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Turkey. Double infamy.
The Budapest team explains, without reservation, that these 16 national committees expressed “collectively their conviction that the Hungarian capital was entirely capable of hosting the Summer Games in 2024.” For them, insists -she, “Budapest is, with its position in the heart of central and southern Europe, a natural choice.”
In itself, nothing serious. Pointed out since the start of the campaign as the Tom Thumb of the race, Budapest wanted to signal to the sporting movement, and in turn to the competition, that it would have a role to play. She brandished a generous handful of supposed allies. Very anecdotal in a world where the number of supporters often exceeds, when it comes time to take stock, the total number of voters.
However, the EOC did not appreciate the Hungarians' exit. And she made it known. A press release displaying its colors and logo left its headquarters in Rome on Tuesday, November 24. Inside, a dry focus like a tobacco leaf.
In essence, the Association of European Olympic Committees and its president, Irishman Patrick Hickey, recall that they aim for complete neutrality in this Olympic campaign (normal, since four of the five candidate cities are European). They specify that the national Olympic committees of Central and Southern Europe do not constitute any association, at least not in the sense recognized by the EOC. They suggest that the IOC members concerned by the Hungarian declaration (less than a handful) were certainly not consulted before being associated with the cause of Budapest 2024. Finally, they point out what everyone has known since for a long time, to know that votes are secret in the Olympic world and that the IOC does not authorize its members to publicly express their choices.
The Hungarians have surely understood their lesson. They will now keep a low profile. Whose next mistake?
