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TOKYO – With the Summer Olympics off to a shaky start on Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee took a big step towards crystallizing its long-term future by voting to officially select Brisbane, Australia as the host of the Olympic Games. summer in 2032.
Australia are now set to become three-time Olympic hosts. She had previously hosted the Games in Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000.
The IOC has now defined the next three Summer Games: the 2024 Olympic Games will be held in Paris, while the 2028 Games will be held in Los Angeles.
Brisbane was the first city to win a summer bid in a new selection process that was revamped in 2019 to discourage the organization from pitting cities against each other in costly bidding wars .
The old tendering process had become increasingly untenable. Candidates frequently withdrew from the race after encountering local opposition. Corruption was a persistent problem.
“This revolution in the bidding process is an essential part of our good governance reforms,” said Thomas Bach, IOC President, in a pre-Games interview. “With this new process, he’s a lot less prone to all of that kind of lobbying and also to the corruption that we’ve obviously seen in the past.”
Candidates who made it through the old process were often flawed.
For the 2022 Winter Games, for example, candidate cities from Germany, Norway, Sweden, Poland and Switzerland, among others, have canceled their candidacies due to a lack of support at home. The last two remaining offers came from Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, two locations known for their human rights concerns. Beijing won the vote and the IOC has since been peppered with criticism from human rights activists.
As part of the new process put in place two years ago, the IOC has created two panels to review potential cities and make recommendations to the organization’s board of directors.
Brisbane’s final selection had therefore felt almost assured since February, when the committee revealed that the city was its “preferred partner”, thus starting discussions on the final details. The vote taken by IOC members on Wednesday was widely seen as a formality.
Despite its purported benefits, the IOC’s new approach has raised some concern. By selecting a host city in closed-door committees, the organization has opened up to questions of conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency in the process.
For example, John Coates, the current President of the Australian Olympic Committee, is also IOC Vice President and a close ally of Bach. The IOC insisted that Coates, and anyone else who might have a conflict of interest, was not involved in the recommendation process.
Cities from Germany, Qatar and Hungary, among others, have also submitted bids for 2032. As part of the new process, these cities can discuss with the IOC the possibility of hosting an Olympic Games in the future. .
Tariq Panja contributed reports.
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