The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has launched a scathing attack on the Oslo bidding team following the withdrawal of its bid to host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.
The Norwegian capital became the fourth city to have cancelled its bid, leaving just two candidate cities – Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China – to fight over the right to host the Games.
Norway’s conservative Høyre party voted against issuing financial guarantees to support the Oslo bid, leading the country’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg declaring that there was not enough support to spend the estimated NOK35bn (US$5.4bn) on the Olympics.
In a statement, IOC accused the bidding team of “failing to convince and inform” politicians of the benefits of hosting the Olympics and called the cancellation a “missed opportunity” for the people of Norway.
In the tersely-worded statement, the IOC said: “This is a missed opportunity to make the most of the US$880m dollars investment the IOC would have made to the Games that would have built a considerable legacy for the people.
“In addition, national sponsorship rights granted by the IOC would have delivered a considerable sum and almost certainly substantially more than the 181 million dollars estimated in the bid. The most recent editions of the Olympic Winter Games (for instance Vancouver and Sochi), which have all either broken even or made a profit, have made sponsorship revenue four times higher than that.”
It has been suggested that the Norwegian media’s colourful reporting of the demands by IOC for Oslo – such as providing special lanes for Olympic traffic and hosting parties for IOC officials – had damaged public support for the bid. The public’s negative reaction to the media coverage of the perceived demands may have swayed politicians to vote against the bid.
The IOC said: “Earlier this year the Norwegian bid team asked for a meeting with the IOC for an explanation of all aspects of the IOC requirements, including the financial details, and the IOC arranged this for all three bid cities in order to ensure fair play amongst the three bids.
“Unfortunately, Oslo sent neither a senior member of the bid team nor a government official to this meeting. For this reason senior politicians in Norway appear not to have been properly briefed on the process and were left to take their decisions on the basis of half-truths and factual inaccuracies.”
The IOC will select the 2022 host city on July 31, 2015, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
If its bid is successful, Beijing – which staged the 2008 Olympics – will become the first city to host both summer and winter games.
Bid problems• Now reduced to a two-horse race, the bidding for the 2022 Games is seen as the most troublesome in modern Olympic history. Oslo is the fourth city to have cancelled its bid after submitting a formal bid in November 2013. The others are Krakow, Poland (bid cancelled in May 2014); Lviv, Ukraine (bid cancelled in June 2014); and Stockholm, Sweden (bid cancelled in January 2014).
