I know I've said on numerous occasions that the host city selection is not that important ... but for the Winter Olympics geography does have a significant impact on the sporting competition. The rest of the choices were pretty dismal here, from what I can see.
The rest of the choices were pretty dismal here, from what I can see. 'cept maybe for the site in Spain, I'd agree. For that matter, what they have now ain't no chicken delight. Sochi has some winter sports infrastructure, but it's unclear if they really have the developed areas you need to host alpine skiing and snowboarding events, and you don't build that stuff overnight. Pyeongchang has hosted international competition in alpine and freestyle skiing, and probably snowboarding too, but the snow is pretty sketchy. Salzburg would be like the "Torino" Olympics, basically -- good mountains a bit of a drive out of town.
So the asterisk in the second link means that Pyeongchang was selected over Borjomi based on picking straws?! Seems odd to me; why not just have four cities downselected? Or two? Or, I'm reading it completely wrong.
Looks like the first link is broken.Borjomi was probably the weakest bid here. All the * means is "this list I'm giving you here is NOT in any ranked order, so don't read anything into the fact that we put Sochi first, OK?" Sorry about the busted link. Worked when I posted it...
I question the need for building a new billion-doller facility every four years. In this day and age the debt left behind after the Olympics is over, is huge. Have there not been enough world class facilities built in the last twenty years? It would seem to me that spending less money to upgrade existing facilities would make more sense. Why not have one summer and one winter Olympic facility on each continent and rotate between them. Just think how wonderful these permanently funded facilities could be.
The only real argument to be made against what you're saying, CB -- and it's a pretty weak one -- is that it would diminish the number of facilities available for non-Olympic (but still elite) competition in some sports where there isn't a commercial/paying-public crossover. Ice rinks and ski areas get plenty of use from the general public, but if you had only one Olympic site per continent, facilities for sports such as luge, bobsled, ski jump, and bike racing would become even fewer and farther between.
It would seem to me that spending less money to upgrade existing facilities would make more sense. What does sense have to do with it? But seriously, as long as cities are lining up to host the Olympics, this isn't going to change. Nobody's showing any sense on either side, here. Also, the IOC has been studying the escalating costs of hosting the Olympics for a long, long time. Check out the quote on page 3 of this IOC report... that's Pierre de Coubertin talking about the cost of venue construction in 1911.
Salzburg is a very beautiful area. I should know, I vacationed there once when I was stationed over in Germany. Great mountains, too. I fell down one once...
