French Alps 2030 and Brisbane 2032 problems show Bach’s bidding reform has failed

The IOC's new bidding process introduced in 2019 by Thomas Bach was supposed to make choosing an Olympic Games host more flexible and sustainable but so far has led to only chaos and confusion

When Thomas Bach was first elected International Olympic Committee President in 2013 one of the things he pledged to revise was the bid process because it “produces too many losers,” he claimed.

Bach assumed power at the IOC not long after the Munich bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics he had led had been humiliated. The German city and the other candidate, Annecy in France, polled 25 and seven votes, respectively, as South Korea’s Pyeongchang earned nearly twice as many with 63 to win in the first round of the election at the IOC Session in Durban in 2011.

The experience undoubtedly fuelled Bach’s comments in 2016 when he said, “We have to take into consideration that the procedure as it now produces too many losers. You can be happy about a strong field in quantity for one day but you start to regret it the next day. It is not the purpose of an Olympic candidate city procedure to produce losers. It is to produce the best possible host for an Olympic Games. We will have to look into this.”

Bach also hated the circus that went with Olympic bids. The consultants and PR companies he believed were making extortionate amounts of money, the journalists asking too many awkward questions about whether hosting the Olympics was worth it and the fact that the massive growth of social media allowed citizens opposed to the Games to organise themselves more effectively than ever before, often resulting in embarrassing referendum defeats. Bach believed then, and still believes now, that the IOC are answerable to no-one.