admin The International Olympic Committee will be accompanied by their counterparts, the Japanese Olympic Committee officials, to assess the Japanese city’s bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. This follows a trip to fellow contender Salt Lake City which took place at the end of April, and an ongoing Vancouver visit.
The goal of this trip is to provide feedback to the Future Host Commission for the Olympic Winter Games on the locations that will be used for these events. These are located on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. The Committee will assess the operations, conditions and sizes of these venues and decide whether they are suitable or not.
Formal discussions are not expected to take place during this visit.
The Sapporo bid plan comprises a total of 13 venues for the main sporting competitions, as well as the Sapporo dome for the opening and closing ceremonies.
Although it is proposed that the sliding ceremonies take place at the 1998 Winter Olympics host city Nagano in the Chūbu region in the centre of Japan’s main island Honshū, no official visit by the IOC has been planned.
The 2030 Winter Olympics are set to be the first one in which the IOC is directly in talks with the selected countries; a more traditional approach is a bidding race.
The IOC’s Future Host Commission then determines and proposes its recommended candidate to the Executive Board. It is then decided whether the bid is put forward to a vote at an IOC session.
The Mayor of Sapporo city, Katsuhiro Akimoto, has recently announced plans to establish a Promotion Committee in order to advance the bid. Sapporo is currently being considered as a strong contender.
Unlike the 2020 Olympics during which there were widespread protests over inflating costs and a surge in Covid-19 cases, this time the polls show a “certain amount of support”. This survey was conducted among 10,000 citizens.
This is not the first time Sapporo is organising such a big event, or even the Olympics. The Winter Olympics in 1972, and the Asian Winter Games in 1986, 1990 and 2017 were all held in Sapporo. On top of that, it has also hosted football matches, the marathons and race walking events at Tokyo 2020.
The main competitors of Sapporo are Salt Lake City which held the 2002 Olympics, Vancouver that hosted the 2010, and Barcelona where the 1992 Summer Olympics took place, in conjunction with the Pyrenees.
No visit has yet been scheduled to Barcelona by the IOC due to disagreements between the parties involved.
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