Bidding for the Olympics is a tricky business. If you win the right to host the Games, you expose your city to billions of television viewers for three weeks (and, by extension, months beforehand). You also have to deal with the headaches that come with hosting the world’s biggest party: cost overruns and security risks, not to mention the anger and opposition of local residents.
Yet cities continue to pursue their Olympic dreams. Nearly every major global metropolis – Beijing, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, etc. – has attempted to host the Games at one time or another, with varying degrees of success.
And then there are the Olympic misfits, those cities far removed from the jet-set crowd that dared to dream of a home on NBC. In many cases (if not all), their dreams are futile, and the International Olympic Committee will look elsewhere. But these cities lived up to the Olympic ideal. They did their best.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the ten most unusual cities that have aimed for the stars: five of them have bid for the Summer Olympics and five for the Winter Olympics.
You may be scratching your head at this choice: hasn’t Sarajevo earn? It is, and it doesn’t change the incredible fact that Yugoslavia had never won a Winter Olympic medal when Sarajevo beat out Sapporo, Japan, and Gothenburg, Sweden, to the Games in 1978. Alpine skier Jure Franko put his country on the list in 1984 by winning silver in the giant slalom.
When Sarajevo, now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, decided to bid to host the 2010 Olympic Games, had the country’s situation changed? No. Since its independence, Bosnia and Herzegovina has never won a medal at the 2010 Olympic Games. any of them Olympic Games – summer or winter.
Many large American cities decimated by deindustrialization could be moved there (Baltimore in 1948, Detroit seven times, and St. Louis in 1904), but the Forest City is the best choice. Cleveland wanted to host the 1916 Games, which were held in Berlin but canceled because of World War I, and the 1920 Games, which were held in Antwerp, Belgium.
Contrary to a persistent local urban myth, the city has not not build Cleveland Stadium (the longtime home of the Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Guardians) to host the 1932 Olympic Games, which were awarded to Los Angeles.
It’s not that Lviv has failed to achieve this. On the one hand, the city’s population of 717,500 is huge, which is not the case for all winter candidates. Ukraine had planned to turn an abandoned military ski resort into a Nordic skiing destination.
It’s just that… well, after failing to make the IOC shortlist, Ukraine’s hands were tied to the winter of 2022. With reports linking the timing of Russia’s invasion to the Beijing Winter Olympics, this host decision could have arguably changed the course of history.
Cuba has always had good results at the Olympic Games: with 235 medals, the country is ahead of Hungary, Romania and Poland among the countries that have never organized an Olympic Games. The city of Havana experienced considerable growth between the two world wars, which made it reasonable to bid for the organization of the Games, which were finally won by Antwerp.
The 2008 and 2012 bids were particularly unusual, given the long-standing U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Longtime President Fidel Castro had enthusiastically asked to host the Olympics “with the third world countries that have never been given such a right in mind,” but would the Americans and their allies have even responded?
Poprad had a compelling bid that drew on several neighbouring cities, and Slovakia is bigger than you might think (300,000 more people live there than in Norway, a two-time winter host).
Several factors worked against this decision, however, including the fact that when Czechoslovakia split, the first syllable attracted most of the winter sports talent (Slovakia did not win its first winter medal as an independent country until 2006).
One of the undeniable advantages of the Winter Olympics is that you don’t have to be very big to participate: the United States has previously presented Anchorage (1992 and 1994), Colorado Springs (1956) and Duluth (1932) as potential host cities.
Georgia is little (its population is only 3.7 million). Borjomi is little (The resort has a population of about 11,000.) That this dream of a bid could come to fruition is incredible, something the country’s powerful have readily acknowledged. More on the smaller nations trying to host the Winter Olympics later.
In 1979, San Juan hosted the Pan American Games, which is about the closest you can get to hosting the Olympics without actually hosting them (Indiana men’s basketball coach Bob Knight was accused of assaulting a police officer there).
The Olympics, however, are a whole different story, as San Juan found out after an early elimination. New York Times As the article pointed out, the Puerto Rican capital submitted its bid for the Games knowing that Puerto Rico’s accession to statehood would likely liquidate the island’s Olympic independence.
Back to the point that you don’t have to be big to host the Winter Olympics, because you TO DO Ireland has always wanted to host the Summer Olympics, which is a problem for Ireland, which has always been keen to host the Games, because nothing is very big in Ireland.
Such was the case in Dublin, which had only 500,000 inhabitants in 1936 and lost to Berlin during the Nazi era. Furious at the IOC’s restrictions on its Olympic committee’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland, the Irish ended up staying home that year.
A few American cities have a population larger than the national population of Andorra (79,034): New Rochelle (New York), Mountain View (California), Champaign (Illinois) and 20 stadiums. Despite frequently sending a handful of athletes to the Winter Games, Andorra has never won a medal.
And yet. The Olympics are about dreams, and the Andorrans dreamed big by proposing a multinational bid for the 2010 Games (France could have helped them). Despite these clever badges, the hard-to-reach city was not selected, not appearing on the list of finalists.
It should be noted at the outset that Indonesia is a particularly worthy country to host the Olympic Games, given its massive population (fourth largest in the world) and its solid competitive record (37 medals, mainly in badminton and weightlifting).
The problem is that Nusantara, the city where Indonesia wants to host the Games,does not currently exist.
Read this sentence again.
Nusantara is a planned city (along the lines of Brasilia and Canberra, two candidate cities in 2000) that is being built to replace Jakarta, which is struggling with the effects of climate change, as Indonesia’s national capital. It will officially open on August 17.
Nusantara’s Olympic bid, which is not, strictly speaking, the first to be created from scratch, offers us all a valuable lesson: build the Olympic host city you want the world to see.