Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung announced in April that the country would withdraw from hosting the 2019 Asian Games, citing a lack of preparedness and concerns that the event would not be financially viable.
The Vietnamese capital of Hanoi was awarded the Games in November 2012 ahead of the Indonesian city of Surabaya. However, following a crisis meeting with officials, Dung confirmed that Vietnam would relinquish its hosting rights in order not to damage its reputation.
Vietnam’s decision has since opened up a bidding race for the Asian Games, with the 2014 edition due to commence in Incheon, Korea on Friday. Sheikh Ahmad said that the appointment of the Indonesian capital of Jakarta as the new host will be formally ratified at an OCA General Assembly meeting in Korea on Saturday.
“In less than one month, Indonesia was there ready to host it,” he told the Reuters news agency. “We have solved the issues with other cities and we have a good agreement (so) let’s leave it to Indonesia because it was the competitor to Vietnam at the last vote. So Indonesia has to have the priority to host.”
However, the 18th Asian Games will be brought forward a year to 2018 because the Indonesian presidential election will take place in 2019. The date change still has to be approved by the general assembly, but Sheikh Ahmad said he expected the following edition would be held in 2023 then every four years to avoid clashing with the winter Olympics and football’s Fifa World Cup.
“It was decided the Asian Games would move from 2014 and 2018, to 2014 and 2019 because it would be good preparation for the Olympics,” he said. “But because Indonesia will have a presidential election in 2019 the requirement was to host it in 2018, which we don’t mind… but we have to give it to the general assembly to approve.”
Jakarta previously staged the Asian Games in 1962, and Indonesia held the Southeast Asian Games in 2011. The Chinese city of Guangzhou (pictured) hosted the most recent edition of the Asian Games in 2010.
Last month, the OCA’s vice-president Wei Jizhong endorsed Indonesia’s readiness to host the Asian Games.
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Category: Event Bidding
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Jakarta set to be confirmed as Asian Games host
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CAF lines up Cup of Nations hosts through to 2023
Cameroon and Ivory Coast were awarded the hosting rights for the 2019 and 2021 editions of the event, but the decision to grant the 2023 tournament to Guinea came as a shock.
Guinea tabled a bid to host either the 2019 or 2021 tournaments, with Conakry, Kankan, Labe and Nzerekore set to serve as the host cities.
Although the country has never hosted the Cup of Nations before, a CAF spokesperson told UK public-service broadcaster the BBC that Guinea’s impressive presentation “and commitment” had led the confederation to “exercise its power to make an immediate decision” to award the 2023 hosting rights.
Cameroon and Ivory Coast are established football nations and both have hosted the tournament on one previous occasion.
Cameroon, which staged the event in 1972, will use host venues in Bafoussam, Douala, Garoua and Yaounde in 2019.
The Ivory Coast hosted the tournament in 1984. The country will host matches across the cities of Abidjan, Bouake, Korhogo, San Pedro and the capital Yamoussoukro in 2021.
In January, CAF announced that a total of six bids were submitted for the 2019 Cup of Nations, from Algeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, DR Congo and Zambia, while three countries – Algeria, Ivory Coast and Guinea – tabled offers to stage the 2021 edition. DR Congo withdrew its bid two months ago.
However, the host of the 2017 Cup of Nations has still not been decided after Libya gave up its hosting rights due to security concerns in the country.
CAF, which has set a deadline of September 30 for bids, is expected to make a decision next year. Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Zimbabwe have all expressed an interest in bidding.
Nigeria (pictured) won the most recent edition of the Cup of Nations in South Africa in 2013, and Morocco will host the 2015 tournament from January 17 to February 8. -
EHF Euro hosts decided as men’s event expanded for 2020
The EHF Congress in Dublin, Ireland decreed that Croatia will host the 2018 men’s event, while France will stage the 2018 women’s tournament.
The women’s Euro 2020 will head to Denmark and Norway, but it is the men’s event in the same year that will undergo a major hosting revamp.
The EHF last month revealed details of Sweden, Austria and Norway’s proposal to co-host the 2020 European Championships, with the organisation stating that its flagship men’s national team event was “likely” to be the first involving 24 teams and held in three countries.
In February, the EHF Executive agreed to submit a motion to the EHF Congress in Dublin for an expansion of the men’s European Championships from 16 teams to 24 as of 2022. In considering the changes, the Executive acknowledged that an expansion of the event would result in a need to strengthen the quality of youth national teams throughout Europe.
The federation added that expansion would also open up possibilities for nations to host one or more rounds of the EHF Euro for the first time.
However, the Executive also said that should an agreement be reached at the September 19-20 meeting, these plans could be advanced to the 2020 competition. This goal has now been realised.
Under the co-hosting plan, the three organisers plan to hold the championship in six different cities and venues, with the Euro 2020 final set to be played in front of 24,000 fans in Stockholm’s Tele 2 Arena, a multi-purpose stadium with a retractable roof.
The six preliminary round groups shall be played in the Austrian cities of Vienna and Graz, the Norwegian city of Trondheim and the Swedish cities of Malmö and Gothenburg. The main round shall take place in Vienna and either Malmö or Gothenburg before heading to Stockholm for the finale.
Norway and Denmark also co-hosted the women’s EHF Euro in 2010, while France hosted the 2001 World Championship and the 2007 women’s World Championship. Croatia staged the men’ EHF Euro in 2000 and also hosted the women’s World Championship in 2003 and the men’s World Championship in 2009. -
Bergen to stage cycling’s 2017 Road World Championships
Bergen overcame competition from Innsbruck, Austria; Melbourne, Australia and the Colombian capital Bogota.
The 84th staging of the UCI Road Worlds will take place from September 17-24, 2017 and Bergen’s successful candidature was confirmed at the 2014 championship in Ponferrada.
The Spanish city will wrap up this year’s event on Sunday, before it heads to Richmond, USA and the Qatari city of Doha in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
Speaking to the Procycling.no website, UCI president Brian Cookson hailed Bergen for producing “by far the best application” out of the four that the governing body received.
He added: “We are very pleased that Bergen has delivered a strong application and we know the city will deliver what it has have promised, As with all international federations, we require host cities to have the money and resources to do a good job with the championship.
“We are looking for a place where cycling is strong, has the potential for growth and can help strengthen cycling’s reputation. But most of all we are looking for candidates that can host an excellent event for riders, fans and the teams that work around the riders.”
Elsewhere, the UCI has awarded three more of its flagship events.
The 2016 World Cycle Tour Final will be staged in Perth, Australia, while the 2017 editions of the Cyclo-cross World Championships and MTB Marathon World Championships are to take place in Sanem, Luxembourg and Singen, Germany respectively.
The hosting decisions were reached at a two-day meeting of the UCI Management Committee and Cookson said: “I am delighted that we are taking cycling to even more people around the world. All these developments show the direction we are heading and, while there is still much to do, we are beginning to see the benefits of our efforts to restore trust in the UCI.”
Earlier in the week, the UCI announced that the season-ending Tour of Beijing has been left off the 2015 WorldTour road race calendar. -
Lucerne targets winter Universiade after Youth Olympics disappointment
Lucerne’s proposal for the 2021 Universiade is set to move forward after receiving backing from the government of the canton of Lucerne.
The local organising committee could base a dossier around its planned bid for the 2020 Youth Olympic Games, which was dropped by the Swiss Olympic Association before it was submitted.
The Swiss Olympic Association instead decided to choose Lausanne for its tilt at the Youth Olympics. Lausanne is facing competition from Romanian city Brasov, with the host due to be decided at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) meeting in Kuala Lumpur in July 2015.
Under the Universiade proposal, the host city of the event would be Lucerne with the various competitions run in central Switzerland’s winter sports resorts.
“This event is very interesting in terms of both sports and value creation,” Health and Social Services Minister Guido Graf said. “The cantons of central Switzerland, Lucerne as a university town and tourism destination can only profit from the winter Universiade.”
The Swiss University Sport Federation (SHSV) has also pledged its support for the bid with director Leonz Eder adding: “Central Switzerland submitted an excellent application document for the 2020 Youth Olympic Games. It is a perfect basis for the organisation of the 2021 Winter Universiade.”
The 2015 winter Universiade will be co-hosted by Granada, Spain and the Slovak cities of Štrbské Pleso and Osrblie. The event will then travel to Almaty, Kazakhstan and Krasnoyarsk, Russia in 2017 and 2019. -
Sir Craig Reedie’s respect and regret for Oslo
The exit of yet another European city yesterday from the bidding contest for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games is regrettable, but the remaining candidates are strong and the bidding procedure is still the best in the world, IOC Vice President Craig Reedie told HOST CITY on Thursday.
“I regret the Oslo decision. But it’s their call and you have to respect their decision,” he said. “It would have been nice to have a Games in Oslo, in a real centre of winter sport.”
On Wednesday Oslo followed Stockholm, Krakow and Lviv in retracting its candidature for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, leaving Beijing and Almaty as the remaining candidates. Munich and St. Moritz had withdrawn from the race before the applicant stage.
The party with the largest membership in Norway’s coalition government failed to gain a majority support for Oslo’s bid, with cost being cited as the primary concern – despite the country’s large sovereign wealth fund and a plan to use existing winter sports infrastructure.
“A number of cities decided not to go ahead because of domestic decisions taken in those countries, which were presented on the basis of a whole range of issues, some of which were cost,” Sir Craig Reedie told HOST CITY.
“I’m not sure that cost was a particular item in Munich’s decision or if people decided to do something else with their time and their efforts. If that’s the case then certainly the IOC has to look at the situation closely and find out if what they are currently doing is sustainable.
“There is an obligation on the IOC to present the benefits in a better way. We really have to prove that the recent Games have in the main all broken even with a small surplus. London was a good example – a small surplus run by a private company. And the infrastructure and stadium costs built by public money came in below the original estimates and will last for generations.
“We need to get that message across, so that future cities who are considering bids understand the difference. And the IOC makes an enormous contribution to the organising committee’s budget: the estimate for the 2022 Games was US$880.”
Reedie is confident that Beijing and Almaty are good potential host cities. “They passed the examination of the technical working group; they went from candidate city to applicant city. We’ve had a good hard look at them; with certain minor modifications, I think the technical people in the IOC are happy that good Winter Games can be had in both.”
There is no risk of Beijing or Almaty withdrawing due to cost concerns. “Neither of the other two cities have a financial issue,” Reedie said.
“The Chinese say they have a very happy memory of the Beijing Games and they can see doing it again. The Youth Games in Nanjing were terrific; they are clearly very committed to the Olympic movement and see the opportunity of developing winter sport in their country.
“In Kazakhstan they see the opportunity of the Games being a catalyst for their city and country, in a way that nothing else ever could be.
“So I pretty certain that they both will go ahead and impress the evaluation commission; they will produce good bid books and we’ll have good contest to decide in Kuala Lumpur.”
The bidding process will not change – yet
The bidding process for the 2022 Games will not change even though there are just two candidates left.
“You can’t change the rules of the game halfway through the game simply because one city has decided not to go ahead. So we’re happy to have both of them,” Sir Craig Reedie told HOST CITY.
How the IOC will run its bidding process beyond 2022 is currently under review, as part of the Olympic Agenda 2020.
One suggestion made by four European National Olympic Committees was that the recommendations of evaluation commissions should count as votes in the host city elections. “Having chaired the last evaluation commission, I thought our report was very accurate and we pointed out plusses and minuses for all three cities, so nobody could remotely say they hadn’t been informed,” said Reedie.
“That said, one of the strengths that the IOC has is that 100 plus members actually decide, and when you’ve got that number of people deciding, you are probably on a much safer basis in terms of the quality of the decision.
“I think at the moment the IOC has the best election process in world sport. People may think that’s a funny thing to say when a perfectly valid potential city has withdrawn, but it’s just as valid now as it was yesterday. It is an excellent and highly authoritative system. Now whether that system will proceed going forward is what we are going to discuss over the next few months, and no doubt we will discuss in London on 28th October.
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ASO rejects Thailand’s Tour de France claims
TAT governor Thawatchai Arunyik told the Reuters news agency today (Thursday) that he had held encouraging talks with ASO chairman Etienne Amaury over the possibility of holding the Grand Depart in 2016.
This was a stance that ASO quickly refuted, confirming that Thailand could be in line to host a one-day race in association with the Tour – as has recently happened in Japan – but stating that there are no plans to take the race itself so far afield.
“There are talks indeed but not to bring the Tour to Thailand,” an ASO spokesman told Reuters. “There are discussions to settle in Thailand via a criterium, just like we did in Japan with the Saitama Criterium by Le Tour de France.”
Gaining a criterium would be a significant development for cycling in Thailand, even if it represents something of a step down from Arunyik’s earlier claims.
“We are still talking with Tour de France organisers but we are looking at the next fiscal year. So 2016, not 2015,” he had said.
“We’re not sure yet how many stages we will hold, whether it is one or two stages or the whole competition. This is something that still needs to be discussed.
“Thailand is the perfect location for this highly prestigious competition, not to mention that cycling as a sport is enjoying enormous popularity here at the moment.”
Last year’s rapturously received opening stages in Yorkshire, England marked the 20th occasion in the Tour de France’s 101-year history that it has started on foreign soil, although these excursions have been limited to western European countries.
Utrecht will host the Grand Depart in 2015 – the sixth time the Tour de France will have started in the Netherlands. -
Argentina looks to Olympic Games bid
The COA is currently pressing ahead with preparations for Buenos Aires’ staging of the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, with the event being seen as a potential springboard for a tilt at the Olympic Games itself.
In a statement, the COA said that it would be “an honour” to bid for either edition of the Games and pinpointed Patagonia, utilising the Andes Mountains, as a potential option for a winter Olympics.
An Argentine winter Olympics would break new ground for the International Olympic Committee, with the event having never previously set foot outside the Northern Hemisphere.
Argentina’s last bid for the summer Games saw Buenos Aires eliminated in the first round of voting as Athens went on to clinch the 2004 event. The Games will take to South America for the first time in 2016 when Rio de Janeiro hosts the event in Argentina’s regional rival, Brazil.
The COA’s statement comes after the IOC last week praised Buenos Aires’ hosting plans for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, which will focus on engaging with the city’s sizeable inner-city population. The IOC stated that the city had already made “impressive headway” in its preparations for the event, which concluded its second edition in Nanjing, China on August 28.
Buenos Aires was awarded the 2018 Youth Olympics in July 2013. The city beat Colombian city Medellin by 49 to 39 votes in the second round of voting by IOC members. In the first round, Scottish city Glasgow was eliminated after getting only 13 votes, compared to 40 for Buenos Aires and 32 for Medellin. -
Chicago ends NFL Draft’s long run in New York
A major event in the US sporting calendar, the NFL Draft is the selection process where the league’s teams secure the cream of the nation’s talent from the college American football system.
From April 30 until May 2, the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University will host Chicago’s first draft since 1964, the year before it began a long-time residency in New York.
Radio City Music Hall has provided an iconic setting for the NFL Draft since 2006 but a scheduling conflict encouraged the league to seek pastures new.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said: “We look forward to returning the event to the city of Chicago and working with the city, Choose Chicago, and the Chicago Sports Commission to create a week-long celebration of football for our fans. Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel and the city of Chicago presented us with numerous ways to enhance the Draft experience for our fans and incoming players.”
Chicago also hosted the draft in 1938, from 1942 to 1944, 1951 and 1962 to 1964. The 2015 NFL Draft will be the 80th edition.
Emanuel added: “Next year, NFL fans from across the country will travel here or tune in as the future of their team is decided in Chicago. We look forward to working with the Chicago Bears, the NFL, and our neighbourhood partners to make this an event that highlights our world class city and reinvests in our communities.”
A record-breaking audience of 45.7 million people tuned in across the NFL Network, ESPN and ESPN2 to watched Houston Texans make Jadeveon Clowney the first overall pick in 2014, surpassing the previous best audience figure of 45.4 million for 2010.
Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Los Angeles have also hosted the NFL Draft in the past. -
Italy’s Supercoppa to be held in Doha
Lega Serie A, the governing body of the top division of Italian football, has announced that Doha will host the game between Serie A champion Juventus and Coppa Italia holder Napoli on December 22.
Serie A president Maurizio Beretta said that the agreement is for this year’s game only at present. He added at the press conference to announce the deal in Paris, France: “We are grateful for the opportunity to be able to export our Supercoppa to an interesting and prestigious country like Qatar.”
The announcement comes with Fifa continuing to debate when Qatar will stage its World Cup. Last month, football’s global governing body put forward January/February 2022 and November/December 2022 as alternative dates, as opposed to the tournament’s traditional June/July slot.
Fifa has previously said that the World Cup should be moved to the winter to enable players and spectators to cope with the stifling summer temperatures in the Middle East. The local organising committee has repeatedly insisted that it is prepared to stage the tournament in its normal summer window by using air conditioned stadia. Fifa’s taskforce on the matter is scheduled to meet again in November.
The Supercoppa Italiana has traditionally marked the opening of the Italian football season, but the league has taken it to a variety of markets in recent years. The Supercoppa Italiana was held in Beijing in 2009, 2011 and 2012; New York in 2003; the Libyan capital of Tripoli in 2002 and Washington D.C. in 1993.
Juventus won the 2013 Supercoppa, defeating Coppa Italia holder Lazio 4-0 in Rome.