South Africa joins seven-nation race for the 2036 Olympics
The IOC confirmed the interested countries on Tuesday, with a shortlist due in March 2027 and a host assessed on funding and public support.
South Africa is one of seven countries now listed by the International Olympic Committee as interested in hosting the 2036 Summer Olympics. The IOC confirmed the group on Tuesday, and other countries have until October 31 to declare an interest of their own.
India, Qatar and South Africa are on the list, alongside Germany, Hungary, Turkey and South Korea. As eNCA reported on 6 October, the IOC issued the current list and set out the road ahead.
That road has two dated steps. Countries have until the end of October to add their names. In March 2027, the IOC Executive Board will draw up a shortlist, and those who make it will enter dialogue with the Olympic body.
The IOC has said the 2036 hosts will be assessed on factors including funding, and political and public support. Its president, Kirsty Coventry, put the athlete at the centre of the process. “Wherever the Games take place, one thing must never change: athletes have to be at the heart of everything we do,” she said in a statement. “That is why, for every future host, delivering the best possible experience for the athletes must always be the starting point.”
For a South African reader, the shape of this bid sits against a record that is real and checkable. South Africa hosted the 2010 football World Cup and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It has never hosted an Olympics. That is the gap the interest in 2036 would close, and it is a gap the country has been close to before. Cape Town bid for the 2004 Games, which went to Athens.
The competition is not a formality. India has stated its intention to host an Olympics for the first time, centred on Ahmedabad, the key city in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Ahmedabad will host the 2030 Commonwealth Games, a multi-sport event read as a rehearsal for an Olympics, and the city is home to the world’s largest cricket stadium. Germany’s national Olympic committee voted last month to select Munich as its candidate city, a century after the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Turkey hopes to go one better than Istanbul’s second place in the bidding for the 2020 Games. Qatar, which hosted the 2022 football World Cup, would have to move an Olympics later than the traditional July and August slot because of the heat.
After 2036 the calendar is already partly spoken for. Los Angeles has the 2028 Summer Games and Brisbane has been awarded the 2032 edition.
What an Olympics would mean for ordinary South Africans is a question the IOC’s own criteria put on the table. Funding, and political and public support, are the measures. Those are the same measures that decide whether a bid becomes a bill for taxpayers, and whether the stadiums and transport built for a Games are still useful a decade after the closing ceremony. The 2010 World Cup left the country a set of stadiums whose running costs have been a recurring item for the cities that own them. Any 2036 bid will be asked to show how it avoids repeating that, and the IOC’s assessment criteria give it a place to say so.
The Enquirer put the development to the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and to the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee, and asked what the country’s next step is, who would carry the bid, and how the funding and public support tests would be met. We will publish their answers when they come.
Source: eNCA, South Africa, India, Qatar among nations who want to host 2036 Olympics
