In a few hours’ time, IOC President Thomas Bach will announce either China’s capital, Beijing, or Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, as the host of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Here are some reasons why China should be confident of success – and some reasons to worry:
Why Beijing will win
PEOPLE. There are not quite 1.3 billion reasons why Beijing will win, but Chinese President Xi Jinping has claimed that 300 million people will take up winter sports should Beijing win the Games. Misleading Chinese stats is a particularly bugbear of these pages, and that number seems extraordinarily high at first glance – plucked, as it is, from thin air – but even applying the Weibo rule and dividing by ten, 30 million participants have the potential to revolutionize the winter sports industry.
EXPERIENCE. Beijing is in the unique position of having held an Olympic Games in the very recent past, so a number of people who were directly involved in the success of 2008 will be directly involved in making sure 2022 is an equal success. The 2014 Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing didn’t hurt either. In short, the IOC voters know that China has what it takes to put on a great show.
TELEVISION. Don’t underestimate the power of television networks – led, of course, by NBC’s billions – to influence decisions of this nature. If you think that NBC executives would want Almaty to win out over Beijing, you are either certifiably insane or Kazakh. Visually, Almaty’s stunning panorama would trump China’s brown mountains, but the depth and range of feature stories produced for an American audience would be far, far greater in China.