2024 Olympic Finalists: 5 Cities Announced
The 2024 Summer Olympics will officially be hosted in one of the following five cities.
- Los Angeles, United States
- Budapest, Hungary
- Hamburg, Germany
- Paris, France
- Rome, Italy
The four European (and one American) cities were announced as finalists by the International Olympic Committee on Wednesday, and were described by the committee’s president, Thomas Bach, as “outstanding and highly qualified candidate cities.”
These five cities were already expected to bid, so there is no real surprise there. Two other possible candidates decided not to bid and did not submit their entries by Tuesday’s deadline, however. Those two cities were Toronto, Canada, and Baku, Azerbaijan.
Los Angeles has made its high hopes for hosting the 2024 Olympics widely known since it was first presented with the option to join the bid this past June. This would be L.A.’s third time ever hosting the Summer Olympics, having done so previously in 1932 and 1984. Boston was another U.S. city previously in the running, but fell through earlier this summer in July. There wasn’t enough support, both from the government and from the public, for them to move forward with their bid.
While finances are a bit of concern for Los Angeles, Bach has created a reform program called “Olympic Agenda 2020,” which is meant to keep the cost of hosting the Olympics down. According to Bach, Los Angeles and the other four cities have accepted the program with enthusiasm. The International Olympics Committee will also supposedly contribute over $1.5 billion to the organization committee of whatever city ends up hosting the event.
If the 2024 Olympics are held in Los Angeles, this will be the first time they take place in the United States since 1996, when they were held in Atlanta. However, the stakes are high for other cities, as well. The Olympics have not taken place in Rome since 1960, and if Paris were to win the bid, they’d hold the event exactly 100 years after their most recent 1924 hosting.
The two-year bidding process will now begin, with the final vote will take place in Lima, Peru, in September 2017. The host city contract and other documents needed for the bid have already been released. All five cities are expected to remain in the running up until the vote in Peru. This is unlike the 2022 Winter Olympics’ final vote, in which only two of the final cities remained. The others had pulled out previously due to either political reasons or financial issues. The winner of that vote, and the host of the 2022 Olympics, was Beijing, China.
[Image courtesy of Richard Heathcote / Getty Images]
