Five bid cities submit Application Files to host 2022 Olympic Winter Games

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The Applicant Cities of Krakow (Poland), Oslo (Norway), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Lviv (Ukraine) and Beijing (China)* all met the 14 March 2014 deadline for submission to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of their Application Files to host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.

The Application Files provide the IOC with an overview of each city’s vision and concept for the Games and form the basis for an initial technical analysis of the bid. It is the principal deliverable of Phase 1 of the bidding procedure.

These files will now be studied by an IOC-appointed working group, which will then submit a report to the IOC Executive Board (EB). The EB will decide which of the five cities will be accepted as Candidate Cities and proceed to Phase 2 at a meeting in July. Following its decision, the working group’s report will be published on the IOC website.

Applicant Cities may make their Application Files public and post them on their web sites as of 15 March.

As the Olympic Games are a unique project, whose size, scope and complexity mean that they are typically the biggest event that cities looking to host the Games will ever undertake, the IOC assists them in a number of ways, including financially and through an extensive transfer of knowledge programme.

The IOC puts at the disposal of the bid cities a significant amount of information and expertise through its Olympic Games Knowledge Management (OGKM) platform, which takes the form of documentation, experts, workshops and personal observation of previous Games. All five Applicant Cities for the 2022 Olympic Games participated in the Sochi 2014 observer programme last month. The programme allows cities to learn the best practices of previous hosts and to adapt those lessons to their own unique context. 

Once elected, the IOC continues to support the local organising committees through OGKM, as well as with the regular visits of its Coordination Commissions and experts, who help to guide the organisers, as they develop their Games project. All IOC-related costs (for accommodation, transport, etc.) are covered entirely by the IOC, as is the case during the Games themselves.  

The IOC makes a significant financial contribution to the organisation of each edition of the Games, where the budgets of Organising Committees for the Olympic Games are generally privately financed. For example, the IOC and its Worldwide Olympic Partners are expected to contribute around USD 590 million in total to the budget for the organisation of the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. To reduce the financial burden on the local organisers further, the IOC also assumes the responsibility and cost of the principal Olympic broadcast signal through its fully owned subsidiary Olympic Broadcasting Services SA (OBS). In Sochi this is expected to exceed USD 150 million.

Applicant Cities who move on to the Candidate City Phase of the bid process have until January 2015 to submit their Candidature Files – in-depth blueprints of the cities’ Olympic projects. The IOC President will then appoint an Evaluation Commission made up of IOC members (who are volunteers) and experts to visit each Candidate City and prepare a technical risk assessment to assist IOC members in electing the host city. This report will be made available to all IOC members ahead of a two-day briefing that provides the members with the opportunity to question the cities directly about their Olympic projects.

In line with the IOC’s commitment to transparency, all documents pertaining to the 2022 bid process are available to the public on www.olympic.org.

Key Dates:

Phase 1:

• Selection of Candidate Cities by the IOC Executive Board – 7-9 July 2014

Phase 2:

• Submission of the Candidature File & Guarantees – 7 January 2015
• IOC Evaluation Commission visits – February to March 2015
• Evaluation Commission report / Candidate City Briefing for IOC Members – May to June 2015 (TBC)
• Election of the 2022 host city by the IOC Session – Kuala Lumpur – 31 July 2015

* The cities are listed according to a drawing of lots carried out by the IOC EB in December 2013.

Note to editors:

The two bid phases (Applicant and Candidate) were introduced by the IOC in 2000 to ensure that cities insufficiently prepared or considered not to have the potential to successfully organise the Olympic Games in the year in question, did not proceed to the second phase of bidding, thus ensuring significant cost savings to both the bid cities and the IOC.

As part of its mission to continually monitor and improve the bid process, and following recommendations arising out of debrief meetings with previous bid cities, the IOC recently brought forward some technical matters and questions regarding existing conditions that would not change between the two phases from the Candidate City questionnaire to the Applicant City questionnaire. Phase 2 has thus become a logical continuation of Phase 1, rather than a new start.

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