Olympic hopefuls
Thursday June 24, 2010 - Email this article to a friend

The International Olympic Committee, IOC, has formerly announced that the German city of Munich, Annecy in France and PyeongChang in South Korea have all been selected as Candidate Cities.

The IOC Executive Board  took the decision unanimously at its meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In an unusual move it asked Annecy to review its venue concept, which does not perhaps bode well for the French bid.

However, Annecy does now know one of the areas in which it has to improve its bid and that may well be an advantage.

'The Executive Board decided that all three Applicant Cities deserved to move to the second phase of the bidding procedure," said IOC Olympic Games Executive Director, Gilbert Felli.

"It has been made clear, however, that Annecy needed to review its project. We look forward to working with the three Candidate Cities and wish them good luck for the year of competition ahead."

The three cities now have until 11th January 2011 to submit their proposals to the IOC.

An IOC Evaluation Commission will also visit each Candidate City.

There will be numerous other hurdles to overcome and criteria to be met.

The final decision will be made by the full IOC membership on 6th July 2011 in Durban, South Africa.

Olympic hopeful, Britain's Ed Drake

Some people do though wonder why resorts want to hold the Winter Olympics in the first place.

Our content editor, James Cove, reported on these doubts form Salt Lake City for the BBC way back in 2002. 

Vancouver was deemed a great success, but whether it brings any more skiers and snowboarders to Whistler/Backcomb in the long-term is questionable.

When the games themselves were on tourist numbers were down.

Cypress Mountain will also be remembered in many people's minds as having poor snow.

It had the worst snow conditions for many years and it had to be brought in by lorry and helicopter even though later in the winter it had record-breaking conditions.

The media's attention had switched elsewhere; except us at PlanetSKI!

None of that seems to stop cities and resorts wanting the Winter Olympics and Munich, Annecy and PyeongChang will be slugging it out over the coming months.

We'll keep you posted on how it develops.

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