‘Madrid should not bid for 2024 Games’

Mayor believes city has already benefitted from Olympic race.

MADRID: Madrid’s mayor said yesterday the Spanish capital should not bid for the 2024 Olympics after failing three times in a row to win the right to host the summer Games.

Olympic chiefs, who met in Buenos Aires on Saturday, chose Tokyo to host the 2020 Games after rejecting Madrid in the first round of voting, a decision that shocked many Spaniards.

Madrid also lost in its bids to host the summer Games in 2012 and 2016 as well as in 1972.



“I think at this moment the Olympic race has already provided us with all the benefits which we can expect from it in the coming years,” Madrid Mayor Ana Botella told reporters. “I believe that Madrid should not seek to host the Games in 2024.”

Madrid had tried to convince the International Olympic Committee that it could put on a memorable Games at a budget price amid a two-year recession that has sent the Spanish jobless rate spiralling above 26%.

‘Too early’ to talk about French 2024 bid: minister

French sports minister Valerie Fourneyron has refused to say whether the country will bid for the 2024 Olympics after Tokyo won the race for the 2020 edition.

Speaking in Buenos Aires, Fourneyron accepted that the unwritten rotation principle meant that awarding of the 2020 Games to the Japanese capital opened the way for another continent to host the event in 2024.

But she said, “Let’s be clear. It’s too early to say that France will be a candidate in 2024.”

After four failed bids to land the Games, the priority now was to work on feasibility studies and to improve  chances of a French bid, she added. “An Olympic bid isn’t only a technical bid about equipment and competition sites, it’s also a question of the social acceptability of the project for the country.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2013.

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