# Nobody wants to host the 2022 Winter Olympics **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [May 27, 2014, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387 "2014-05-27T17:34:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387/81 "2015-08-07T14:04:38Z")
Squaw Valley, California hosted the 1960 Winter Games, and that might even be less important than Lake Placid. But that was in the old days when the Olympics, and especially the winter games, were much smaller. ---
**Author:** ![ISiddiqui](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/97f17d/32.png) [@ISiddiqui](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ISiddiqui)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387/82 "2015-08-07T15:12:00Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > One would assume the same sort of internal politics that caused the USA to put forth Atlanta for 1996, despite Atlanta being a genuinely weird choice. What other country has ever proposed to host the Olympic Games in what might be, generously, its tenth-most-important city? Atlanta’s competition for the '96 games were Nashville, San Francisco, and Minneapolis (which was runner up). The Top 5 US cities didn’t bother to bid for it. Atlanta was determined to have the best potential infrastructure to host a games at the time (it also had a pretty good story of arising from the ashes of its racist past). ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2015, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387/83 "2015-08-07T16:48:52Z")
> [@OneCentStamp](#): > > Hey, Atlanta is a damn sight more important than Lake Placid (pop. 2500, closer to Montreal than to Boston or Buffalo), and Lake Placid has hosted two now. 😛 Winter Games sites, historically, were not necessarily held in big places, but rather in places where winter sports took place. The Winter Games are a very different thing in that they are, obviously, in need of cold weather and mountains, whereas you can hold the Summer Games basically anywhere someone’s willing to spend a lot of money. So if one looks at a list of Summer Games sites, it’s mostly great cities, usually a country’s greatest city (Seoul, London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo, Moscow, Helsinki, Sydney, and Montreal was Canada’s greatest city at the time, though it isn’t now) or on occasion second-greatest (Los Angeles, Barcelona, arguably Melbourne, and Melbourne and Barcelona are damn close to Sydney and Madrid In importance.) Atlanta, really, is a weird outlier in Olympics history; it is the one host city that is nowhere near being among its country’s greatest cities. Winter Games locations have mostly been “hey, here’s a place with mountains and snow.” Prior to recently, actually, most Winter Games were NOT in big towns; Sapporo is a big city, but places like Albertville, Lillehammer, Cortina d’Ampezzo and Innsbruck are just geographically appropriate. Squaw Valley isn’t even a town at all. It’s only recently that they’ve had a run of placing the Winter Games in bigger cities. ---
**Author:** ![kurtisokc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bbce88/32.png) [@kurtisokc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kurtisokc)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2015, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387/84 "2015-08-08T20:16:30Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Atlanta, really, is a weird outlier in Olympics history; it is the one host city that is nowhere near being among its country’s greatest cities. The other outliers are St. Louis [http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904\_Summer\_Olympics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_Summer_Olympics), and Los Angeles (which only ranking 5th in population among US cities when it first hosted in 1932)[http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest\_cities\_in\_the\_United\_States\_by\_population\_by\_decade#1930](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_States_by_population_by_decade#1930). I don’t think its a coincidence that they are all in the United States. There really aren’t very many other countries that are big enough to have multiple cities capable of hosting the summer games. BTW, the 1904 games were originally awarded to Chicago, but later moved to St. Louis. An description of these games makes for some interesting reading. It was only the 3rd time the Olympics were ever held, and obviously they hadn’t yet figured it all out. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nobody-wants-to-host-the-2022-winter-olympics/689387.md?page=4)