I mean the 7,000 pages of demands from the IOC to the hosts. Touched on here by John Oliver.
Under “Olympic Agenda 2020”, they are reforming the bidding process. Here is a 25-page PDF summary of the recommendations. The document is vague, but I think after the fiasco with the bidding on the 2022 Winter Games, they realized something has to change. It’s gotta hurt that the only bidders left standing were Almaty and Beijing and that natural winter venues like Oslo and Stockholm dropped out. Beijing is trying create a winter sports tradition and industry from scratch.
And yet here Toronto is seriously considering a bid for 2024.
And after Boston dropped out of the bidding for the 2024 Summer Games, Los Angeles might try for it. They have an advantage in that many venues already exist. (But I would have thought that would have been true in Boston as well.) It’s not a good thing that major American cities like New York or Chicago don’t really try for the Games.
New York and Chicago both were in the running within the last couple of selection cycles. LA, SF, and DC were bidding along with Boston this time. The alleged attraction of the Boston bid was based on low cost from using existing college facilities in a make-do fashion, but what killed it was lack of planning and the IOC’s expectation that local government would cover any overruns, of whatever size (ever hear of the Big Dig? I know you have). The idea of shutting an already-congested city down for several weeks, after years of disruption from construction of a temporary stadium and transit upgrades (ha!), with the whole process being something a few promoters put together in private without working to build grassroots support or even actively discussing their ideas publicly, was the reason for such strong opposition.
LA always did seem like the obvious choice anyway, even if it will cost as much to rebuild the Coliseum as it would to build something new.
I would jump for joy if its in LA. The last time I was too young to appreciate it, and having read about how LA ran the games, I’m fairly confident we can do it again. And this time I’ll get to go to some events! A lot of our infrastructure was already in the process of being updated like expanding metro lines, bus lines, and some stadiums. By 2024, if we do get it, it would be completely done and up and running
So is Reno/Sacramento.
I wonder if Beijing is going to build all-new facilities or can they fix up the crumbling facilities that are currently rotting after the Summer Games?
I don’t think it would be that hard. The winter games are less intensive. The skiing events require damn little. Build a few indoor arenas for the skating events, revamp the bird nest stadium for the ceremonies and they’re good to go.
My understanding that Beijing doesn’t have snow-covered mountains suitable for ski runs and that they’re going to use snow making equipment to produce it. And just how far from the city are the mountains?
Whoops, I meant Reno/Sacramento are looking for the 2026 Winter Games.
(Emphasis mine.) They require damn little assuming you have snow. 
The plan is that most of the skating events will, indeed, be held in venues left over from the 2008 Summer Games. And while I don’t personally know how much they have been utilized, I doubt that they have been “rotting.”
I don’t know about that. The Sochi games were ridiculously expensive. A sliding track for the bobsleigh/luge/skeleton has to cost a small fortune. You need at least two skating facilities to hold figure skating and hockey within the two weeks of the games. Don’t know if the Olympics require a dedicated facility for curling or if they can use a (third) converted skating rink. Speed skating always seems to be held indoors since about Calgary, so that’s a 400-meter track (same size as the summer games track), with all the pipes and cooling to freeze it, and a building to house it. And a couple of ski jumps.
There’s a lot of infrastructure for a Winter Olympics, and it’s very specialized so you can’t re-purpose it when the Games are done.
The impression I got was that there was no reason that the Sochi games needed to be that expensive. Billions were lost in corruption. And the Russians also built up Sochi, ostensibly for the Games, but, as I understand it, in the long run as a destination resort.
Almaty, Kazakhstan is surrounded by huge mountains and experiences 30ish high temperatures during the winter.
Beijing actually has numerous ski resorts around the city; that said, the winter window is extremely short, I visited there in March one year and the temperatures were well into the 70s the entire week.
So which sporting event is responsible for givlng us the far more odious Barack Hussein Obama and his bankrupt city of Chicago?
Let’s try not to make this into a political discussion/debate.
I wonder why China didn’t try to go with Harbin, a seemingly more suitable city.
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?
It’s entirely possible Beijing was picked solely for the honor of making it the only city to host a Summer and Winter Games. Symbolism and prestige are most important to a dictatorship than they are to a democracy.
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.