Barely beating out Qatar (just kidding).
It’s a good choice, better then yet another rich French mountain village, IMO.
So the Olympics will be held in Pyeongchang. What’s the over/under on how many times various TV people accidentally say Pyongyang?
The lady on NPR probably said it correctly this morning but it made me do a double take when I first heard it.
Didn’t Seoul have the summer games just a few cycles ago? I wonder if those are the closest sites to ever hold the summer and winter games.
I beleive so. Pyeongchang is 180 km from Seoul.
Nagano and Tokyo are just a little further apart.
Montreal and Lake Placid are about 110 miles apart.
If Munich had won, they’d have set an unbreakable record for that.
Anyone else ever wonder if we’ll ever see a Winter Olympics held in the Southern Hemisphere? Maybe New Zealand or Argentina? The latter would make NBC happy, but could lead to the oddity of trying to get Americans to watch winter sports in the middle of a summer heat wave. Also it’s probally seriously screw up training for the vast majority of teams.
Do New Zealand’s highest mountains conform to Olympic skiing standards?
And does Argentina even HAVE mountains? I thought it was primarily plains. Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru are where you get the Andes. And are those skiable?
Why would it make NBC happy?
And yeah, though it might seem fun to watch winter sports in summer, it probably would feel too weird.
Whoosh? Aconcagua is in the Argentinian part of the Andes, the highest mountain on the Western hemisphere. Argentinian geography
Granted, it doesn’t seem that winter olympic sports are the more popular sports in Argentina.
The whole border between Argentina and Chile runs along the Andes.
Bariloche is a major ski resort.
Paraguay has no significant mountains.
We had the Summer Olympics in Sydney, why would the Winter Olympics be more of a problem?
30 years by the time it actually happens.
Hmm, I stand corrected, I guess Argentina does. And Paraguay doesn’t.
The mountain thing and the snow thing, for two.
The winter sports are all coordinated to the northern winter. Sure, the indoor sports could be held anywhere, but the outdoor ones would have to be held in July or August in the south, and that would totally bollocks up everybody’s schedule. That’s when winter athletes rest and train, and it would screw up their sports something fierce if they had to somehow be at their peak at a different part of the calendar.
Not to mention that there are really only two southern countries that even have enough mountains and snow to hold the outdoor sports, Chile and New Zealand, and they’re a long way off the tourist track.
I think Argentina would make NBC happy (more than New Zealand) because it is similar time zone as USA. In New Zealand (and Korea) the featured events will be on approximately 12-18 hr time lapse for prime time coverage.
It’s a lovely area but it is going to have to do a lot of shaping up in terms of tourism. The only decent accommodation we could find there (we visited in spring) were for huge groups of people (like for company retreats). Plenty of seedy “love motels” though.
Every few years someone throws around the idea of NZ bidding for the Winter Olympics. About four or so years ago a some people tried to raise funding from business to put together an exploritory group and failed utterly.
The costs are just to big for a population of only 4 million, the risks are huge and the benifits questionable.