I just read this NY Times article, and I came upon this surprising statement:
Tehran was a serious contender? The Olympics might have taken place in a hardline theocracy at its height, in a developing country?
Can anyone tell me more about the bid, how seriously Iran took it, and how seriously the rest of the world took it?
And, if the Olympics were such a liability after money-losing debacles like Montreal, what did Lake Placid and Los Angeles hope to gain by bidding? Mere prestige?
As to “how seriously the rest of the world took it”, there’s a history of all the host city votes stretching back to 1936 here. As you can see, Teheran wasn’t on the short list.
Thanks for the link.
I read elsewhere that they withdrew their bid. But I’m curious if up until that time, they whipped the population into a nationalistic fervor, much like China did a few years ago, only to pull out when it looked like they might be defeated by the Great Satan.
And, up until they withdrew, was there significant support for their bid from other parts of the world?
Another important point is that it wasn’t Khomeini’s hard-line regime making the bid — the Shah was still in power in 1978 when the decision for the '84 Olympics was made. However, his grip on power was becoming increasingly tenuous at the time, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if the bid was withdrawn for precisely that reason.
That said, I’ll be quiet now and let someone who knows more than I do take the floor.
Los Angeles and Lake Placid had both hosted the Olympics before, so they probably saved a bit of money by not having to build all the needed venues from scratch. (Los Angeles reused the Coliseum and already had a basketball arena, Lake Placid used their existing bobsled run and ice arena.)
The summer games are on a bigger scale, so I don’t know if it’s fair to use the economic performance of Montreal as a predictor of the success of Lake Placid.
And now that I think of it, the sites for the 1980 games would probably have been selected and confirmed before 1976.
Tehran is actually a [(modern roads/buildings, big airport) and would probably be one of the larger ones to host games. Just because a country is developing doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have one big largely modern city (in fact this is probably the Third World standard).
After the Nazis hosting the '36 summer games & other bids like Beijing (single party mass execution state anyone?) this is hardly a surprsing choice based in politics. The developing world and the Islamic world participate all the time in the games and have gotten short shrift in the chance to host.
Not that hosting the Olympics is necessarily even a [URL=http://]http://sport.guardian.co.uk/london2012/story/0,14213,1405799,00.html](]huge city[http://tehran.stanford.edu/imagemap/tehran.html[/URL) .
Egad, link troubles on my end!
"huge city " for the first and "good deal for the host " on the second.
If we’re going to consider Olympic host cities “controversial” because of global disputes about the nation’s politics, I think every city would be disqualified.