The Unlikely Place Bidding To Host The 2036 Olympics

Forbes

30-03-2025

The first great upset of the 2036 Olympics may be upon us already: it's the takedown of South Korean capital Seoul as a potential host of the Summer Games by a little-known rival 200 kilometers to the south.
Chances are you've never heard of North Jeolla Province. Also called Jeonbuk State, it is southwest South Korea, bordering the Yellow Sea. Its capital Jeonju, whose name translates to 'perfect region,' is many things at once. An urban space with a famous traditional Korean village at its center all set in the midst of an otherwise rural area, Jeonju is known for grand gastronomy and a yearly fashion show where the clothes are made entirely of paper.
North Jeolla's selection as South Korea's candidate for the 2036 Games comes as a surprise among those who figured Seoul was the obvious nominee. The capital hosted a successful Summer Games in 1988 and has the infrastructure in place to do it again. Yet 88 percent of international sports tournaments in South Korea in recent years have happened outside the capital, a fact North Jeolla's Governor Kim Kwan-young made the most of while talking up his region's bid.
One potential red flag: North Jeolla hosted a disastrous World Scout Jamboree in 2023, where 40,000 scouts from 155 nations gathered on reclaimed mud flats that had been converted to a campsite. Poor planning, bad weather, and unsanitary conditions contributed to illness and injuries before a typhoon upended the entire function. Ultimately scouts were evacuated to different cities, where other arrangements were hastily organized. A post-mortem of the event revealed organizers had been unprepared.
Nonetheless, Kim's team has convinced South Korean sports officials, who backed the province over the capital by a margin of 49-11 in a vote this month, sending North Jeolla soaring over the first hurdle toward official candidacy. All that's left is for government ministries to sign off on the project before paperwork can be submitted to the International Olympic Committee.
Persuasive arguments put forward by Kim included the fact that Australia, which will host the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane, has spread out its host cities to ensure development in three different parts of the country. Melbourne hosted in 1956, Sydney in 2000. It did not hurt that the governor was able to point out that Seoul is not as sport-centric as one might think: in recent years more than 88 percent of sports tournaments in South Korea have not taken place in the capital.
In proposing to hold different sports in different cities within the region (track and field in Daegu, swimming in Gwangju, gymnastics in Cheongju to name a few) North Jeolla has embraced a recent trend of Olympic decentralization that led to the French Alps being name as the host of the 2030 Winter Olympics. Part of Kim's argument was that hosting the Games would be a boon not just for one city but for an entire region, coloring it as a 'national project for regional development,' and thus good for the nation as a whole.
Even when hosted in a particular city, the Olympics do tend to reflect the spirit of a nation as a whole, at least in the eyes of viewers. Paris's mise-en-scene last summer was so quintessentially French that it was easy to equate the whole nation to the City of Light, despite the reality that life and culture outside the capital is often dramatically different than it is within. The same might be said of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 or London in 2012.
Though a date has not been set for choosing the 2036 Olympic host, it is unlikely to happen before 2026 at the earliest, IOC officials have said. Even the process for choosing the next summer Olympic host has yet to be fleshed out. The upcoming Games in Brisbane, as well as those in the French Alps and the 2034 Olympics in Salt Lake City, were essentially awarded by the IOC Executive Board in pre-negotiated deals. But in earlier times IOC members voted for the city they felt was best, lending an air of suspense to the proceedings but also opening the door to 'lobbying and also corruption" as outgoing IOC Thomas Bach put it bluntly in 2021.
If the new process has dispelled some of the drama around bidding, it has also streamlined the process and made it more sustainable. It will be up to new IOC President Kirsty Coventry to decide how the organization will go about picking the next host city, and whether she gives more power back to the wider IOC membership in making the call.
No matter how it is eventually decided, the race to host the 2036 Olympics is already shaping up to be one of the most intriguing in recent years.
Interested parties include Istanbul, whose Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu told Reuters that 'all 16 million Istanbulites are willing to host the Games,' as well as Santiago, Chile, which hosted the Pan American Games in 2023. Indonesia, which bid for 2032, has also pledged to try again for 2036. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which was chosen over Busan, South Korea to host the World Expo in 2030, is said to be interested, and India and Egypt may bid as well. Not all applicant cities will make it to the 'candidate stage' of the process.
The prospect of a Games in Africa has clearly interested the IOC, whose new President hails from Zimbabwe and is the continent's most decorated Olympian. But Coventry, unlike one of her challengers for the Presidency, has not gone so far as to guarantee that Africa will be attributed a Games during the next decade. Next year's Youth Olympic Games will be held in Dakar, Senegal, and is likely to be looked back on in deliberations about future bids.
Egypt already seems convinced that the 2036 Olympics may be out of reach. As he announced that the nation would bid for the Games, Mustapha Berraf, President of the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa, added that it would be trying for 2040 as well.