Qatar wants to host Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2036
The Middle East nation hosted the men's football World Cup in 2022.
'This move underscores the State of Qatar's unwavering commitment to supporting the Olympic and Paralympic Movements and its keen interest in playing an active role in the advancement of global sport,' a QOC statement said.
Staging a Summer Games in the searing heat of the Middle East may require a move out of the event's traditional slot. The 2022 World Cup was played in November and December instead of June and July.
Sheikh Joaan bin Hamad Al Thani, president of the QOC and chair of the bid committee, said: 'We currently have 95% of the required sports infrastructure in place to host the Games, and we have a comprehensive national plan to ensure 100% readiness of all facilities.
'This plan is rooted in a long-term vision aimed at building a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable legacy. Our objective goes beyond simply organising a successful event, we aim to deliver a global experience that reinforces the values of inclusivity, sustainability and international collaboration.'
The new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, said last month that her organisation would be reviewing the process for determining Games hosts.
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The game was drab and gritty, the skies dismal and grey, and the ball bobbled around a muddy pitch as the league leaders ground out a 3-1 victory against their defensive-minded rivals. Teenage fans behind one of the goals occasionally banged a drum in an attempt to whip up the small crowd clustered in the stand or huddled in thick coats along the touchline. The breakthrough goal after half an hour was met with relieved cheers; the club café did a brisk trade in coffees and teas at half-time. This scene on a chilly Saturday afternoon in January could have been replicated across the country. The match was between Real Bedford (aka 'the Pirates') and Leverstock Green from Hertfordshire. It took place in the Southern League Division One Central, seven tiers below the riches of the Premier League. Here players pocket a few hundred pounds a month to supplement their salaries or student loans while owners struggle to keep their clubs afloat with crowds typically numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands. Yet this game — like all the Bedfordshire team's home matches — was being streamed live online for a global audience. For this non-league club is part-owned by the billionaire Winklevoss brothers. The American identical twins Cameron and Tyler rowed for the US at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and in 2004 sued their Harvard University classmate Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for a social media site (they are both played by Armie Hammer in the Oscar-winning The Social Network). In 2008 they accepted a settlement for $65 million (£41 million). Real Bedford also has a generous sponsorship deal from the Winklevosses' New York-based crypto exchange, Gemini. Other sponsors include the data centre provider Iren and the bitcoin mining company Luxor. Among the fans I find buying replica strips before kick-off are Steve and Maria Bakker, who have travelled to the Ledger Stadium from their home in Brisbane, Australia. 'We were going skiing in France and decided to go to Bedford as a side trip,' says Maria, 56, a healthcare technician. 'It's the highlight of our whole tour.' Three months later I return to watch the team play Kings Langley, another Hertfordshire side, in front of a record home crowd of 1,426 people. The teenage boys are still banging their drum behind the goal, but this time there is a party atmosphere in the spring sunshine, with free pizza and fireworks exploding after a penalty by the summer signing Joey Evans, 25 — his 34th goal of the season. The Pirates have won their third successive title, marching up the leagues towards the most unlikely of sporting dreams: to one day take the second-best club in Bedford all the way up to the Premier League. The man behind this bold vision is a 46-year-old heavily tattooed former advertising boss who grew up in the town, and whose father and mother — an aircraft engineer and a nurse — worked 'all hours' so he could attend a local private school. In 2017 Peter McCormack launched what became the world's most popular bitcoin podcast, What Bitcoin Did, in which he travelled the world to interview analysts, presidents and technology seers. Believing that he could harness the passion and wealth of the global cryptocurrency community to disrupt football, he tried to buy the bigger Bedford Town but was rebuffed. So instead, four years ago, he bought the tenth-tier side Bedford FC for an undisclosed fee, changed the club's name and colours, rebranded with a skull and crossbones logo and declared that he had created the world's first bitcoin club — where fans can pay in bitcoin, players and staff can take home wages in the cryptocurrency and club finances can be boosted by any surge in bitcoin's value. In McCormack's project, any passionate bitcoin investor, anywhere in the world, will soon be familiar with the name of Real Bedford FC. 'I always liked football,' McCormack tells me in his Real Coffee café in Bedford town centre, which sells club merchandise alongside cappuccinos, cakes and cannolis. 'But I'd go to games, see a group of lads from their home town that they loved and then wonder why Bedford doesn't have a team in the football league.' This remained a hazy idea until he sat down over beers with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in Austin, Texas, in 2022. Initially he was hoping their Gemini cryptocurrency exchange would sponsor his podcast, but when he mentioned buying a football team — and explained to them the pyramid system of promotion and relegation — the pair challenged him to think about going all the way the top. 'I told them to leave it with me,' McCormack says. This conversation took place the year after the Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham, sparking worldwide interest in the semi-professional Welsh team. As captured in the Disney+ documentary Welcome to Wrexham, last season the club reached the Championship, English football's second tier, after a record-breaking third successive promotion. The pair have been followed into sprinkling stardust on struggling football teams by the US quarterback Tom Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl champion, taking a small stake in Birmingham City in 2023. The Croatia and Real Madrid midfielder Luka Modric became a co-owner of Swansea City in April. He was joined last month by the rapper Snoop Dogg. In February the Winklevosses handed over bitcoin worth £3.6 million for a 45 per cent stake in Real Bedford. McCormack owns almost all of the rest. 'We love an underdog story,' says Tyler Winklevoss, 44, when we meet on their first visit to Bedford after flying in to enjoy the team's latest title triumph. 'We bit on it straight away,' his brother, Cameron, adds. 'It's crazy and it sounds impossible but it reminded us a lot of when we first heard about bitcoin in 2012. Lots of smart people dismissed that idea too. And we loved the thesis of a football club powered by bitcoin.' Cameron admits they knew little about Bedford before making their investment. But he says they enjoyed rowing in regattas at Henley, where they witnessed the communal fervour produced by football when England reached the quarter-finals of the 2004 European Championships. They later both studied business at Oxford University and were in the losing crew in the 2010 Boat Race. 'It was a very magical year and we became very fond of England,' he says. But can Real Bedford really rise to the Premier League? 'That's our goal,' Cameron says. 'We would not have invested if we did not think it could happen.' Until now Bedford's main claim to fame has been as the birthplace of John Bunyan, who wrote the 17th-century allegory The Pilgrim's Progress while imprisoned for public preaching in the town's jail. Yet McCormack points out this market town of 185,000 inhabitants is growing fast; it is the second-biggest town in the country, behind Wakefield, never to have had a club in the football league. In April the prime minister announced a boost for Bedford's economy with news of a £50 billion theme park — the first Universal Studios has built in Europe. Sir Keir Starmer said that plans for a 476-acre complex on the site of a former brickworks would 'firmly put the county on the global stage'. It is claimed the attraction will lure 8.5 million visitors in its first year. As McCormack tells me his life story he comes across as both a savvy businessman and a man on a mission to save his home town. 'I want my town to win,' he says passionately — and he is not just talking about football. He takes me down 'crack alley' among the shops near his café, where three men are smoking drugs in a car with a smashed back window. Then he shows me the tatty façade of a boarded-up Debenhams that closed four years ago as he complains about how high business rates are putting off budding entrepreneurs. 'We must be ambitious — a place of economic opportunity — but if a town centre is not safe it does not work.' Determined to help the police crack down on crime in the town, he has hired ten private security guards to patrol the streets every Saturday this month, armed with body cams and radios — a £10,000 pilot scheme which he hopes will provoke a civic response. McCormack always had an entrepreneurial streak, selling football stickers and marbles at school, then starting a music fanzine at the age of 15 to get free records and tickets to heavy metal gigs. He built up a thriving advertising agency in London with 40 staff and a £3 million turnover until a messy divorce from the mother of his two children sent him spiralling into depression, drink and drugs. 'I'd been using a little bit of cocaine up till then,' he says, 'but I was going to work every day, driving home, then it was a gram of coke and a bottle of wine every night. I was not sleeping a lot. I ended up in hospital. I was at rock bottom.' The doctors wanted to put him on anti-depressants. Instead McCormack bought a pair of trainers and started running every day. He handed the remnants of his business to a partner, pocketing £180,000 from the sale of its office lease. He attended any gym classes he could find, ate vegan food and stopped using alcohol and drugs. Eventually he ended up in Italy at a yoga and healthy eating retreat run by an ultra-endurance athlete called Rich Roll. He had listened to Roll's podcast while pounding the paths around Bedford. Roll, a former entertainment lawyer who built up his wellness brand after kicking his own drink and drug addiction, told the guests on his retreat that if anyone was in Los Angeles they should look him up. McCormack flew straight out to the US, asked Roll about podcasting, bought some recording equipment and started his own show two days later. 'Rich said to pick a topic for your podcast, so I started a bitcoin podcast — and four years later I found myself interviewing the president of El Salvador.' McCormack had come across the cryptocurrency while ordering cannabis oil on the dark web for his mother when she was suffering from cancer, then later used it to buy cocaine for himself. He was lucky with his timing — purchasing bitcoin and launching his podcast at the start of the cryptocurrency's 2017 bull market, which saw prices explode almost a hundredfold before plummeting. His own £32,000 investment soared to £1.2 million before falling back to £60,000. He soon became an influential voice in a cultish community, building a large social media following (he has 580,000 followers on X) and running CheatCode, an annual three-day crypto conference in Bedford. Now his latest bet is harnessing the power of the volatile currency to build a football club, using it for everyday club transactions — as well as a clever marketing tool. The club's pirate badge features the bitcoin logo and the words 'est. block 712003', denoting Real Bedford's first trace on the currency's blockchain database in place of a founding date. Its orange shirt reflects the way bitcoiners talk about people being 'orange-pilled' when becoming true believers in the cryptocurrency, a play on the red pill taken in the film The Matrix. But despite the club's crypto credentials, its website carries a prominent warning that bitcoin is a risky investment that should be treated with caution. 'Fans sometimes ask if we're being paid in bitcoin,' says the goalkeeper Tyler McGregor, a 22-year-old PE teacher from Milton Keynes and one of only two players surviving the team's rise through the ranks from the Spartan South Midlands League Division One. Players and staff do have the option of taking home some or all of their wages in the currency. 'All I really know is that it's a very good way of making your money work for you. It can fluctuate but it seems to be gaining momentum with more people using it. But I'm not that well educated on it. It does get brought up in the changing room, but we just want to win football matches and do our best for Peter. He's building a remarkable foundation for Bedford and I hope he can keep it going.' 'The economics of football are very simple,' McCormack says. 'Every now and then you get an anomaly like Leicester winning the Premiership [in 2016] but most teams end up within five or six places of their budget. So to go through all the divisions we need a budget to win and a decent manager to deliver. But if you want the best budget in the league, where do you get your money from? At this level it is merchandising, but most people make f*** all money, then maybe a little bit of local sponsorship and match-day revenue. It's a hard business, a very tough business.' Tickets at Real Bedford cost £12 for adults, £2 for under-18s — that's roughly 0.000011BTC at time of going to press. 'So I thought, how do I bust this model? Then I thought if we become a bitcoin club we are instantly an international club because I've got the platform and the podcast. So where most clubs are selling a couple of grand in merch, we've sold £300,000 in three years — it's insane. Shirts, hoodies, hats — we've sold loads of them. We did a five-year sponsorship deal with Gemini for half a million quid when most clubs like us would be over the moon to get five or ten grand for their shirt sponsorship. This is all unique at our level.' Thomas Pacchia owns the Pubkey bitcoin bar in New York, where last September Donald Trump made a stop on the campaign trail to buy a round of cheeseburgers — the first bitcoin transaction by a current or former president. Pacchia screens all of Real Bedford's evening matches in the bar. 'I watch most of them — it's a beautiful project,' says the former Wall Street lawyer. Bitcoiners such as Steve and Maria Bakker, whom I met at the home ground, watch games on social media back in Australia. 'I was listening to Pete's podcast when he said he was trying to get support from around the world — and now we are rooting for Real Bedford,' Maria says. McCormack's aim is to have one of the three biggest budgets in each league they progress through, then rely on a strong manager and club culture to keep on rising with both the men's and women's teams — the women have just won two league titles on the trot. The current manager is the Bedford-born Rob Sinclair, 36, who previously managed the ninth-tier Cambridgeshire side Eynesbury Rovers and briefly played for Bedford Town in 2020 after a career with teams including Stevenage and Forest Green Rovers. Club finances appear to be in rude health: the Winklevoss investment, currently worth £5.6 million following a recent surge in bitcoin's value, has so far sat untouched and has been earmarked for future infrastructure development. McCormack wants to retain the brand's punk attitude — with a black-painted, graffiti-covered tunnel, Nirvana-style T-shirts on sale and a burst of Rage Against the Machine blasting from his phone whenever Real Bedford score a goal. He was fined for improper conduct by the Football Association for holding a gun in the photograph that accompanied his chairman's letter in the match day programme — only to replace it with a mocked-up portrait in a tank. PAUL STUART FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE Perhaps the closest model for this club is Salford City, bought by five former Manchester United teammates in 2014 and later backed by a Singaporean billionaire. They rose rapidly to League Two with four promotions in five years. But the surge stalled, which McCormack blames on being in the shadow of Manchester United and Manchester City, whereas his team has no such big-league rivals in the vicinity. MK Dons, 20 miles away in Milton Keynes, finished 19th in League Two last season; Luton Town, 22 miles away, did enjoy one recent season in the Premier League in 2023/24. Salford City were taken over in May by a new consortium headed by Gary Neville and David Beckham, talking of their ambitions to reach the Premier League pinnacle. So does the team truly believe they might one day be facing the likes of City and United, Arsenal and Liverpool? 'You don't want to look stupid and say we are going to reach the Premier League and be a mammoth force,' says McGregor, the goalkeeper. 'But then no one expected us to win three leagues back to back. We will just take it as far as we can.' 'I am in the property business and Bedford has taken a right kicking — it has been terrible,' says the retail property director Neil Grice, 57, attending his first Real Bedford match. 'We are very dedicated. We've been fans for an hour and a half,' jokes his friend Andy Hurman, 58, a marketing manager, who got to meet the Winklevoss twins. 'It's our first game but it was brilliant, I absolutely loved it.' So how far could the team go? 'It's a bit of a stretch to see the Premier League, but they could be a good Championship club and that's proper football, which would be brilliant for here.' 'Bedford's been stagnant,' says Ian Tull, 44, a transport manager, who has been following the club for two years with his teenage son, Ashton. 'There's been nothing here. Now there's this club, Universal, and it's smashing. People laugh, but why can't we go to the Premier League?' McCormack, tired of the constant travelling, has handed over his bitcoin podcast after 861 episodes to a friend. He now hosts The Peter McCormack Show, a populist-tinged podcast that has had guests including the former prime minister Liz Truss, the US intelligence whistleblower Chelsea Manning and, most recently, the 'cancelled' historian David Starkey. 'There are a lot of problems in the world,' McCormack says. 'After my divorce I was only happy when I got away from Bedford. Travel was my therapy. But time heals and Bedford is home. I chased a lot of things I thought I wanted in life. But in the end I like being in my own community with people I know.'
