Nevertheless, every competing draft costs millions. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to agree on a city early?
Competition makes the concepts better. It’s like in sports: If I run the 100 meters alone, I won’t achieve a best time. Only when I compete against competitors do I give my all.
How will the concepts of the candidate cities be improved specifically?
An example: The Berlin application initially planned the rugby games in the Jahn Stadium. We suggested checking whether the Olympic Stadium would make more sense. The result: The city has to provide one fewer venue and can also accommodate more spectators in the larger stadium. The bottom line is that this means tens of millions of euros in savings and higher ticket revenue. Such optimizations only arise when concepts compete with each other.
What criteria does the German Olympic Sports Confederation use to ultimately decide which German city to send into the international race?
There is a transparent evaluation matrix: distances between the athletes’ village and competition venues, size and capacity utilization of the arenas, the organizational budget, sustainability, traffic and safety concepts – and of course the results of the citizen surveys. The Olympic specialist associations evaluate all of this. An evaluation commission with representatives from politics, DOSB and top sports monitors the process and can make a recommendation for the general meeting, which will then make a final decision on September 26, 2026.
The registration costs are much higher than those for the application. Paris will have spent around ten billion euros on the Summer Games in 2024. Why should a country like Germany, which is now heavily indebted, afford such an expensive sporting event?
You have to separate very precisely. Firstly, the organizational budget: in Paris this was around 4.5 billion euros. The IOC contributed around 1.5 billion, the rest came from ticket sales, national sponsors, media rights. The games themselves were 98 percent privately financed and even generated a surplus in the end. Secondly, there are investments that are triggered by the Games, but are not only made for them – such as the Olympic Village, which will later be converted into housing, or infrastructure projects such as the recultivation of the Seine River in Paris. These are political decisions that a city has to make at some point anyway. But they speed up the games because they set a fixed target date.
International competition is fierce: Qatar, India, Indonesia and Turkey with Istanbul are also applying for the 2036 Games and claim that their regions of the world have never been allowed to host the Olympics. Budapest and Northern Italy are also considering an application. Why should the IOC ultimately give Germany the contract?