Beijing to Host 2022 Winter Olympics

The IOC has just announced that Beijing will be the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics at its annual meeting, in Kuala Lumpur where the host for the results ceremony was Britain's famous triple jumper Jonathan Edwards.

The results came after a paper ballot was needed when the electronic one failed.

It will be the first time a city has hosted summer and winter Games.

It will be the third Olympic Games in a row in Asia, following the decision to stage the 2020 summer games in Tokyo, and the third Winter Olympics in a row to move successively East wards after Sochi in 2014 and South Korea in 2018.

IOC delegates had only two candidates to choose from after four European nations pulled out, in several cases of local referenda, normally siting costs being too high to stage the Games, although when Oslo, which was a third remaining finalist pulled out, Norwegian media also reported on what it considered excessive demands by the IOC. In response IOC officials said the benefits of staging an Olympics greatly exceeded the costs.

As with the last and next winter Olympics, there was going to be controversy too, whichever candidate the IOC had chosen. Kazakhstan has almost no winter sports history and has developed its few new resorts from scratch with oil money rather than organically due to public interest. It has high mountains but low natural snowfall.

Beijing's Alpine events would be staged 100 miles away in a fast developing ski region but like South Korea the mountains are not high making it difficult to find a venue with the vertical to host a Men's downhill (as has been the case for the 2018 Games in South Korea, requiring the creation of a course in an environmentally sensitive area of natural parkland)( and like Kazakhstan it has little natural snowfall, meaning either venue would mean boom times for snowmaking manufacturers.

Unlike Sochi however, dubbed 'The tropical Winter Olympics' both areas are at least normally very cold.

The IOC also decided that the 2020 Youth Olympic Winter Games would be staged in Lausanne in Switzerland, beating in Brasov in Romania.

This would appear to be a hopeless choice, but the lesser of two. Martin Bell recently posted elsewhere, a picture of the Beijing slopes in January past. Think snowless mountain, except for half a dozen narrow strips of machine snow.

The IOC clearly just don't get it. "In response IOC officials said the benefits of staging an Olympics greatly exceeded the costs."
Well clearly, the world's snow areas do not believe that to be the case.

Countries withdrawing from an IOC bid speaks volumes.

I would be slightly more positive. China is a mountainous country including the Himalayas, it is a bit arrogant for Westerners to believe we have a richer alpine history and should be holding the games. The growing middle class has seen a boom in Chinese going abroad to ski (Japan and Europe) and at same time, Europeans heading over to challenge themselves on some of the Chinese giants. Yes not an 'Alpine' country in many people's minds but I guess that is the risk of being then 2nd biggest country in the world. High speed train will fix the logistics and will be a good way to remind people that many of the world's mountainous regions are arid.

Do agree would be nice to have something in Europe again at some point however there seems to be an acknowledgement that as a continent we are broke, a winter Olympics being and indulgence we cannot afford.

Given that the traditional alpine events are becoming less dominant with each games, I don't see going to China as a big deal. With focus being increasingly on slope style, moguls, big air, pipe and skier/boarder cross, vertical drop becomes less important. As long as they have the ability to make snow to compliment what's already there, they'll be fine.

It's a mountainous country, but the proposed site for Alpine events close to Beijing doesn't tend to get any natural snow. I've seen pictures and it looks depressing. Yes, it's cold enough for snow-making, but given the environmental impact I believe that international events like Olympics shouldn't be endorsing snow-making. I do understand that this is what many resorts heavily rely on as well, there are also snow-domes and other hideosities, costly to environment, that will eventually leave the world without any other skiing, but they are private entities. Anyway, I've lost interest in Olympics once it became clear it's not about sport, but mainly about business. Last year the only events I watched were moguls as we were hiding in a slope-side restaurant from weather and it was showing the event. Otherwise I wouldn't bother to waste electricity on this nonsense.