No Bid From France For Olympic Games

French Sports Minister Jean-Francois Lamour said Sunday France will not bid for the Olympic Games in the near future until they have analyzed the reasons why France lost its bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. He told reporters at the Olympic Games in Sestriere, “we’re not going to bid for the Olympics, be it summer or winter”.

France lost the 2012 Games by a narrow margin to London.

“We have every reason to believe that a new bid would lead to the same result. We first need to understand why we are not understood by the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)”, reports Reuters. He added, “four times is enough”.

Paris lost three Olympic bids and Lille lost a bid for the 2004 Games.

Lamour said, “since my arrival in Turin I have talked to some 30 or 35 IOC members and I have collected 30 or 35 different reasons why we failed”.

He cited some of the reasons Paris may have failed in its bid was the absence of French representatives in some major sports federations, and the Paris bid should have been led by a single personality “devoted 110 per cent to the task” as Sebastian Coe did for the London bid.

Lamour said France would not bid for the Summer Games before the 2024 Olympics but he said a Winter Olympic bid at a nearer date might be considered.

The Alpine towns of Gap, Grenoble and Annecy had expressed their interest in a Winter Olympic bid but Lamour said he has persuaded them to wait. Write or read comments about this article

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