Nacre

Well, there's no actual need for a large athletics stadium anywhere in the world. The fact that Paris has moved its annual athletics meet (Meeting de Paris) out of Stade de France is pretty telling; even if a large and globally influential city does have a large athletics stadium it is better off hosting "normal" athletics events in a 20,000 seat stadium like Stade Charlety.

It's also a landlocked city, which prevents it from using cruise ships as temporary hotels as Athens did in 2004, Sochi did in 2014, and as Brisbane will likely do when it hosts.

If the IOC and World Athletics really would accept a 36,000 seat athletics stadium for their marquee event, then it really would be a major change. I don't know if they really will though, because they need about 30,000 seats for the "Olympic Family" which would only leave 6,000 seats for ticket sales to fans.

Maybe it is nitpicking, but it's so frustrating that InsidetheGames uses that headline when the reality is almost the opposite; it is Swiss Olympic (association) trying to sell this idea to the people and government of Switzerland, not the government of Switzerland trying to sell this idea to the IOC.

Grisons is 14% Italian-speaking and Italian is one of the official languages of Grisons (along with German and Romansch). There should be more than enough Italian-speaking volunteers and organizers for successful cooperation with Italy.

St Moritz would be a pretty great solution as it is 1) close to Milan (closer than Cortina, in fact), 2) in an Italian-minority speaking region, and 3) part of a country that is unlikely to host the winter games on their own in the near future. Other than national pride, a joint Swiss-Italian effort was the best solution all along.

I've heard that it costs more than $3 million CAD (or $2.3 million USD) per year to maintain the sliding centre in Whistler. If that is the true upkeep cost for a bobsledding track, then it's hard to see how communities will maintain one even if they do manage to scrounge up the money to build it.

My guess is that transportation is a bigger concern than distance. Stratford is pretty far from the city of London, the Stade de France is in the suburb of Saint-Denis instead of Paris proper, Athens' Olympic Park is about 10 km away from the Acropolis, et al.

I don't understand how anyone who has actually worked at or even volunteered at one of these events could think that it's a good idea to spread things around a huge area. Managing the logistics of a major event in a single city can be tough. You would presumably need a small fleet of helicopters and executive cars on standby to move everyone around an entire country like New Zealand.

The problem with the winter games is trying to lump all of them together in one spot. There are very few places in the world where ALL of the winter sports are popular and lots of places where ice events are popular but don't have mountains, or vice-versa. Ice skating in Dutch Golden Age paintings The IOC needs to formally separate the hosting duties of the mountain resort(s) and the city with the ice arenas. Let the Dutch host the ice events, with the Swiss hosting the mountain events two weeks later.

I think that part of the question of "does the media cover it" is our expectation for what kind of media will cover the event. For the Olympics the entire world media is interested, and people who don't normally care about triathlon will watch. Conversely there isn't much coverage in the general media of triathlon at the European Championships or Pan-American Games . . . but there also isn't much coverage of the World Triathlon Championships. Yet no one thinks that the world championships for the various sport are going to disappear, and they absolutely are covered by triathlon-oriented media and are followed by triathlon athletes and fans. Is our expectation that the continental championships and other second-tier events (like the Commonwealth Games) should be covered by the world media like Olympics are? Or is our expectation that they should be covered by the fringe media for the various sports featured in that event? I think the former is doomed to fail, but the latter is currently successful.

Although the Pan-American Games don't get a lot of media attention, I think that they are still very viable. There are a bunch of things that the Pan-Ams do that make them more palatable that the Commonwealth Games . . . at least to Canada. The continental games are tied into existing sporting networks much better than the Commonwealth Games. (IE Olympic qualification via the Pan-Ams, Asian Games and African Games. And the various European Championships.) Community sports facilities are more acceptable, reducing the need for new construction. The Pan-American Games are only intended to matter to the host city/region, the athletes and people interested in the sports on offer. No one expects them to attract huge television audiences or massive crowds of tourists, so there's less room for disappointment when they don't. Continental integration is more in line with the ideology of our times than the legacy of the British Empire is.

No. Melbourne has FAR more in place already than Auckland. Any New Zealand city would need to build a lot of facilities, and now there isn't enough time left to do that. London is the only realistic option, IMO.

They can use portable air conditioning and fans if there really is a heatwave. Be honest with yourself; you are going out of your way to be critical of Paris.

Average July high temperature in Los Angeles: 32 C / 89 F Average July high temperature in Paris: 26 C / 78 F I live in Seattle where the average July high is also 78 F. I don't have AC, nor do any of my friends. Ce n'est pas une problemme.