Nacre

Agreed. Other issues in addition to venues: Money. The economics of the winter games are a LOT better for northern hemisphere cities with the existing infrastructure to support them. Hotel room occupancy rate in Vancouver is at capacity during the summer, so there's no benefit in adding tourist during the summer, whereas there would be a benefit in February. Medals. Canada is much stronger in winter sports than summer sports, so the winter games would provide a much stronger patriotic pull. Host the winter games and your fans get to see Canada win lots of golds and very possibly "own the podium" at first overall like it did in Vancouver 2010. Host the summer games and your fans get to see Canada finish in the 20's: Canada won 0 gold and 5 silver at Montreal 1976. More athletes. ~12,000 athletes for the summer games vs ~3,000 for the winter games. More people = more expense and effort housing and caring for them all. And in a city with scarce land for a new athletes village, no less.

Very few. It has almost everything (except the speed skating oval, which has been converted into a community center) for the winter games and perhaps 1/3rd of what it would need for the summer games. "Perplexing" is the best word to describe this.

Because 1) it does not have the existing sporting facilities to host, 2) the USA is a Common Law country making new infrastructure projects very expensive (for example it is 10 times more expensive to build new subway/metro tunnels in New York than in Berlin or Paris) and 3) it's extremely difficult for politicians to force through unpopular projects in built-up cities in Western countries.

To clarify, massive amounts of public money are spent on stadiums in the US. https://www.insidehook.com/sports/cheap-champs-chiefs-exec-leave-kc-stadium-tax Full private funding of stadiums only really happens in global cities like New York or Los Angeles. Cities the size of Brisbane in America (like Pittsburgh or Kansas City) invariably end up paying to build stadiums - sometimes with all of the money coming from governments.

Local politicians can still change the plans after winning a bidding process. Just look at the main stadium for London.

This isn't entirely wrong but it absolves local politicians of blame, when they are often the biggest source of problems. The IOC didn't force Russia to spend $51 billion on Sochi (which in reality was probably a good investment to turn Sochi into the Russian version of Orlando), it didn't make Jean Drapeau choose a grossly over-engineered design for the Stade Olympique in Montreal, and it isn't behind the current malaise over the stadium in Brisbane.

I don't think that the people proposing "regional events" fully understand this. Just consider what happened to the organization and budget of Melbourne's Commonwealth Games when they decided to go for events all over the state of Victoria. I think that this is the fundamental economic issue. High cost of housing is increasingly the major concern of people in the developed world, and a megaproject that will lead to gentrification and rising housing prices in the host city even if it the project is a success is simply not a rational choice for the 99% who aren't profiting from property development. In contrast, back in the 1980's to early 1990's when hosting the games the public was much less pinched by housing costs. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5568/housing/uk-house-price-affordability/

Well, don't I feel silly.

The Commonwealth Games has required large venues in the past. For example 40,000 seats at the athletics stadium. I would guess that hurts a lot of potentially viable bids from countries like Malaysia.

It should come close to covering the operational costs. And to be honest, the Commonwealth Games hosts shouldn't really be taking on massive capital costs anyway - with the notable exception of the athletes village, which can serve as social housing after the games. Since Guilga has already compared the Commonwealth Games to the Pan-American Games, it's worth noting that the Pan-Ams work perfectly fine with a temporary athletics stadium seating only 13,000. An 18,000 seat Kuala Lumpur Stadium should be acceptable. Kuala Lumpur also has a decent aquatics center, a velodrome, a cricket stadium, and so on. They shouldn't really need to build any new venues.

That would only delay the inevitable. A Commonwealth Games that alternates between being hosted in Australia and the UK would keep the games on life support, but it would not make them healthy.

The Maginot Line worked perfectly. It was the decision to put all of their frontline forces in Belgium and fail to maintain a strategic reserve (somehow forgetting everything Napoleon taught them) which was the cause of the disaster. Yes, it's hard to imagine how the French could be so chauvinist and impolite . . .

The Commonwealth is simply less important today than it was ten years ago, let alone fifty. An underrated part of why Russia's "operation" in Ukraine went sideways is that the portion of the population in Ukraine that grew up in the Soviet Union is continually declining, and the generation that grew up in post-Soviet era wants to integrate with the EU and not Russia - meanwhile the decision makers in Moscow are all old men who grew up in the USSR. A similar effect has already taken place in the Commonwealth with increasing numbers of Canadians, South Africans, and generally everyone but Little Englanders identifying less and less with the British Empire. Durban dropping out is probably more an effect of this change than it is a cause of it.

They should easily be able to put up temporary grandstands for a cricket stadium anywhere. That's not to say that they can't or won't use Angel Stadium, just that they don't need to. If I were in charge of selecting a site, I would be very tempted to use the Woodley Park Cricket Complex (near the Sepulveda Dam) to show off the support the city gives to the sport outside of the Olympics.

I think it's important to point out that the ancient games happened every year with a rotation of four cities (Athens, Corinth, Delphi and Olympia). A cycle of four events with one of them held each year would let the IOC continue or even increase its revenues while also meeting the needs of athletes, fans and the host cities . . . and return to the one games every year model of the ancient Panhellenic games.