Nacre

There's a lot of French food beyond haute cuisine, though.

It is a tremendous shame that the IOC can't find a reasonable and rational formula for communicating with potential host city populations on how and why hosting the Olympics can be beneficial. Arguing that there will be no financial burden on the host city is obviously false, and I don't believe that it will convince anyone in Sweden. Where the Olympic hosts have gone wrong in the past is in building unnecessary white elephants that end up being seldom used and rotting away after the short-term sports festival has left. The IOC must acknowledge this, and apologize to prior host cities like Athens. Building one modestly-sized speed skating oval in Stockholm would be an affordable cost to the Swedish taxpayer and would help provide more leisure and athletic opportunities for the Swedish public as well as benefiting Swedish athletes. It would not be a white elephant, but instead a net benefit for the Swedish public.

It's sad how often this becomes a question of "do we built a speed skating oval to host the Olympics?" When it should really be the opposite. The point of hosting the games should be to provide local athletes with better facilities, not the IOC. It's not crazy to build a speed skating facility in Stockholm to provide young (and old) Swedes with more opportunities for winter sports and recreation.

The point is that if the IOC is going to allow regional bids again (Lillehammer was also basically a regional games) then ANY host should be able to use lots of venues and infrastructure outside of that host. And that includes Sweden. Or Denmark. Or Morocco, for that matter.

Your own source lists 20,000 for Brisbane, and gets to 49,200 by counting other communities. Copenhagen could do the same creative accounting and include facilities in Malmo, Helsingborg, Odense, etc. My point is not that Brisbane is somehow unworthy of hosting. My point is that if the IOC allows a regional bid in Australia, then they could do the same somewhere else.

The EU as a whole is much larger than Australia in population and its economy, and Denmark can utilize some of the transportation and commercial assets of its neighbors. Brisbane also had less than half of the required hotel rooms, venue capacities that did not meet the minimum, et al. Yet here we are. I am not saying that Copenhagen hosting the summer games is a good idea. I am saying that it isn't any more crazy than Brisbane hosting the Olympics.

If Brisbane is big enough then so is Copenhagen.

Exactly. "Sweden" is not exploring a bid. The Swedish Olympic Committee is trying to drum up support for a bid, using hand-picked statistics which will inevitably show that Sweden can easily host a fantastic games while glossing over the various obstacles that Sweden faces hosting the games. Sigulda should be fine; it is only an hour or so travel from Riga which has plenty of infrastructure. The problem is the alpine skiing venue being located an absurd 8 hours/600+ kilometers travel from Stockholm.

This is the fundamental issue. In general, Olympic facilities are an awful fit for the actual needs of the local community. Re-using the same facilities once every sixteen or twenty years does not make sense if they are not heavily used in the interval period. For the winter games a complicating factor is that part of the decline comes with the overall decline in winter sports participation. Skiing is an expensive sport with a relatively high risk of catastrophic injuries (both of which make it unappealing to parents) and it's hard to get to a ski area if you are young or don't own a vehicle with snow tires. Declining numbers of winter sports enthusiasts equals declining support for spending money on winter sports.

It would be difficult for France to boycott their own games, or for France's allies to do so. In any case, more weapons and ammunition shipments to Ukraine are a better solution than pointless gestures of disapproval.

The problem isn't the ski areas themselves, but the infrastructure needed to support the games. In example my home city of Seattle cannot host the winter games irrespective of funding and political will because the road to the potential alpine skiing resort (Crystal Mountain) is not wide enough and enlarging it would be political suicide for local politicians because it's in a protected forest. There are lots of ski areas that could manage the winter games if it were only a question of catering to the athletes. It's the huge requirements for officials, media and fans that make the modern games difficult and cuts the list of potential hosts down dramatically.

That is precisely why Kazakhstan has even more incentive to host the winter Olympics now than they did in 2014. Planning a future winter games in Almaty wouldn't stop Russian tanks from crossing the border, but it would improve Kazakhstan's prestige and ability to cooperate with other partners like Beijing and New Delhi; and Putin absolutely cannot afford sanctions from the USA, EU and China all at once. That said, I agree that the IOC doesn't want Almaty if they have another viable alternative.

Yes. I think it's also important to note that the split has already happened informally. If it's already OK for Beijing and Zhangjiakou to host together when they are 200+ km apart, why not formally allow 600+ km with an extra day for travel for athletes to get from the ceremonies to the mountains?

Kazakhstan is actually possible, IMO. They are currently trying to diversify their foreign partnerships and move out of Russia's "sphere of influence" to get better relations with Europe and China. (See the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, cooperating with China's "New Silk Road" projects, security guarantee from China in addition to the CSTO, etc.) A winter Olympics would be a good way to publicly show to the whole world that Kazakhstan is an independent player on the world stage instead of a Russian vassal. And for the same reasons it would be really difficult for the governments of the EU and USA to push Kazakhstan on human rights at the present moment.

Utah should be a safe pair of hands, and I think that the people there have more enthusiasm for another games than Vancouver, (although that's not based on any actual evidence). The problem for Vancouver is that cost of living in the city has gone up tremendously since they won the 2003 bid to host the 2010 games. https://i0.wp.com/www.homelists.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Greater-Vacnovuer-PriceChart.png?fit=941%2C557&ssl=1 Salt Lake City isn't cheap either, but cost of living isn't nearly as problematic for people there and it should be easier to convince people to accept a small tax hike of some variety.

Yes. I think these projects ignore the reason why the Olympics are now difficult to host. The games are simply too big and complex. Adding even more complexity by increasing the number of officials and governments involved, volunteers needed, et al is a step in the wrong direction. The games need to be simplified and reduced in size.

Why I don't think that sports are a very effective way of punishing rogue states . . . Sports governing bodies have no way of really sanctioning someone like Vladimir Putin in a meaningful way. They can only really punish the athletes and fans. Personally, I think it is extremely doubtful that dictators care about sport itself. They only care about it as a mechanism of redistributing tax funds to their cronies and fanning nationalism in the populace they rule over. So banning their national team can actually help them by letting them portray their country as the victim of the "hegemonic west", justifying the disappearance of national funds and military spending as part of a cold war against the west. The mechanisms by which dictators remain in power (government control of media, police brutality and fear, patronage politics, et al) are not affected by sport.

Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, nor is it developing them. The USA has lots of nuclear weapons, but it doesn't need to base them in Ukraine (or any other eastern European country) in order to threaten Russia with them. In the long run this crisis will push the EU to meet its energy needs internally, and not rely on either Russia or the USA. US weapons sales to Eastern Europe are a tiny fraction of the real market for American military suppliers: the US military. Countries like Poland and Ukraine are working to develop their own military-industrial capacity rather than relying on the US. The USA has done lots of terrible and stupid things in the past. But it's not responsible for this.

For some reason I thought that the SSE Hydro was in Edinburgh instead of Glasgow. Anyway, the point is that Scotland could manage the ice events if it could partner with a ski area somewhere else like Slovakia.

I think the logical solution is create some general rules that apply to everyone rather than punishing Russia in this unique instance (which would look like the IOC taking sides in the conflict).

Sadly it's a catch-22 situation for them. Option 1: pretend to be someone you are not and adopt British jargon. Option 2: use North American phrases and be accused of being an ignorant chauvinist and not knowing anything about "real football".

A major problem for the winter games is that they require a rare outdoor venue (ski resorts with the required vertical drop) AND major arenas, which need large populations to support them. There are lots of places that have either snowy mountains or big cities with cold weather, but only a couple dozen with both. Solutions: 1) set up a rotating group of host cities, 2) let a ski area and a distant city host the snow and ice events separately. There are lots of cities like Minneapolis and Edinburgh that could manage the arenas if they could pair up with a ski resort for the snow events. Yes. Mormons face substantial pressure from within their community to put forward a good face towards "gentiles" (non-Mormons) to make their religion look good. Mormons who are unfriendly to strangers, have a shabby appearance, et al face substantial disapproval. This has some surprisingly unexpected effects; for example Salt Lake City is the #1 city in America for breast enhancements (because Mormon women are supposed to be perfect goddesses).

There are lots of possible cities; there are about 25 cities -if not more- in the USA that are big enough for the Pan-American Games. But much of our existing sporting infrastructure isn't suitable. Even in Los Angeles the swimming pools at USC are outdoors, for example, and thus technically are not acceptable for high level competitions by FINA.

Which part are you unsure about?

Part of the problem is that existing venues in the US are not acceptable for championship competition due to a non-standard size. For example lots of existing velodromes are 400 meters or 333 meters instead of 250 meters, and most aquatics centers in the USA have 8 lanes instead of 10.