India is among the aspirants for hosting the Olympics in 2036 and beyond, Thomas Bach, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has said.
After Brisbane (Australia) was chosen last month to host the 2032 Summer Games, the IOC enjoys a queue of suitors to host the Olympics in 2036, 2040 and even beyond, Bach said.
The aspiring hosts include India, Indonesia, Germany, and Qatar, Bach said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
A narrative about the Olympics has taken hold so strongly in recent years that it has become received wisdom: The mushrooming costs and controversies of hosting the Games have driven down, to nearly zero, the number of potential host cities.
Bach, who was re-elected this year for four more years as the IOC chief, presented a sharply different picture in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“And this is just the ones which come to my mind,” Bach said during an interview during the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics, adding: “So we are really in a very good long-term position.”
Others who have publicly expressed interest in hosting the Games include Russia, whose athletes have spent the past three Olympics with their country under a partial or full ban for doping.
The new IOC bidding process was approved at the 134th IOC Session on 24 June 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The IOC also modified the Olympic Charter to increase its flexibility by removing the date of election from 7 years before the games and changing the host as a city from a single city/region/country to multiple cities, regions, or countries.
The change in the bidding process was criticized by members of the German bid as “incomprehensible” and hard to surpass “in terms of non-transparency”.