Geographically dispersed Olympic Games are well on their way to becoming the norm, the chief executive of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said on Thursday, as the scale of the event makes it harder for any single host to supply the infrastructure.
Sarah Hirshland was speaking at the Columbia University Sports Management Conference. Reuters reported her remarks, in a story carried by The Straits Times.
"The dispersal of the Games themselves is evolving. And a lot of that is because the scale of the Games has gotten so big and significant that the infrastructure required to host is very hard to find in a single place," she said.
International Olympic Committee officials hailed the most recent Milano Cortina Games as a success, despite early concerns about the first spread-out Winter Olympics, which had venues scattered over 22,000 kilometres.
The Los Angeles Games of 2028 are also expected to be spread out. Softball and canoe slalom are set to take place in Oklahoma City, and the football tournament will be played across several metropolitan areas: New York City, Columbus, Nashville, St Louis, San Jose and San Diego.
The 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps are expected to follow the Milano Cortina model, with venues in Nice and in the Alpine regions.
Further ahead, New York state formed an exploratory committee this year to host the 2042 Winter Games, with hosting duties shared between the five boroughs and Lake Placid.
By comparison, Hirshland said, the centralised venue plan for Utah's 2034 Games will serve as a "rare exception".
The reasoning deserves to be stated in the order in which it arrives. The Games have become too large to fit in one place. The response is to hold them in several places. A Games held in several places is larger than a Games held in one.
Our analysts have followed the mechanism to its conclusion. Each dispersal relieves the infrastructure problem by adding hosts, and each added host enlarges the event that could not be hosted, which requires further hosts.
The arithmetic is already visible in the published plans. A Winter Olympics has been successfully delivered across 22,000 kilometres. A summer football tournament will be staged in six American metropolitan areas at once. A future Winter Games is to be divided between the five boroughs of New York City and Lake Placid.
At this point the host city has ceased to be a place and become a distribution list. Milano Cortina is not a location but a pair of them with 22,000 kilometres of venues attached, and the IOC has recorded it as a success.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that one constraint survives. However far the venues travel, the Games are still required to happen at the same time, and time is the only dimension in which the event has not yet been permitted to spread.
The Department has accordingly written to the IOC about the 2042 bid. If the infrastructure required to host cannot be found in a single place, the Department would like to know on what grounds it can be expected in a single fortnight.