IOC Future Host Selection Process to Undergo Review

New International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry’s first press conference after two days of meetings with the IOC membership resulted in news about the future host selection process, the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games in Los Angeles and the issue of female athletes.

When Games are awarded have been done through the Future Host Commission in a process that members have told Coventry leaves room to interpretation. When Los Angeles was awarded the 2028 Games that was 11 years in advance; Brisbane 2032 was awarded 11 years in advance as well while the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City awarded was nine years in advance. By comparison, the 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps was awarded with six years’ notice.

“Members want to be engaged more in the process,” Coventry said, adding they will use learnings from the upcoming hosts and how the bid award time was used to plan their respective Games.

Current interested parties in future Games will be part of the review including the long-awaited 2036 Summer Games bid from India, with a delegation from the country visiting the IOC next week.

“The way we used to do things is not where we want to go,” Coventry said. “There’s been some very good reforms to get the future hosts and the selection of host cities to date. But (members) felt that they wanted to be included in the process a little bit more and really be able to better understand the process. If you’re not sitting on the Future Host Commission you’re obviously not getting as much information and it’s such an important part of what we do and members get asked a lot in their own home countries what’s happening, where it is going, that they want to better educate themselves.”

LA28 and Travel Bans

President Donald Trump’s directive banning citizens from 12 countries from entering the U.S. exempts athletes and LA28 officials said earlier this month that they were confident the Games have the administration’s full backing, which Coventry echoed Thursday.

Coventry said the IOC had a report from the organizing committee and “there is an incredible willingness to see that the Olympic Games are a huge success. That gives us faith as the Olympic Movement that the platform will be there to ensure that our values are stuck to and that our values will be heard and that we will be able to ensure successful Games.”

“The important thing for us is that the federal government and this administration recognized the importance of the Olympics and the Games,” LA28 Chief Executive Officer Reynold Hoover told Reuters, adding “we have direct communication with the White House through the chief of staff, we have direct communication with the Department of State and we are working with the State Department to have embedded teams to coordinate visa access,” he said.

USOPC Chief Executive Officer Sarah Hirshland said this month as well “it is our intention and our assurance that the administration and our federal and — frankly — government partners agree that we have an incredible opportunity here to be a great host country. … we have every assurance from the administration that they will be great partners in helping ensure that we are a great host country.”

Female Athlete Eligibility

The IOC will set up a working group on “protecting the female athlete,” Coventry said. “It was agreed by the members that the IOC should take a leading role in this and bring together experts and international federations and find that we bring consensus. We understand there will be differences depending on the sports, but it was fully agreed that as members and as the IOC, we should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category.”

The female athlete debate has centered mostly around the United States after Trump issued an executive order on the day his second term began that gives the federal government wide latitude across multiple agencies to penalize federally funded entities that “deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.” The administration recently said the California Department of Education and the state’s high school sports federation violated civil rights law by allowing transgender girls to compete on girls sports teams.

Female athletes will be in the majority at an Olympics for the first time in Los Angeles after the soccer competition was flipped to have 16 women’s teams and 12 men’s teams. That decision by the IOC executive board helped push the core quota of athletes for LA to 50.7% women and 49.3% men — 5,333 for women and 5,167 for men, the IOC said.

The gap is closed slightly when athletes for the sports being added specially to the LA28 program — involving 322 female and 376 male competitors — are included. Those sports include cricket, flag football and lacrosse.