KRAKOW, Poland: Authorities in the Polish city of Krakow have said they are pulling out of the race to host the 2022 Winter Olympics after a majority of the city’s residents voted against the bid in a referendum over the weekend.
The head of the Olympic Committee in neighbouring Slovakia, which was bidding to be co-host, said he believed Polish citizens were put off by the $50bn spent by Russia to stage the Sochi Games this year.
With Krakow out of the race, Ukraine’s Lviv, China’s Beijing, Norway’s Oslo and Kazakhstan’s Almaty are the last remaining cities in contention for the hosting rights.
The proposed bid from Krakow was rejected by more than two thirds of those who voted in a referendum on Sunday, leaving bid officials with little option other than to throw in the towel.
“Today we are starting talks with the Olympics Committee on how we can withdraw from the Winter Olympics 2022 project. I think it is bad news, but this was the citizens’ will,” Krakow mayor Jacek Majchrowski told a news conference yesterday.
Many residents in Krakow, Poland’s second-biggest city, felt that some of the infrastructure needed for the Games - in particular an arena for curling, a sport barely played in Poland - would turn into white elephants afterwards.
Polish officials had promised the Games would have brought with it more than 20bn zlotys ($6.6bn) in infrastructure investments, but many residents believe that would happen with or without the Winter Olympics.
Poland’s sports ministry said in a statement that Krakow’s decision to drop out was “a missed opportunity not only for the region but for the whole country.”
Slovakia said it cannot afford to mount a bid on its own, but that the formal decision on pulling out from the Games would be taken on May 30 when all the parties involved will meet in Krakow.
“In my view, a similar opportunity will not occur for a long time. I doubt that anybody will try in the foreseeable future in this region,” Slovak Olympic Committee Chairman Frantisek Chmelar said in a statement on the committee’s website.
“In people’s minds, there probably was the negative role of the widely broadcast huge expenditures in Sochi, as well as the known difficulties accompanying the preparations for the 2016 Olympic games in Rio,” Chmelar said.
Now that the people have spoken, the picturesque medieval town joins a growing list of potential hosts to drop out of what has become a troubled race.
Stockholm withdrew just a few months after launching a bid last year, concerned over costs and the environmental impact of the world’s biggest winter sports event.
Germany’s Munich and Switzerland’s St Moritz did not even file bids after referendum voters in those countries rejected a candidacy. Meanwhile, a probe into allegations of widespread doping in Kenyan sports has uncovered serious incidences of drug use and sounded the alarm that the country’s athletes are at risk of being manipulated by some foreign sports agents.
However the government-appointed commission, which completed its work earlier this month and has presented its findings to the Kenyan sports minister, Hassan Wario, did not uncover evidence of doping among its record-breaking distance runners. The reports has blamed ignorance, lack of education and manipulation by foreign agents as the main reasons for the recent upsurge in cases of athletes testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, including the blood-booster EPO. “We have left our athletes in the hands of foreigners,” the head of the taskforce, Professor Moni Wekesa, said.
“Athletics Kenya (AK) only organises the national events, including the African games and Olympics and have given the foreign agents the free hand to manage the athletes in the Diamond League and other international competitions. These are the people who have the greater control on what to give the athletes,” he said.
“Any drugs which we found to have been used by the athletes was only through the influence of the foreign agents. These are the very sophisticated drugs only the agents know how to administer,” he added. AGENCIES
