ARGENTINA-SPORTS: Buenos Aires Awaits Olympic Vote

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 3 1997 (IPS) - Argentine sports enthusiasts, led by President Carlos Menem , are on tenterhooks this week awaiting the outcome of voting on whether the 2004 Olympic games will be awarded to Buenos Aires.

Menem – one of the prime backers of this city’s push for the Games – flew to Lausanne, Switzerland to be on hand when the 109 members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) make their decision Friday. Other cities in contention are Athens, Capetown, Stockholm and Rome.

The IOC comprises 43 delegates from European countries, 21 Americans, 20 Africans, 20 Asians and five citizens of Oceania. The city that obtains 55 votes will be the winner but before voting, Committee members will rweceive a final presentation of each city’s proposals.

Hosting the Olympic Games isa not only a matter of prestige. It is big business for everyone from the airline companies that fly in athletes and visitors rigfht down to the vendor who sells popcorn and drinks at the Olympic sites.

The host city’s coffers are boosted by 49 percent of all income generated from the worldwide television broadcasting of the games, and spopnsorship contracts amounting to around one billion dollars. If Buenos Aires is chosen, it will be the first South American city to host the Olympic games, and orginisers say it could mean some three billion dollars in foreign exchange through tourism and investment.

Newspaper reports from Switzerland make Athens and Rome the front runners for the 20004 Games while Stockholm, where there have been recent bombing incidemnts at sports stadiums, has dropped from favour.

As for Buenos Aires’ chances, members of the Argentine Olympic commission say only that “anything can happen.”

One point in Argentina’s favour, they stress, is the high-level support the proposal has enjoyed – right down from Menem and Buenos Aires Mayor Fernando de la Rua to all citizens.

“If all five cities were chosen as finalists, that’s supposedly because they all have the same technical possibilities,” Ernesto Rodriguez, head of the Department of Volunteers of the Argentine Committee, told IPS.

The system of voting can bring surprises. If no city obtains 55 votes in the first round, further rounds are held in which the least voted city is successively eliminated, until one of the candidates finally takes the necessary number of votes. That means the favourite in the first two rounds can lose in the third if the committee members who voted for the cities that were disqualified throw their weight behind a weaker candidate.

That seems to be Argentina’s best bet, according to some observers. For the year 2000, the Chinese capital Beijing was the media favourite while Boston in Massachusetts took the most votes in the first rounds – but Sydney, Australia emerged the winner.

Buenos Aires supporters believe the city has several advantages. The fact that the games have never been held in South America is not so important – they have never been held in Africa either – as the attraction of the concept of the “Olympic Corridor.”

This Corridor is a 15-km long area running along the city’s coastline, where the installations to be used in 28 of the 31 sports disciplines would be concentrated, as well as the athlete’s villa and the press complex.

The corridor’s location on the edge of the city would allow competition in the games to proceed without any interference through the day-to-day activity of a city which has a greater population of 13 million.

Furthermore, the sports installations – 75 percent of which already exist and would only need upgrading – involve one of the lowest budgets of all five finalists – 7.2 billion dollars compared to 8.34 billion dollars for Rome. And 65,000 citizens have signed up as volunteer workers throughout the games.