Financial pressures give Brisbane Olympic Games bid an edge

BRISBANE’S likely bid for the 2028 Olympics could not have been better timed.

One decision facing a possible Brisbane Olympic bid is whether to centralise events in Brisbane. Picture: Liam Kidston

BRISBANE’S likely bid for the 2028 Olympics could not have been better timed with the International Olympic Committee so conscious of public fears about the escalating costs of hosting Games that it is prepared to accept disposable facilities.

The 12-strong Council of Mayors of southeast Queensland will meet on Friday to consider whether to submit a largely Brisbane-based but regional bid for the 2028 Games, with all indications being that the vote will be overwhelmingly in favour of proceeding.

The vote will just be the first step in what would be a long journey, with the federal and state governments both needing to guarantee the bid, but Brisbane has two critical factors working in its favour: by deciding now, it has three years to get its basic Olympic plan in order before it would need to start seriously lobbying ahead of the 2021 IOC decision; and rarely before have candidate cities held such a strong bargaining position.

The IOC was seriously rattled by the withdrawal of a number of cities bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics but especially by the cancellation of the Norwegian bid. That one of the richest countries on earth thought the Games too expensive an exercise forced the IOC to take a serious look at how it could minimise the financial burden on potential host cities.

“The changing political and economic world climate has impacted preparations for and the costs involved in staging the Games,” reported an IOC working committee headed by Australia’s IOC vice-president John Coates last year.

One of the key recommendations of the working committee was to put an end to the architectural arms race that had developed over time, with each successive host city attempting to outdo its predecessors by providing ever more spectacular — and expensive — sports stadia. After the Games they often became expensive white elephants.

“The IOC (is) to actively promote the maximum use of existing facilities and the use of temporary and demountable venues,” the committee suggested.

Another recommendation almost anticipated the type of bid Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk has envisaged, one that involves the entire southeast Queensland sector.

“The IOC (is) to allow, for the Olympic Games, the organisation of entire sports or disciplines outside the host city or, in exceptional cases, outside the host country notably for reasons of geography and sustainability.”

Evidence of the softening IOC line surfaced yesterday when it announced it would permit Tokyo, which has won the rights to host the 2020 Games, to make three venue changes to its approved plan to rein in costs.

Basketball, canoe slalom and equestrian events are now to be staged at more economical venues. Coates, the head of the IOC inspection team for Tokyo, estimated that by allowing the 2020 organising committee some leniency on its pledge to use 80 per cent of venues within 8km of the Olympic Village and permitting a switch to the basketball venue used for the 2005 world titles — an hour from the village — would save Tokyo $900 million.

Jim Sloman, the chief operating officer for the 2000 Sydney Games organising committee, said one of the questions Brisbane would have to consider was whether to scatter the Olympic sports around the southeast Queensland region — making particular use of facilities built for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games — or to congregate them together in an Olympic Park.

“If you build an Olympic Park like Sydney did, like London did for the 2012 Games, it’s a lot harder to deal with the logistics,” Sloman said. “On big days in Sydney we had 400,000 spectators to cope with in terms of transport and logistics.”