The 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics will be held in the French Alps and in Salt Lake City, America.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has actually determined the hosts of two Winter Olympics. The one that will take place in 2030 will be hosted by French Alpine resorts. And the 2034 Olympic Games went to Salt Lake City. This American city has already hosted them. But the 2002 Olympics was remembered not so much for sporting achievements as for the abundance of high-profile scandals – corruption and doping, of which Russia was one of the main victims.

The International Olympic Committee, in fact, named hosts of two Winter Olympics – 2030 and 2034. Since the last decade, the selection of venues for its main competitions has been carried out according to a simplified scheme, which has abolished the classic one – with a long competition of applications and a final vote by the executive committee. It is replaced by the selection, carried out in advance by a special commission, of a single priority candidate. Such candidates now remain applications from – this is the official wording – the French Alps, as well as the American Salt Lake City. The head of the IOC commission for future Olympics, Karl Stoss, explained that now with their representatives will be conducted so-called targeted dialogue to help with the process of organizing competitions.

The final status of hosts of the Olympic Games will be assigned to the French Alps and Salt Lake City at the IOC session in July 2024.

The American application actually had no competitors at all. The French had them – Sweden and Switzerland. At the same time, Karl Stoss explained that the Swiss option has actually become a priority for the IOC for the 2038 Olympics. Thus, with her, apparently, the intrigue disappeared.

The fact that the IOC was pleased to award France, whose capital will host the Summer Olympics next year, and the Winter Olympics, is, of course, nothing surprising. The concept of her next application involves holding competitions in five locations. Four of them are famous ski resorts with excellent infrastructure, both sports and tourist: Meribel, Courchevel, Val d’Isere and La Clusaz. And the French plan to give tournaments in hockey, figure skating, speed skating and short track speed skating to Nice. It quite often becomes the host of top international competitions, including winter sports, and also has a developed infrastructure.

The choice of Salt Lake City is more interesting primarily because of the background.

The capital of Utah has already hosted the Olympic Games once, in 2002. However, they were remembered not so much for the sporting struggle as for the abundance of high-profile scandals of all kinds.

The first one broke out long before the Olympics. In 1998, IOC member Mark Hodler accused a number of his colleagues of accepting bribes from the American bid committee, thus trying to obtain the votes needed to win the competition. Investigations initiated based on his statements were carried out by both US law enforcement agencies and the parent sports structure itself. After them, the heads of the bid committee, Tom Welch and David Johnson, were forced to resign, ten IOC members were expelled from the organization, and the same number received less severe punishments.

The scandals at the Olympic Games themselves could even overshadow this grandiose corruption emergency. There were a lot of them, but a few stood out too much for their originality.

Large-scale reforms of figure skating judging aimed at increasing its “transparency” were provoked by an incident in pairs competitions. In them, Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were ahead of Canadians Zhami Sale and David Pelletier. However, after the end of the competition, the IOC made an unprecedented decision to review the results and award Sale and Pelletier a second set of gold awards. The reason was allegedly pressure exerted on the French referee Marie-Rene Le Gun in order to ensure victory for the Russian duo. For some time, businessman Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov was considered as the main suspect in organizing such pressure, but his guilt could not be proven.

More often than not, doping came to the fore during the Olympics. At some point, it almost became its central theme. Doping tests stripped three cross-country skiing stars of a total of five gold medals: the German Johan Muehlegg, who competed for Spain, as well as the Russians Larisa Lazutina and Olga Danilova. In addition, Russian skiers, the clear favorites of the relay, were suspended from competing in it due to test results. The domestic delegation took all these cases extremely seriously, and its leaders even threatened the organizers and the IOC with a boycott of the closing ceremony, which, however, did not materialize.

Alexey Dospehov