IOC to formally give Games to Paris, Los Angeles

Paris is expected to be ratified on Wednesday as the host for the 2024 Olympic Games with rival candidate city Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Games.

Both cities were competing for the 2024 Summer Games after several other contenders withdrew, and the stage was set for Paris to win its bid when the International Olympic Committee confirmed that Los Angeles had officially embraced the later date of 2028.

The IOC’s 1,000-plus members will sit down in the Peruvian capital of Lima to vote on the hosts of the 2024 and the 2028 Olympics, although the result is presumed to be well-known.

Paris and Los Angeles were the two last cities left in the race for the 2024 Summer Games, with four others – Hamburg, Rome, Budapest and Boston – having pulled out amid concerns over cost and size.

With the Games having lost their sheen and cities now viewing them as a financial burden rather than a glorious opportunity, the IOC changed the bidding process and decided to award two consecutive editions at the same election.

The IOC session in Peru will therefore lack the usual dramatic moment when the name of a city is pulled out of an envelope as Paris will be awarded the Games in seven year’s time and the Californian metropolis getting the nod for 2028.

Paris, which like LA has hosted the Games twice before, will no doubt be the bigger winners, having got what they set out to get.

It was a Parisian, Pierre de Coubertin, who reinvented the ancient Greek games as a modern global sports competition at the turn of the past century. Paris hosted the Games in 1900 – the second city after Athens – and again in 1924, but lost all three of its most recent bids.

The expected decision paves the way for Los Angeles and Paris to join London as the only cities ever to host the Games – summer or winter – three times since the modern Olym-pics began more than a century ago.