With 100 Days to Go Before the Vote, is Beijing Still the Front-Runner to Host 2022 Winter Olympics?

With exactly 100 days to go before the IOC decides between Beijing and Almaty on who will host the 2022 Winter Games, is Beijing still the front-runner?

We called it here over a year ago when there were still six cities bidding for the games: we continue to believe that Beijing is a shoe-in for the first city in history to host both the summer and winter games. The Olympic Committee has since visited Almaty and Beijing and declared them capable of hosting the games; now only time will tell.

However, one set of seasoned Olympic watchers – the bloggers over at aroundtherings.com – give Almaty a slight edge in an exhaustive analysis of the two potential hosts.

Their matchup takes 11 factors into consideration and scores the cities on a scale of 0 to 100. Almaty scored 71, while Beijing came in at 66.

Beijing's edge comes from its marketing, finance, and operations acumen. Almaty's edge comes mainly due to ambiance and weather.

There's no doubt that Almaty has us licked for winter weather: its mountains get far more natural snow than those on the outskirts of Beijing.

In terms of ambiance, the authors cite Almaty's "cozy" and "warm" atmosphere. "It seems a good fit for a compact Winter Olympics with some apres-ski atmosphere thrown in," they report.

Meanwhile, Beijing "offers little of the charm of the stereotypical Winter Olympics host city," and the reporters lament the fact that the mountains are so far away and the smog so thick that Beijing "won’t be the most picturesque of Winter Olympic hosts."

They go on to point out a few additional factors that could push the bid in favor of either city:

Advantage Beijing: "Almaty lacks an IOC member from Kazakhstan, which puts it at a severe disadvantage. No city has ever been elected to host a winter or summer Olympics without an IOC member in the country. China has two, including vice president Zaiqing Yu."

Advantage Almaty: "Artificially created snow will be required [in Beijing] to support Olympic events in the mountains, the first time for a Winter Olympics."

The question really comes down to: will the IOC trade a sure thing – Beijing, which has experience with the Olympics and the financial might and political will to pull out all the stops for a major spectacle – or take a risk on an untested, far less commercially potent host, but one that is more likely to achieve the affordability and sustainability tenets the IOC put forth in its recent 2020 Olympic Agenda.

After Sochi's USD 51 billion price tag, even the IOC admits that the cost of hosting the Olympics is getting out of hand. The problem with selecting Beijing is that China is fairly incapable of settling for anything but putting on the Best Olympics Ever and you therefore can't count on Beijing 2022 being anything but an all-out spectacle, regardless of cost.

Beijing has sidestepped the affordability element by claiming that the six new venues and the high-speed rail to Zhangjiakou they're building will be built regardless of the results of the bid and thus should not be counted as part of the cost of hosting the games.

But the sustainability of the Games in Beijing is pretty tenuous, given the capital's lack of snowfall and indeed a general shortage of water overall.

"The demand for water and the cost of making snow appears to contradict efforts by the IOC [to make] affordable and sustainable Games," notes aroundtherings.com.

So, with all these factors in mind, let the countdown begin: on July 31 the IOC will make its decision and we here in Beijing will know whether we'll be caught up in Olympic hype for another six or seven years.

Image: Beijing 2022