You just can’t keep a good country down. Qatar Olympic officials, who failed to secure Olympic bids in 2016 and 2020, said they won’t give up in their pursuit of hosting the first Middle East Games.
General secretary Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said at the Aspire4Sport business conference that he believes the next bid will be even stronger because of what they’ve learned from past hosts.
“We have watched countries build large venues and struggle later with what to do with them,” al-Thani said. “Our team has worked backwards, thinking first about how these venues can be of use in the future before planning their use during major events.”
The real problem: Doha has average summer temperatures north of 105 degrees and doesn’t start to cool off until November, meaning they might need to hold the event as close as possible to winter.
Not unprecedented, since the Sydney and Seoul Games were moved to late September, but going all the way into the fall could pose rating problems with the Olympics going up against the NFL, NBA, and NHL.
Doha, which is roughly the size of Connecticut and has only 1.7 million people, has already secured the 2022 World Cup, so they’ll be able to prove to the world they can run a major sporting event in due time. But they’d like to secure the Games sooner than later as it aims to be the Middle Eastern sports hub.
