At the Paris Olympics, cities and countries were discreetly making their case to host in 2036

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At the Paris Olympics, cities and countries were discreetly making their case to host in 2036

2024-08-12 02:38 Last Updated At：02:41

PARIS (AP) — If historic waterway settings are the new must-have accessory for Olympic host cities, then Istanbul’s mayor wants the IOC to know his city has one.

If the key to getting the 2036 Summer Games is having hosted world championships in top-tier Olympic sports, then Qatar can point to its track record over the past decade.

If winning over the International Olympic Committee is about ambition, finance and relationship-building, then India’s project backed by the Ambani family and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is well placed.

Saudi Arabia is following a similar path and in Paris sealed an Esports Olympic Games hosting deal with the IOC for 12 years, beyond the next Summer Games that is available to be awarded.

If the 2036 Olympics must go to Asia — a logical option to follow Paris, Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032 — then Indonesia will push its case as a fast-emerging economy of 280 million people.

In Paris, interested parties discreetly made their case for hosting the Olympics in a process run by the IOC that is now more discreet, less obviously a campaign and which critics say is too opaque. It can end with a winner far quicker than the old way of holding a multi-candidate vote seven years before the Games open. Brisbane outpaced Qatar to get the 2032 award 11 years in advance.

If just one thing is clear, the 2036 Olympics host will be known long before 2029 and strongly shaped by the high bar Paris has set.

“I mostly focus on what the IOC expects, what they dream of, what the world wants to see,” Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu told The Associated Press in an interview in Paris. “Personally, I’m not really interested to know what city is the competitor.”

The IOC has said it has a “double-digit” number of cities or countries in talks, maybe informal at this stage, about their interest in hosting a future Summer Games which can be later than 2036.

Still, those that hosted hospitality houses in Paris over the past two weeks were showing clear intent.

At the opening of India House on July 27, IOC member Nita Ambani said hosting an Olympics was “a dream that belongs to 1.4 billion Indians.”

The Ambani family, India’s richest and owners of the Reliance Industries conglomerate, now has a global reputation for lavish hosting. Celebrations over several months for their son Anant’s wedding in Mumbai drew world leaders, A-list performers and several IOC members who ultimately vote to confirm Games hosts.

Qatar did not have a public hospitality venue, though the ruling Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, was in Paris for meetings of the IOC of which he has been a member since 2002, and the opening ceremony.

Istanbul House opened in the final week of the Paris Olympics, reminding visitors the city will host the 2027 European Games, a kind of audition project.

“You are also competing with the past experiences of Olympic Games,” İmamoğlu said in translated comments. “You need to do better than what has been done in the past.”

What Paris has done is show an IOC focused on sustainability that the Olympics can be staged without building white elephant venues that stand long after the closing ceremony as a reminder of wasted taxpayer costs.

Los Angeles in 2028 will go further using only already existing or temporary venues. This goal is met by taking two sports that could not be staged locally — softball and canoe slalom — about 1,300 miles (2,000 kilometers) east to Oklahoma City.

Indonesia hopes to impress Olympic evaluators by having hosted the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and Palembang. The Asian Games has more sports and athletes than the Olympics, and Saudi Arabia does not host it until 2034, in Riyadh. Qatar did in 2006 in Doha and will again in 2030.

“Indonesia has the infrastructure, the ambition and the willingness to do it,” Indonesia’s team leader at the Paris Olympics, Anindya Bakrie, said.

When Indonesia would not host Israel games at the Under-20 World Cup in men’s soccer last year, FIFA moved the tournament from the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation just weeks before it opened.

“By saying that we want to bid for 2036, it also means that we know that we have to deal with the issue. If we do it right,” Bakrie said, “we have enough time to educate the public.”

And if Istanbul is to win — in 2036 or 2040 — why not another athlete parade at an opening ceremony by the Bosphorus strait that connects Europe and Asia?

“If you have the scenario, the right choreography, it can be very formidable,” İmamoğlu said. “You can dream of having 500,000 people watching the inauguration in such a setting.”

AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Death toll in attack on Christmas market in Germany rises to 5 and more than 200 injured

2024-12-21 23:06 Last Updated At：23:10

MAGDEBURG, Germany (AP) — Germans on Saturday mourned the victims and their shaken sense of security after a Saudi doctor intentionally drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a small child, and wounding at least 200 others.

Authorities arrested a 50-year-old man at the site of the attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. He has lived in Germany since 2006, practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Magdeburg. officials said.

The state governor, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters that the death toll rose to five from a previous figure of two and that more than 200 people in total were injured.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that nearly 40 of them "are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”

“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Scholz said. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.”

Neurosurgeon Mahmoud Elenbaby said some 80 patients were brought to Magdeburg’s university hospital on Friday night.

“We managed to stabilize most of them, but many are still in intensive care, and some are also in critical condition,” Elenbaby told The Associated Press as he dashed into the hospital cafeteria to buy himself a cola.

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried. A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God's mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

There were still no answers Saturday as to what motivated the man to drive his black BMW into a crowd in the eastern German city.

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he said was the “Islamism of Europe.”

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that’s part of a centuries-old German tradition. It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is located in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

The number of injured people was overwhelming.

“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold," she said.

The market itself was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 meters (yards). Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Moulson reported from Berlin and Gera from Warsaw, Poland.