Which City Should Host the 2014 Winter Olympics?

PyeongChang and Salzburg Are Considered Favorites

2014 may seem like a long way off, but National Olympic Committees in seven countries are already immersed in the bidding process for the 2014 Winter Olympic games. In July of 2005, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) released its list of seven applicant cities who had met the initial deadline. In alphabetical order, the aspiring host cities are:

Almaty, Kazakhstan
Borjomi, Georgia
Jaca, Spain
PyeongChang, South Korea
Salzburg, Austria
Sochi, Russia
Sofia, Bulgaria

Overview of the 2014 Bidding Process

Applicant cities turn in questionnaires to the IOC in February of 2006. After reviewing these documents, the IOC meets in June of 2006 to announce its short list, which will probably consist of four cities. These applicant cities then become candidate cities, with completed bid books due during January of 2007. In the months following, the IOC scrutinizes each bid and visits each of the candidate cities for on-site inspections. The IOC releases a report shortly before the actual election, which is scheduled to occur on July, 7, 2007, during IOC business meetings in Guatemala.

The 2014 process should be competitive, but it is unlikely to be as contentious as it was for the 2012 summer games, when world-class cities like Paris, Moscow, Madrid, and New York eventually lost out to London. Nonetheless, the popular site www.gamesbids.com is already following the action, with its mathematical bid analysis tool, known as BidIndex, ready to start crunching numbers and predicting frontrunners sometime in early 2006. The index is based on data from previous bids measured against their eventual success.

Overview of Applicant Cities