Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

On July 7, President Bach of the International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced that Oslo, Almaty and Beijing, the three remaining applicants were now officially "candidate cities" for the 2022 Winter Olympics. In the upcoming year, three cities will need to submit their Candidature Files, receive visitations from International Sports Federations and the IOC's Evaluation Committee, and perform technical statements to the IOC members.

The first phase of the bidding process was really dramatic and unprecedented in Olympic bidding history, as six cities consecutively withdrew from the bid. As for Beijing's bid, it feels as if generations have passed if you compare it with its bid for the 2008 Olympics.

Both the domestic and international situations have changed drastically and controversial topics frequently surface. As a frequent participant in international sports games, I selected several representative categories and collected information from media coverage and IOC reports in order to share and to support.

I. Why did six cities withdraw?

On March 3, 2013, two towns in Switzerland, St Moritz, which hosted two separate Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948, and Davos, which hosts the World Economic Forum every year, withdrew from the bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The people of Graubünden, the state where both towns are situated, voted 52.66 percent against the campaign in a referendum. Dissenters worried that the new constructions, venues, cableways and other basic infrastructures needed for alpine skiing would impact the natural environment. Moreover, the $4.55 billion original budget might continue to increase. Therefore, St.Moritz's dream of hosting the Winter Olympics for the third time quickly died out.

On November 11, 2013, before the IOC's deadline for each city to apply for the bidding of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Germany's Munich and three other Olympic-related communities voted 52 percent against the application which led to Germany's withdrawal. Two years earlier, in July 2011, Munich lost to South Korea's Pyeongchang at the very end of the competition over the 2018 Winter Olympics. Munich failed to fulfill the goal of becoming the first city to host both the Summer and the Winter Olympics.

What was the reason for Munich to withdraw without a fight? Dissenters stated that they worried about the issues the Winter Olympics would bring to the ecosystem and that the price would be too high.

A legislator from the Green Party as well as the initiator for the movement against bidding for the Olympics said, "The opposition is not toward sports, it is toward the nontransparent operation and the IOC's greed over profit." He continued to say, "The IOC should make reforms first, not to let stadiums to adapt to the Games but the other way around [to let the Games adapt to the stadiums]."

Unlike the three cities above, the 1912 Summer Olympics host city Stockholm withdrew from the competition after nominating itself as one of the six applicant cities.  On January 17, 2014, the Mayor of Stockholm declared to withdraw from bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, because the capital's governing party did not support the application due to the potential costs.

Hosting the Winter Olympics means investing heavily in building new sports infrastructures, for instance a sleigh and sledge stadium. A stadium like this is not needed after the Games. Stockholm's withdrawal means that the applicant city list for the 2022 Olympics decreased from six to five.

However, the drama did not end there. On May 26, Poland's Krakow, one of the five remaining applicant cities, officially dropped out of the process. The day before, the city's citizens voted 69.72 percent against the application in a non-legally binding referendum.

On June 20, just days before the Executive Committee of the IOC decided the list of candidate cities for the 2022 Olympics, IOC President Thomas Bach held talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyukin and Ukraine National Olympic Committee President Sergey Bubka. This conversation produced Lviv's official withdrawal from competing for the 2022 Winter Olympics due to the current political and economic situation in Ukraine.

Until then, six cities ended their journey toward hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics and left only three applicant cities in this campaign, Oslo, Almaty and Beijing.

It is not hard to find some common reasons of why these cities withdrew, such as the high cost of hosting the Games leading to heavier taxes, newly built stadiums harming the ecosystem, some stadiums becoming white elephants after the Games, and so on. Personally, others' reason to withdraw is the best notice to Beijing's application operations. Beijing's bid committee should plan and solve the above issues from the very beginning of the venue planning.

People's will were behind the withdrawals and that was undeniable. However, was withdrawing the best option? I am not at liberty to say yes or no, but to present three kinds of facts in order to shed some light on the argument.

The first is about the ratio between agree and disagree votes. The 52.66 percent of from Switzerland's Graubünden, and around 52 percent from Munich and three related communities, shows that the opposition did not win overwhelmingly and the advocates were not weak. The 69.72 percent of disagreement votes from Krakow, however, is quite exceptive, as its bid was rocked by the resignation of its bid committee president due to the media's wide coverage over the scandal of her husband offering payment to journalists to write positive stories about the bid.

Second, let me cite a few comments by the backers of the bids in the cities that withdrew.

The Swiss Olympic Committee stated on its official website that the Graubünden 2022 campaign was sorry to come to an end due to this referendum. It meant that the large scale tourism, business and athletics programs were going to halt as well.

Krakow's Mayor Jacek Majchrowski, who led the referendum, said after, "I regret this result. This project is crucial to the development of this entire region." He said later, "According to my personal calculations, we lost about 3 billion zloty ($980 million) worth of investment. This is a big thing which would lead to many more issues. But, our people made this decision." The mayor also believed that the people were greatly misled by negative coverage over the gain and loss of hosting the Winter Olympics.

Last, I really have a question, "Did the respondents know bid-related information before performing a poll?" Personally I don't think so. Some people didn't know that the IOC would provide every host city with around $800 million from its own marketing and broadcasting revenues once you win the bid. There are also people who were confused the Games' budget with non-games project budget. There were some misunderstandings that the future budget for the organization committee would come directly from the tax-payer or the government's funding.

The IOC also admitted that there are some communication problems with applicants. The IOC's Executive Director Gilbert Felli said, "So in the communications, and that's the lesson from this campaign here, we lost good cities because of the bad perception of the IOC." He went on to explain that desires for compact venue plans and asking too many questions about capital infrastructure costs have all led to the false perception that the Games are too expensive and out of reach for most cities.

Since the IOC and the applicant cities had communication problems, then, it is hard to believe that there was no communication issue between the cities and their citizens. Communication is always a big challenge for the big scale project.

With six cities' withdrawing for whatever reasons, two questions were asked here, is the Olympics again facing a trough and should Beijing continue to move forward?

II. Does Beijing need another Olympics after 2008?

The Olympic Charter begins with the fundamental Principles of Olympism: Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of human kind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.

The IOC even established the Youth Olympic Games to bring teenagers away from video games and closer to nature and sports. Personally, I think that the IOC's ideologies and methods are extremely progressive, the Olympic spirit is lively and the Olympic flag is powerful.

Second, the Olympics is still one of the most influential brands in the world and the most successful international games. Two statistics could prove this, IOC marketing development and the TV viewership of the games.

Games marketing revenue increased from $2 billion to $8 billion in two decades or five most recent Olympic cycles, thanks in part to the increasing sponsoring of the Games by corporations.

Such a large income does not flow toward the IOC alone. 90 percent of the income will be directly sent to the supporting agencies of the Olympic Games, and 10 percent of the income will be kept by the IOC as its operating capital.

From 3.6 billion in Sydney 2000, 3.9 billion in Athens 2004 to 4.7 billion in Beijing 2008, the TV audience of the Olympics has been increasing constantly. Although the 2012 Olympic audience dropped to around 4 billion people, there were about 8.5 billion PCs, smart phones or tablets connected to the Internet during the London Olympics, making it the largest online sports event in the history. This phenomenon echoes the trend as traditional media slows down while new media expands rapidly.

Does the Winter Olympics suffer in comparison? Absolutely not! The TV audience for the last few Winter Olmypics went up from the 2.1 billion of Salt Lake City 2002 to 4.1 billion of Sochi 2014. They are still enormous amounts.

Each Olympic Games has positive impacts on its host city. Since the Athens Games, each Olympic host city conducted long-term and detailed researches on the Games' impact over the city's economy, politics and environment, according to the requirement of the IOC.

The researches conducted by each of the Organizing Committees mostly recognizes that preparing and hosting Olympic Games has a positive impacts on the cities' development, such as improving the development of the national sports industry, refining basic infrastructure, increasing employment opportunities, polishing or reconstructing new communities, elevating the city or the country's image, and intensifying nationalism, and so on. Comparatively, other events hardly have such a comprehensive and heavy impact.

Let us look at how winter sports became prevalent in Europe and North America. Before the mid-1800s, ice and snow were natural obstacles. They are even stories that they were used as punishment by the king of Sweden for prisoners who were forced to jump off a snow mountain. The survivors gained freedom and the smart prisoners started to use the wind and slope in order to safely land. This playful legend was supposedly the start of ski jumping.

In the late 1800s to early 1900s, European and American countries began to develop winter sports, as more people improved their nutrition and started to enjoy the ice and snow with the help of sports equipment. The development of winter sports signifies major improvements in people's quality of life in winter when economy develops to a certain degree.

China would be the same. Ever since the reform and opening-up, people solved the basic needs of food and clothing. As of natural resources, Northern China's geography, topography, temperature and precipitation ensure China's ability to begin large-scale winter sports. People don't have to be afraid of the cold, the snow and ice, and winter sports like old times. Instead, the public, especially teenagers, now would be able to leave the cozy room and video games to enjoy the winter and the nature. This kind of lifestyle change will be healthy and positive, which greatly helps the balanced development of teenagers' body and mind.

For instance, China's skiing population is relatively very low. Barely 0.004 percent of the population of China ski, for the obvious reasons that most of them lack the money, time, or access to resorts. Over 44 percent of resorts in China are in the northern region of Heilongjiang.

The best opportunity for the development of winter sports should be the bidding for, organizing and hosting of the Winter Olympics. It is interesting to note that when Beijing announced its Winter Olympics application in November 2013, there was an 80 percent increase in tourism for two major ski resorts in Zhangjiakou, the co-bid city close to Beijing. Massive amount of investment is also entering the region to build high-quality ski resorts. Even the bidding news encouraged people to go near the ice and snow, to say nothing of what the actual organizing and hosting might make possible.

There is no doubt that the Olympics would also bring a series of problems and challenges. For example, the scale and standards of the Games lead to high costs for the host cities. Some competitions are not attractive. A few venues lose their value after the Games. And also, there's the anti-doping "tug-of-war."

These problems, together with new challenges that will arise with the development of the Olympics, cannot disguise the excellent performances by athletes on the field, the value of various educational activities, the selfless volunteers working behind the scenes, the pursuit of development for the human body and mind, or the quest to build a more peaceful world. III．What kind of bid and organization do we expect?

What's the attitude of the public in Beijing and in other cities towards Beijing's bid? According to a survey from the French IPSO company in January 2014, support lies at 94.8 percent. But a later IOC survey found only 74 percent support. The consecutive withdrawals may well have influenced people's views. But the rate is still the highest among all three cities compared to 36 percent in Oslo and 66 percent in Almaty. The bidding body needs to keep the public well-informed to meet any concerns, however.

Although Beijing's bid for a winter Olympics accords with most people's will,  oppositions to the bid has occasionally appeared on social media and also from IOC independent poll survey with reasons such as high cost wasting the taxpayers' money and potential corruption.

Opposition to the Games is largely about the money, not about the sports or the Games. The public worries about whether we can expect clean, right-sized, and sustainable Games once we win the bid.

Let's look at the two ways the money is generally spent for the Olympics. One would be spent by the Olympic organizing committee on technology, overhead and so on. This budget is generally open and controllable.

The other is the investment in the host city's infrastructure, including subways, airports, venues and so on. In a developing country, such spending is enormous. But they would continue to benefit the public after the Games. This is why the IOC firmly insists that the Olympic budget should not account for this.

Under this IOC-derived standard, media claims that Beijing 2008 cost of $40 billion and Sochi 2014 cost of $50 billion were both exaggerated.

Of course, Beijing's 2008 Games, the Shanghai Expo, the Guangzhou Asian Games and the Shenzhen Universiade all suffered from major corruption scandals in infrastructure construction. The government departments overseeing infrastructure projects should be more open and transparent in their project planning, bidding, construction and operations. And third-party audit reports should be issued as well.

Sustainability is another big public concern. Claims that the 2008 venues are massive money-losers occasionally bubble up on social media.

What will be the fate of the Winter Olympic venues? Are they going to be white elephants?

I think an official report on post-Games operations of the Beijing 2008 venues should be issued as early as possible. And the venue legacy planning for the Winter Games should be made public as well.

There is still about one year to go before we find out if Beijing has won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. If the bid is successful, Beijing would become the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Such a win would be a tremendous honor.

The author is senior consultant for Zhangjiakou Bidding Office of 2022 Olympic Winter Games and senior consultant for Nanjing 2014 Youth Olympic Games Organizing Committee. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn