The French Alps and Utah both got an Olympics in Paris. Are more dual awards coming?

Before International Olympic Committee members named Utah the host of the 2034 Winter Games two weeks ago in Paris, they selected the French Alps as the site of the 2030 Winter Games.

It was only the second time the IOC has chosen the locations for two Olympics at the same meeting, known as a dual award. In 2017, both Paris and Los Angeles were competing for the 2024 Summer Games, so the IOC decided Paris would host this year, and Los Angeles in 2028.

The option is available under the new, less formal selection process that no longer requires hosts to be named seven years in advance. It allows the IOC to avoid having to make a choice between a pair of strong bids.

Or, in the case of Utah’s bid to host in either 2030 or 2034, with a preference for the later date to avoid competing for sponsors with the Los Angeles Games, having to wait possibly years for a decision.

Why both the French Alps and Utah got an Olympics

“We did not set out to do a double award,” the IOC’s future Olympic Games hosts director, Jacqueline Barrett, told the Reuters news agency in an interview about the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games decisions.

“If special circumstances arise to be able to seize opportunities ... here we found ourselves in a situation with two great projects. And we thought, we don’t want to let these projects go,” Barrett said.

She added that a dual award “provides security for the future, for the athletes principally, the Olympic movement, the partners.”

IOC President Thomas Bach initially ruled out a dual award for the Winter Games two years ago, saying the 2034 pick should wait until his term in office ends next year so his successor wouldn’t be committed to a choice that could have waited.

That changed after the other bids in the race at the time, Sapporo, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, faltered due to a lack of public support, and IOC leaders delayed the process in late 2022, allowing new contenders, including France’s French Alps bid, to come forward.

Bach said then a dual award was once again a possibility . But it would take until last fall for the IOC to give a “green light” to naming the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games sites together, after Utah bid leaders made it clear it would be hard to sustain public support without a “positive signal.”

Barrett told Reuters there could be more dual awards coming, including for the 2036 and 2040 Summer Games. Istanbul, Turkey; India; Indonesia; and Santiago, Chile, are already in the running, and other places, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Germany and South Korea are said to be eyeing bids.

“It will very much depend on what the individual projects are,” Barrett said of a potential dual award for the next Summer Games up for grabs. “I think the IOC would not close the door to it but it is not an automatic response either.”

Will there be a rotation of future Winter Games hosts?

There’s more options on the table for future Winter Games, she said, since climate change is already limiting the number of locations seen as able to provide consistently cold conditions for snow sports in the coming decades.

The additional options include rotating the Winter Games among a preselected list of permanent sites. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has said the state could be hosting an Olympics and Paralympics every 16 or 20 years as the North American Winter Games site.

Also a possibility is having multiple regions or even countries host, to utilize existing venues.

“We are looking at grouping, sharing or looking at rotation,” Barrett said. “We are not limiting ourselves to one position.”