Currently known as the city to visit if you want to see pandas, Chengdu is looking to put itself on the global sports map, with an official proposal to bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics.
While most of the talk about the Olympics returning to China has centered on the 2022 Winter Games, it turns out the Summer Olympics may also be coming back to China, too.
As incredible as that sounds, lawmakers in Chengdu – which one forecast says will among the world’s top 30 cities by 2035 – have targeted hosting the 2036 Olympics
Ahead of the more famous national “Two Sessions” held each year in Beijing, cities around the country hold their own local editions, in part to figure out what proposals can be submitted to the main political council in the capital.
Pu Hu, a member of the CPPCC Chengdu Committee, recently submitted a proposal which calls for the city to bid for the 2036 Olympic Games. That sounds like a bold move, but there are a few connections here: at the closing ceremony of the recent Pyeongchang Olympics, China basically marketed itself as the home of pandas – and, as anyone Chinese person can tell you, Chengdu is where most of the cuddly creatures are found. What’s more, there’s even an official “Olympics Panda Family” at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center.
Your 2022 Winter Olympics host lit up the Internet with glowing flying pandas https://t.co/OHwpsAQPI0
— TIME (@TIME) February 26, 2018
Pu’s reasoning is that many Chinese cities will be capable of hosting the Olympics 20 years from now, so Chengdu can position itself at the head of the line by taking the initiative now. None of China’s central and western cities have previously held large-scale international sporting events of this type, Pu notes.
A somewhat saner voice comes from Pu’s female colleague, Deng Juqiu, who, while agreeing an Olympics would benefit Chengdu, called for further feasibility studies.
But it’s not just Chengdu that is considering a bid.
While most had assumed that Shanghai would take the reins if China was ever to launch another Summer Games bid, this WeChat article not only discusses how officials in Guangzhou have been weighing up a run at 2032, but that the city of Zhengzhou – in the news recently due to its copycat Bird’s Nest stadium – has also expressed interest in hosting the Olympics.
While actually securing what would be China’s third Olympics remains a long way off, two points are worth making: first, that China’s appetite for staging large, international sporting events won’t even begin to be sated until the FIFA World Cup arrives on these shores; and, second, that China is still seen as a potential “savior” by many of the big sports organizations, especially the IOC.
2022, remember, was “the Olympics that no one wanted” due to profitability concerns, while Paris and Los Angeles have been awarded 2024 and 2028 ostensibly because the IOC couldn’t afford to turn down a major city that actually wanted to host a Games.
It’s very possible, then, that business could return to normal for 2032 and beyond i.e. no cities submit bids. If that is the case, expect the first call the IOC makes to be to Xi Jinping, who, as per last week’s news, will presumably still be in power by then.
This article was first published as part of SupChina’s China Sports column here.
