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After this year's widely lauded Olympics in Paris, Denmark's capital announced it is exploring the possibility of hosting the international sporting event in 2036
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- Title
- Copenhagen 2036? Denmark looks into hosting the Olympics.
- Published
- Sep 9 2024
Used to live there.
My personal layperson opinion is that Copenhagen is way too small to host such an event. If anything, all the competitions need to be spread out over the entire country but even then it's a stretch and a half seeing as the largest stadium in the entire country only holds 38k people. The list of stadiums big enough for much of anything other than local/national level stuff is very small.
Copenhagen is not big. Only 600k (2M metro) - in comparison, Paris is 2M (12M metro) and Tokyo is 14M (38M metro). There are no facilities capable of this, and the amount of investments would be ridiculous and unless it's the going to be the smallest Olympic games in history (?), this is just not feasible at all.
Maybe I am biased. And maybe there is some nimbyism. But still.
Some snippets from r/copenhagen
I think you're right about the events needing to be spread out, Copenhagen is definitely too small to have everything in the same area. However, I'd take the capacity concerns with a pinch of salt. Everyone and their mother in France ranted about how having the Olympics here would be a logistical nightmare, the city would be jam packed with people, public transport would be a mess, it would be unsafe, etc, etc. Then the Olympics rolled around and the locals basically fled. The city was eerily quiet, even in areas that are usually filled to the brim with tourists. It felt like it usually does in August during the Great European Migration, when shops close and Parisians go on holiday, except it happened weeks before it normally does.
Local businesses suffered a lot from loss of revenue and rising prices. Hotels and Airbnbs struggled to fill as well, partly because other tourists avoided travelling here during the games. Some long established places are even facing closures because they didn't earn enough in July and weren't planning for that. Though it may not make up for the lack of facilities in Copenhagen, if events are in fact spread out, it might be doable at least from a city capacity perspective?
They could try to organize a pan-Nordic olympics (i.e. some events in Sweden and Norway). Unprecedented, but Paris took place on two continents, so could work? I think the IOC definitely needs to look at new models because the events have become too big and too expensive – Paris is a good step in this direction!
Serious question, were they particularly lauded? All I heard was controversy.
Serious question, which controversies did you hear?
For the most part, with the exception of the Dutch Volleyball player, the controversies that I heard of seemed... Manufactured?
Anecdotally, most people I know enjoyed the Olympics this time round.
There’s always a bit of Olympics controversy but after the chaos that was Rio (green swimming pools, falling apart stadiums) and Tokyo awkwardly fitting in between lockdowns it felt like a while since there was a plain, successful Olympics.
Yeah, the consensus seemed to be that this was one of the most successful Olympics ever. The Seine May have been a bit dirty and the IOC may have fucked over a gymnast, but having those competitions in those venues was seriously incredible.
And NBC finally made it easy to watch with peacock basically being darn near perfect this year.
I think most successful in general might be pushing it, but they were certainly a success and probably the most successful Olympics ever fiscally.