Much has happened already in the first five-and-a-half weeks of 2015 in the fledgling race to host the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics, although, when you think about it, little progress has actually been made.

To the surprise of many, Boston has been confirmed as the United States' contender while Rome will launch a somewhat implausible Italian bid. A maelstrom of other cities are supposedly considering bids, with feasibility studies and working groups galore having been convened, but nothing has been confirmed.

While with seven months to go until applications are due, this ambiguity is not unusual, the elephant in the room this time around is the impact of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Agenda 2020 reform process.

As I see it, Agenda 2020 is having exactly the impact the IOC wished it to when they unanimously passed the 40 recommendations at their Session in Monte Carlo.

It is being hailed as a radical step marking a paradigm change in Olympic bidding, encouraging cities to launch attempts when before they would have been reluctant to do so. Yes, the vagueness of the measures means that no one quite knows where these changes will be felt, or how strongly they will hit, but that is almost beside the point. Such is the potential appeal of this new era of reform that the sort of anti-bid movements seen so spectacularly in the 2022 race have not yet taken shape. They are still waiting to see how things play out. 

Thus the IOC have so far manufactured greater interest in the process but while committing only to changes that are general and vague rather than concrete and specific.

Agenda 2020 signified great change but how much occurs in practice remains to be seen ©Twitter



Take Hungary for instance. When the bid was first muted by sporting authorities last September, Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlós dismissed speculation as "unrealistic" and "unviable" in what was taken as an apparent death knell to an effort not yet off the ground.

But the post-Agenda 2020 era brought new optimism, as Hungarian Olympic Committee President Zsolt Borkai argued how the reform measures created a "historic opportunity" for Budapest to succeed at last after five failed bids, with the nation, incidentally, having won more Olympic medals than any other that has never hosted the Games.

What exactly were these "historic changes"? Most of the extra financial support to be offered by the IOC had been introduced anyway for the 2022 bidders, even if it is now more widely known and better communicated, while commitments to "sustainability", "human rights" and "flexibility" and all the rest of it are too vague to really mean anything.

It is the commitment to hold more events outside the host city in order to capitalise on pre-existing venues which has generated the most headlines, but it will be interesting to see to what extent this actually happens in practice.

South Korean organisers gave a resounding no to plans to move events overseas, although considering holding them in North Korea, a country it is still technically at war with, never seemed feasible. Yet given the logistical constraints of dealing with different countries, not to mention the impact of international politics and diplomacy, I can never really envisage a joint bid getting off the ground. A bid co-held across different cities in a single nation seems slightly more plausible but still unlikely, with calls for a South African attempt for 2024 taking in Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg similarly impractical.

IOC vice-president John Coates has encouraged Tokyo 2020 to move events for reasons of sustainability ©Getty Images



More likely is a bid holding a few events outside the main host city for reasons of practicality, as is beginning to happen with Tokyo 2020. Yet is this really that different to previous Games, like London 2012, where sailing and football were held outside the host city and various other sports were held in the suburbs and far-reaches?

Whatever their rhetoric, the IOC must be reluctant for venues to decentralise to too great a degree, lest they dilute the atmosphere generated by having a central focal point for the Games, as was seen so memorably in Stratford in London 2012, as well as legacy benefits brought in by this redevelopment.

It is hard to predict at the moment whether the opposition will continue to simmer rather than boil, as seen with the various anti-Boston 2024 groups so far, or reach the feverish levels that scuppered Winter Olympic bids of Oslo and others last year.

For Boston it depends largely on how the campaign is conducted, both in gaining the trust and support of the public, as well as of the IOC members, whose love of America appears to be slowly rising but cannot be taken for granted.

IOC President Thomas Bach summed it up well on his United States visit last week, complementing progress but warning how they have to "undertake all efforts" and "get their team together" and then have to "run with the absolute determination to win, but also to know that in the right moment, everything has to come together".

Boston is in many people's eyes the early favourite in the race for the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics, but a lot of work lies ahead ©Getty Images



For Rome surely - and, possibly, also Budapest and Paris if green lights are given following the completion of feasibility studies - economic uncertainty is likely to prove too much. Current Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi appears far more positive than the more austerity-minded Mario Monti was in 2012, but with Rome being bailed out yet again by the Central Government last year and with concerns remaining over the running of the city, it is a long-shot.

In the wonderful words of one opposition politician, it is "like painting an old Fiat 500 red and hoping people will believe it's a Ferrari".

Much of the same could be said about Berlin, with memories lingering of the violent protests which accompanies its ill-fated bid for the 2000 Games in the early 1990s, particularly as a referendum has already been confirmed if the bid goes ahead.

This suggests Western Europe's largest non-capital city Hamburg could be the best bet when the German Olympic Sports Confederation selects its choice on March 21.

As it was to a large extent in the 2020 race, an Istanbul bid would likely be scuppered more by geopolitics than anything else, with ISIS forces ever closer over the Syrian border and increasing instability between secular and Islamist forces at home. And if the Bosphorus city is to bid for a major event, surely the 2019 European Games would be a better and more achievable bet?

Of other possibilities, economic problems in Russia have surely put paid to the likes of St Petersburg or Kazan launching bids, while Azerbaijani authorities would have to move quickly after June's inaugural European Games to get an attempt from Baku up and running.

That leaves the Gulf, with Dubai and more probably Doha likely to launch an attempt. The fact the Qatari capital is hosting the 2019 World Athletics Championships and a certain football extravaganza three years later is unlikely to put it off, and if anywhere could pull off all three it would be Qatar.