Use of the technology in the two-year bid process will begin next week, when a series of “kick-off” meetings with the five Candidate Cities and their respective National Olympic Committees (NOCs) will be held via video link.

Insidethegames understands, meanwhile, that a string of “individual workshops”, scheduled for the week of November 16 and originally expected to be held in Lausanne, are instead to be video-conferenced as well.

Four European candidates – Budapest, Hamburg, Paris and Rome – are up against the United States west coast city of Los Angeles in a contest that began formally this week and will culminate in September 2017, at the IOC Session in Lima, the Peruvian capital.

The whole process has been revamped, with a series of milestone dates for the candidates, on the road to what they all hope will be one of the biggest prizes in world sport, set out in documentation published this week by the IOC.

The new race will be divided into three phases, with opportunities for the IOC’s Executive Board to whittle down the field at the end of each.

Stage One – entitled Vision, Games Concept and Strategy – will run until June 2016.

Other key dates in this phase include October 16 when cities and NOCs will sign the candidature process as well as paying the first $50,000 (£32,000/€44,000) instalment of a $250,000 (£160,000/€220,000) “candidature service fee”.

Lots to determine the order of the Candidate Cities throughout the process will be drawn by the IOC Executive Board in early December, while the deadline for delivery of Part One of the five cities’ Candidature Files is February 17, 2016.

There will then follow around three months of analysis by an IOC-appointed Evaluation Commission Working Group that is clearly going to be a key player for the first year of the race and beyond, before the IOC Executive Board decides in June which candidates are deemed worthy of passing onto the next stage.

The fundamental task of the working group will be to provide a “dashboard report” to the Executive Board.

The documentation notes: “A specific recommendation may be made by the Evaluation Commission Working Group to defer a city’s candidature to a later campaign.”

Survivors will pass to Stage Two – Governance, Legal and Venue Funding – more workshops, feedback on Stage One and payment of a second $50,000 tranche of the fee.

This is also the juncture in the process when the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games take place, enabling candidates to participate in the Olympic Games Observer Programme, as well as further workshops, planned to take place in Rio de Janeiro.

The submission deadline for Part Two of the Candidature Files falls on October 7, with a further interval for analysis before the Executive Board passes judgement, as it did at the end of Stage One, in December 2016.

During this interval in November, the official 2016 Olympics debrief – another important moment – will take place in Tokyo, the 2020 Olympic host-city, along with further workshops.

The last nine months of the contest, in 2017, will doubtless see a ratcheting up of both the workload facing surviving bid teams and the tension.

After payment of the rest of the fee, submission deadline for Part Three of the Candidature File – Games Delivery, Experience and Venue Legacy – has been fixed for February 3, 2017.

Over the subsequent five months, an IOC Evaluation Commission will visit remaining candidates and prepare a report, in a part of the process that remains ostensibly similar to past bid battles.

July 2017 is set to be a critical month, with publication of the Evaluation Commission report followed by a right of response for the candidates and a Candidate City Briefing for IOC members and international sports federations (IFs).

By this stage, most IOC members, including those newly elected at the 2016 IOC Session in Rio, will seriously be weighing which of the candidates to favour with their vote.

Before the actual election, however, the Executive Board will again designate which candidates are to be submitted to the Session, “in accordance with bye-law to Rule 33 of the Olympic Charter”, in force since August 2.

This is a lengthy, 13-paragraph, bye-law of which perhaps the most interesting sentence, in the context of the new race, is paragraph 2.4: “Each candidate city shall provide financial guarantees as required by the IOC Executive Board, which will determine whether such guarantees shall be issued by the city itself, or by any other competent local, regional or national public authorities, or by any third parties.”

The actual election to determine which of these five cities will host the 2024 Games will take place in Lima in September 2017, at a precise date that is still to be determined.




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