Summer Olympics 2016.
Chicago, Rio, Tokyo and Madrid got shortlisted. I don't know exactly why, as both Prague and Doha got better marks than Rio, but maybe it's just one city per continent.

Anyway, I'd say Chicago and Tokyo are clear favourites.

Rio and Madrid have repeatedly lost this before, haven't they?

Why would any place want this giant white elephant?

There are still a lot of people who buy into the whole "it will generate tons of jobs, and redevelopment, and give us an excuse for building infrastructure that we should have had for decades and make us into a World Class City" thing, even with all of the recent experiences to the contrary.

I found the New York bid in 2012 to be particularly bizzare, but in reality it had very little popular support. Pretty much everyone who was pushing it thought that they would reap a personal economic benefit.

Not that all big sporting events are bad. More modest undertakings like the Super Bowl, the World Cup (since it's spread around), various college championships and even the Winter Olympics are probably a net winner.

It's just too fucking big and requires too many different venues.

At least with Atlanta, I could understand the desire to create a new public image for the city, but does Chicago really have an image problem? The people who live there seem to really love it and everyone I've talked to about it who's visited likes it. (Me too. I've not spent a lot of time there, but I like the general vibe of the place much more than I like New York). It has an excellent reputation as a good city for arts, restaurants and sports. The olympics won't help.

I pretty much agree with that, especially the bit about Chicago. We should really ask Goldstone to give his on the ground view of support for their bid, I have no idea if it is any more grounded in reality than New York's was.

I'll tell you why Doha didn't make the shortlist: because it's nowhere near ready to host sometihng of this size. I tried to get into an Asian champions league game there a few weeks ago and the ticketing system was atrocious (relying as it did on vast numbers of baton-wielding cops to patrol the doors). They could build the physical infrastructure for this in a snap, but the human infrastructure is severly lacking.

I think Brazil might have trouble convincing people it could hold a World Cup and an Olympics back-to-back. Or that it deserves to have both so close together.

Madrid and Tokyo would be my guesses. Nagano and the '02 WC went very smoothly and they have a working transportation system that can handle events like this. Barcelona's success will have done a Madrid bid a power of good (and any Spanish bid can usually count on a bloc of hispanophile votes from South America, which will come in handy once Rio gets knocked out). Chicago might benefit from the fact that it's the US and they'll be due again soon, but I'm not sure what they have in the way of infrastructure.

What was rather amazing about Nagano was that they were able to host most of the back office media and organisational people in Tokyo and still get them to Nagano (which is several hundred km away) when they needed to be there.

I happened to be in Tokyo for part of those games and the logistical aspects were very impressive.

I think the Doha bid is a non-starter as half the field will get busted at customs...