Tweaking the Olympics cycle is a champion idea | Letters

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Tweaking the Olympics cycle is a champion idea | Letters
Author: Guardian Staff
Published: Jan, 01 2025 17:32

Give the Games a boost by moving indoor sports to the winter event, writes Brian Cookson, and other readers respond to an article in which Sean Ingle suggested staging the summer Games more frequently. Sean Ingle’s suggestion of holding the Olympics every two years is an interesting one (Paris Olympics were great, so why not hold summer Games every two years?, 30 December). However, another option would be to take some or all of the indoor sports out of the summer Olympics and put them into the winter Games, alongside the current sports that under International Olympic Committee (IOC) statutes require snow or ice to be an essential and inherent feature.

As well as maximising the profile of the Olympics every two years, this would reduce the financial and logistical loads of hosting the summer Games, while also spreading the excitement and interest in the winter Games beyond the reducing number of countries capable of hosting them.

Back in 2014, as a newly elected president of an international federation affiliated to the IOC, I suggested this in a media interview. Needless to say, it did not make me popular, either with the IOC or with my contemporaries in other sports. But it’s still a good idea.

Brian Cookson. Past president, British Cycling (1996-2013), Union Cycliste Internationale (2013-2017). In response to Sean Ingle’s suggestion that the Olympics should be every two years, it is tempting to question the now ubiquitous capitalist assumption that the Olympics’ job is to generate revenue and deliver audiences rather than be the culmination of a physical and mental endeavour.

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