The deal has been sealed. The International Olympic Committee has confirmed that Paris will host the 2024 Summer Games and Los Angeles the 2028 competition.
Both cities have hosted the Olympics twice before: Paris in 1900 and 1924 and LA in 1932 and 1984. The French capital was the second ever host of the Olympics, after Athens in 1896.
Members of the IOC were welcomed to the Peruvian capital by the Committee’s President Thomas Bach and Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
In his opening remarks, Bach said the session was an important occasion to “chart the course for the future of the Olympic Movement.”
“We are showing a sceptical world that we are making the Olympic Movement stronger, that we are living up to our values and responsibilities [...] The IOC has already implemented all good governance measures called for under Olympic Agenda 2020. We have reformed and we have changed,” he said.
The ceremony comes amid a corruption crisis within the IOC. Several of its officials have been implicated in fraud this year. The latest instance came last week when police raided the home of Carlos Nuzman, the head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee. He was questioned and had his passport seized. Police say they are looking into ‘strong evidence’ of vote-buying to secure the Rio 2016 bid.
Seventy-two-year-old Nuzman is suspected of acting as a go-between in a ‘cash-for-votes’ scheme aiming to win the support of Lamine Diack. Diack, who was president of the Intenational Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) at the time, was an influential IOC member.
In April, the Head of the Olympic Council of Asia denied links to a fraud case, but then resigned from his role at football’s world governing body FIFA a day afterwards. Media reports had connected Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah to Richard Lai, a FIFA audit and compliance member who was barred after admitting taking some 800,000 euros in bribes.
While in July, Namibian four-time Olympic silver medallist and IAAF council member Frankie Fredericks was suspended from athletics while he is investigated for a potential ethics violation.
Bach said on Monday (September 11) that “once evidence is there” the IOC would act on graft allegations.
