2022: the year of the sportswash.

A city without snow and a state in the desert. Obvious places, really, to hold the Winter Olympics and football World Cup if you’re the IOC and FIFA. Welcome to 2022, the year of the sportswash.

The principal outdoor venues for Beijing 2022 are – on a good day – 90 minutes and two and a half hours’ drive respectively from the Forbidden City. The alpine skiing in Zhangshanying will rely almost entirely on artificial snow. But the IOC has no truck with those who believe winter sports should be held where snowfall is plentiful. After all, its 2014 Games were held in the subtropical seaside resort of Sochi.

Qatar has a population of 2.9 million, only a little over 300,000 of them native Qataris. Just as the Chinese have constructed snow resorts to welcome the world, so Qatar has built six stadiums for the World Cup and refurbished two others. Just one is fully demountable, although others will be trimmed in size to leave the tiny desert state – whose national team has never played in a World Cup – with seven world-class venues ranging in capacity from 20,000 to 40,000.

The snow in Beijing will look fantastic, as will the pitches in Qatar. Doubtless the quality of the sport will match the surroundings, although the November schedule for the football raises important questions about player welfare, as well as the knock-on effect on national club competitions halted for a swift run at the most important tournament in the game.

The prospect of compelling sport shouldn’t silence the key questions: why Beijing, and why Qatar? It’s easy to blame the IOC and FIFA hierarchies who steered the bidding processes, but their national members ultimately voted for the two hosts. 

What does China need of a Winter Games? Certainly not international kudos, nor the rumblings of discontent about human rights and diplomatic boycotts of the event. Most likely, its leaders are of the ‘bread and circuses’ persuasion, banking on creating goodwill among a huge population largely oblivious to noises off. The IOC, it seems, needs China – an unreliable, but potentially hugely lucrative source of commercial revenue.

It’s much harder to see what FIFA gets from Qatar. Allegations of corruption in the bidding process in 2011 have nipped at the heels of Qatar 2022 ever since. Certainly, FIFA has no need of this venue in its ambitions for global sporting domination. And it’s taking a big risk around a late autumn timing and attendances.

I led London’s bid to host the 2017 World Athletics Champs against competition from Doha, Qatar, back in 2011, just after the state’s World Cup bid success. It was tough and at times unpleasant, with unsubstantiated rumours of brown envelopes changing hands on the eve of the vote. My business lesson: never underestimate your opponent in a contest in which coming second is as good as coming last.

At the Beijing 2015 World Athletics Championships, I watched from my hotel window coaches filling a massive parking lot each morning with Chinese bussed into the Birds Nest Stadium. I’ve no way of knowing whether they’d paid – or been paid – to attend the athletics. No doubt the Beijing 2022 organising committee has all their names and addresses should they be needed next month.

Four years later I sat in a sparsely populated Al Khalifa Stadium for the Doha 2019 WAC. The venue only filled on the night that local hero Mutaz Barshim won the high jump – and even then it created the uncomfortable sight of a crowd almost devoid of local women and girls.

Athletics, though, isn’t football, so there has to be a fair chance that overseas fans and seat-filling with non-Qatari local workers will create a solid enough backdrop of people for the global TV audience. 

The simplest question to answer is what Qatar gets from hosting the FIFA World Cup. An exit at the group stages for the home team no doubt, but four weeks of glittering imagery worldwide to wash over concerns about the immigrant lives that the state has been built on.

Originally published by Sport.Inc and reprinted here with permission.