Host City Selection
Planning of the Lillehamer bid started in 1981, following Falun, Sweden's failed bid for the 1988 Winter Olympics. It was supported by the government largely to help stimulate the economy of the inland counties. Lillehammer originally bid for the 1992 Games, but came fourth in the voting. In 1986, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to separate the Summer and Winter Games, which had been held in the same year since the latter's inception in 1924, and arrange them in alternating even-numbered years. A new bid was launched for the 1994 Games, modified with an indoor speed skating venue and an additional ice hall in Lillehammer. Additional government guarantees were secured.
Three other locations bid for the games: Östersund, Anchorage in Alaska, and Sofia. The 94th IOC Session, held in Seoul on 15 September 1988, voted Lillehammer the host for the Games. The Lillehammer Olympics were the last Winter Games to date to be held in a town, rather than be centered around a city.
| City | Country | Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lillehammer | Norway | 25 | 30 | 45 |
| Östersund | Sweden | 19 | 33 | 39 |
| Anchorage | United States | 23 | 22 | — |
| Sofia | Bulgaria | 17 | — | — |
Read more about this topic: 1994 Winter Olympics
Famous quotes containing the words host, city and/or selection:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happy as possible.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“Every writer is necessarily a critic—that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.... The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg—nine-tenths of him is under water.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)