Madrid Bid For The 2016 Summer Olympics - Candidature Process

Candidature Process

After failing to achieve victory in the election process of the host city of the 2012 Summer Olympics, the city council of Madrid decided to nominate it a candidate to host the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics on July 3, 2006. The nomination was encouraged by statements of the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jacques Rogge, that European cities would still have a chance to host the 2016 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched the bidding process for the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics on May 16, 2007. On May 30, 2007, the candidature was formalized by the Spanish Olympic Committee (SOC) with claims to be "radically new" and more prepared than the city's last attempt to host the Olympics. The IOC announced that seven cities—Baku, Chicago, Doha, Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo—were submitted by their respective NOCs to bid for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Madrid bid committee attended the 2016 Applicant Cities' Seminar in Lausanne, Switzerland, on October 18, 2007, where it learnt more about the bidding process. The Application Files, which contain the answers and guarantees requested by the IOC's 2016 Candidature Acceptance Procedure and Questionnaire, were returned by all seven applicant cities to the IOC on January 14, 2008. The responses were studied by the IOC Working Group and the IOC Executive Board, at the latter meeting to decide which cities would be accepted as candidate cities.

On June 4, 2008, the IOC announced that Chicago, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid were selected to the next bidding phase, during a meeting in Athens, Greece. This decision was based on a report by a special IOC Working Group of experts, after a thorough technical analysis of the projects presented on the files submitted by the applicant cities. Each city's potential for staging successful Summer Olympics and Paralympics in 2016 was assessed by the Working Group according to eleven criteria: government support, legal issues and public opinion; general infrastructure; sport venues; Olympic village; environment conditions and impact; accommodation; transport concept; safety and security; experience from past sport events; finance; and overall project and legacy. Between August 5 and August 26, 2008, the bidding committees from the four candidate cities participated in the Olympic Games Observer Program, during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Madrid officials also followed the completion of the 2008 Summer Paralympics. The IOC announced that it had received the Candidature Files of all four candidate cities on February 12, 2009. The Madrid 2016 Candidate File has three volumes covering 600 pages divided into 17 topics, with 671 guarantees and 80 images. According to the Madrid bid committee, the dossier was produced by more than 150 people, who invested more than 16,000 hours of work. The front cover image includes the names of 350 of the 2,850 people who have been part of the formulation of the document.