Dispersed Games to become increasingly common, says USOPC CEO Hirshland

NEW YORK, Oct 15 : Geographically dispersed Games are well on their way to becoming the norm, USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said on Thursday, as the growing scale of the Olympics complicates infrastructure plans for hosts.

IOC officials hailed the most recent Milano Cortina Games as a success, despite early concerns over the first spread-out Winter Olympics that had venues scattered over 22,000 kilometres. 

The upcoming LA28 Games are also expected to be spread out, with softball and canoe slalom set to take place in Oklahoma City and soccer to be in several metropolitan areas: New York City; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; St. Louis; San Jose, California; and San Diego.

"The disbursement of the Games themselves is evolving. And a lot of that is because the scale of the Games has gotten so big and significant that the infrastructure required to host is very hard to find in a single place," said Hirshland, who was speaking from the Columbia University Sports Management Conference. 

The 2030 Games in the French Alps are expected to follow the Milano Cortina model, with venues in Nice and the Alpine regions. New York state this year formed an exploratory committee to host the 2042 Winter Games, with the duties to be shared between the five boroughs and Lake Placid. 

By comparison, the centralised plan for Utah 2034's venues will serve as a "rare exception," said Hirshland.

"It is likely that the LA 2028 Games will be the largest summer Games ever," she said. 

"My guess is that the summer Games thereon after will probably be smaller than what we're going to see in LA. And a lot of that is infrastructure demand, cost demand, and to some degree there is a point at which even the logistics get so cumbersome that you can't continue to grow unless you really rethink the way you do it."