What Hosting Now Selects For
The collapse in competitive bidding was a market correcting. Cities were being asked to accept unlimited downside on a fixed-deadline construction programme in exchange for capped revenue and contested benefits, and enough of them worked that out for the supply of volunteers to dry up. The response, lowering the requirements and negotiating privately rather than competing publicly, addresses the cost side of the problem directly and probably produces better-planned Games.
What it also does is change which places can host. A process that rewards having the venues already narrows the field to cities that have hosted before or that have built comparable infrastructure for other reasons, which pulls the Games back toward a relatively small set of wealthy, already-equipped regions. That is a defensible trade, and it is close to the opposite of the expansionary logic that drove the bidding era. The Games stopped being a prize cities fought over and became an arrangement they negotiate, and the negotiation now begins with what a host is unwilling to build.
