I say this with a tongue and cheek approach because their are still 2 bidders left that would like the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. They are Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China. Today, October 1, 2014, the ruling government in Norway withdrew their support of Oslo's attempt to bring the Games to their nation.
Winter Olympics: Oslo set to quit 2022 bidding race - BBCSport
Norwegian government rejects backing for Oslo 22 Winter Olympics - FoxNews.com
Oslo withdraws bid for 2022 Olympics, Citing High Costs of Games - NYTimes.com
Why is this? Basically, public support of the Olympic Games was 3 in 10 Norwegians as reported on by various local news outlets and the outcry that bringing the Olympic Games to Norway would leave to severe of a financial burden on their society.
At this point, the International Olympic Committee needs to look squarely at themselves and figure out how costs of their 4 year traveling carnival of sport must become economically more sustainable so that more countries might bid again as well as have a solid post-Olympic plan of what your going to do with the venues once you have built out the infrastructure (stadiums, media center, olympic village along with all of the road and airport improvements) to have the Olympics.
In North America, we have a lot of abilities to re-use our venues for collegiate purposes, public-private partnerships and/or new training facilities to be used by the National Governing Bodies of US and Canadian National Teams where in many of the nations in the past Olympiads in Sochi, Torino, Nagano and Albertville the venues that were built out have not seen the amount of usage that one might imagine would be great value on the investments that were built to put them up in the first place.
What will be the legacy of another Olympic Games in China less than 15 years after the Summer Games? You can see venues from 2008 that are not in use today or have fallen apart due to lack of maintenance and we are only 6 years past that competition.
With the Winter Olympics in 2018 being in South Korea and the Summer Olympics two years later in 2020 being held in Japan, would a third Olympic Games be held in Asia in Beijing? What does this say about how and why the Olympics are now suddenly in only part of the world?
What this says is that the Games have become too expensive to host in Europe with 3 areas that subsequently pulled out due to financial reasons in Norway, Poland, Sweden and additionally with the uncertainty of ongoing violence in Ukraine you are left with, Almaty, Kazakhstan which is Central Asia, but is near the borders of eastern China and southern Kyrgyzstan. Their other national borders in the region are Russia to the north, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan also to the south. On their western side is the Caspian Sea. Almaty was the capital of the nation, but the capital was moved and is now in a more central location to the north called Astana.
Map of Kazakhstan
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the United States, Denver 76 was awarded the Games in 1970 and gave them back to the IOC in 1972 due to concerns about rising economic costs and the environment impact.of the event.
All of which I can say is that 2022 unless something drastic changes will be a very unique situation that the IOC can only hope never happens again. But in a sense this has already happened again and that was 1976 when Denver had the Olympics as it had been awarded to them and the voters of the region, gave the Olympics back to the IOC when they vacated their obligation to host, thus why Innsbruck, Austria hosted the Games after having hosted in 1964.
History repeats itself, but lessons can sometimes be forgotten it seems.