The 2036 Olympic Bid Is Not a Sporting Contest. It Is a Geopolitical Auction.

The International Olympic Committee does not hold elections in any meaningful sense of the word. It holds ratifications. By the time the ninety-plus IOC members vote on an Olympic host city, the outcome has been shaped by years of lobbying, bilateral "Memoranda of Understanding," gift-adjacent hospitality programmes and the quiet accumulation of favours that Thomas Bach's leadership has refined into something approaching a diplomatic service. When the committee selects the host for the 2036 Summer Games — a decision expected in 2025–2026 — it will not be choosing the best city for sport. It will be ratifying a geopolitical outcome that has been negotiated in the background for half a decade.

The declared bidders for 2036 include India (Ahmedabad), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh), Indonesia (Nusantara), Turkey (Istanbul) and Egypt (Cairo). Each bid carries a sovereign logic that extends well beyond athletics. And each illuminates something important about how the Olympic apparatus has evolved from a sporting institution into a platform that states purchase in order to perform legitimacy.

India's Bid and the Modi Optics Machine

India's 2036 bid, centred on the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat — Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state — was formally confirmed to the IOC in 2023. The choice of Ahmedabad over Mumbai or Delhi is instructive: it is not India's largest or most internationally recognisable city, but it is the one most associated with the BJP's developmental mythology, the site of the Sardar Patel Stadium (now the Narendra Modi Stadium, the largest cricket ground on earth) and a showcase for the government's Smart City infrastructure spending.

The bid's political logic has been well-documented by sports analysts. It is not primarily about athletics infrastructure, which India would need to build from the ground up across multiple disciplines. It is about what David Goldblatt calls the "sovereign theatre" function of mega-events — the capacity to project modernity, administrative competence and national cohesion to both domestic and international audiences simultaneously. For Modi's BJP, a home Olympics in 2036 — coinciding with India's centenary of independence in 2047's approach — is a civilisational narrative, not a sporting schedule.

The IOC has been warm. Bach visited India three times between 2020 and 2024, meetings that generated joint communiqués about "Olympic values" and "partnership" that contained almost no specifics. This is the IOC's preferred diplomatic register: affirmative but uncommitted, encouraging enough to sustain a bidder's investment while preserving maximum flexibility for the eventual ratification.

Saudi Arabia's Bid as PIF Asset

Saudi Arabia's Riyadh 2036 bid is the most structurally legible of the competing claims because it makes no pretence of sporting logic. Saudi Arabia has essentially no Olympic tradition: the kingdom has sent athletes to the Games since 1972, but has never won a gold medal, fields small delegations and has no mass-participation sports culture comparable to the other bidders. What Riyadh has is the Public Investment Fund, Vision 2030, and a government that has calculated that sports hosting is the most efficient available mechanism for international legitimacy rehabilitation.

The bid's framing, managed by a consultancy infrastructure that includes former IOC insiders and international PR firms, consistently emphasises "legacy," "youth development" and "global inclusion" — the IOC's preferred vocabulary — while avoiding the substantive questions: how would Saudi Arabia accommodate LGBTQ athletes and delegations in a country where same-sex relations remain criminalised? How would the IOC's stated commitments to gender equality translate in a country that only permitted women to attend sporting events in 2018?

These questions have been raised, in increasingly pointed form, by human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The IOC's response has been consistent: "dialogue," "engagement," "conditions." It is the same architecture the body deployed when awarding the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing, which proceeded without meaningful human rights progress on any of the benchmarks that had been quietly suggested.

The IOC's Capture Problem

The structural problem is that the IOC's financial model makes it incapable of the independence its founding mythology claims. The organisation distributes approximately seventy-five percent of its revenue to national Olympic committees, international sports federations and Olympic Solidarity programmes. A significant portion of that revenue derives from the hosting agreements themselves, meaning the IOC is financially dependent on states willing to pay — and the states most willing to pay are those for whom the political return justifies the investment.

Anouk Aubert's analysis of IOC host selection patterns since 1990 finds a consistent correlation between host-city selection and the bidding country's GDP trajectory and geopolitical ambition; the correlation with sports infrastructure quality is considerably weaker. This is not corruption in the transactional sense — it is structural capture, the accumulation of incentive alignments that make genuinely independent selection effectively impossible without reforming the revenue model from the base.

The IOC under Bach has not moved toward such reform. It has moved in precisely the opposite direction, with the Olympic Agenda 2020+5 framework explicitly encouraging states to make longer-term partnership commitments — which is to say, converting what were previously discrete hosting arrangements into ongoing bilateral relationships that further entrench the dependency.

What the Global South Bidders Expose

Indonesia's Nusantara bid and Egypt's Cairo bid carry different political weight than India or Saudi Arabia's, but illuminate the same dynamic from a different angle. Both countries are using the Olympic bid process as a development-legitimacy signal — a way of communicating to international capital markets and multilateral lenders that the state is stable, ambitious and administratively capable.

Indonesia's bid is inseparable from the Nusantara new-capital project, Joko Widodo's most ambitious and contested legacy investment, a purpose-built city in Borneo that has encountered construction delays, environmental objections and significant scepticism about whether it will ever function as a genuine urban centre. Hosting the Olympics there would, in the government's framing, confirm the project's viability. It is the anti-logic of sound sports planning — choosing a Games location to validate a political decision rather than selecting a location because it serves the sport.

Egypt's bid is similar in structure: a country undergoing significant IMF-supervised austerity looking to use an Olympic announcement to signal confidence and attract investment. The IOC, which is careful not to make explicit political endorsements, is nonetheless de facto endorsing these projects whenever it grants "preferred bidder" status or "Future Host Commission" positive assessments.

The 2036 selection will almost certainly be framed by the IOC as a triumph of outreach to the Global South or the Islamic world or the Asian century — the discursive frame will be chosen post-hoc to match the selection. What it will actually represent is the next iteration of a process in which sovereign capital bids for legitimacy and the IOC provides the receipt.

Monexus covered this as an institutional capture story; mainstream sports media ran the bids as competition previews, almost entirely absent the financial and governance architecture that makes the outcome legible.