There were obviously quite a few arguments that Hendrik Wüst and his colleagues had to present when they performed their concept for Olympic and Paralympic games in the Rhein-Ruhr region this Wednesday morning at a meeting with a delegation from the German Olympic Sports Association (DOSB). The subsequent press round in the German Sports and Olympic Museum on the Cologne bank of the Rhine began with a decent delay. But what North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister subsequently had to announce, testified by great imagination and even contained a few superlatives. In addition, the consent among the population is higher than among competitors from Munich and Berlin, who had presented their concepts in the past few days. 95 percent of the sports facilities are either already available or could be erected temporarily. And six million people live so close to the region that they could “arrive by train within three hours”. All that is not completely new, Rhein-Ruhr has already headed for an application, led by sports manager Michael Mronz, was slowed down in 2021 from the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The then NRW Prime Minister Armin Laschet noted that the DOSB, which was still very undecided at the time, “has no sense of what is happening in the IOC”. It is different now, to which Mronz is now a member of the IOC, and on the other hand, because those responsible at DOSB saw at the latest with the fascinating games of Paris last year, which fascinating strength can start from this event. If the records arise less in the costs and the waste of resources and more on fields such as enthusiasm, the public interest and the sustainability of the necessary investments. External content activate a total of 14 municipalities from Dortmund via Recklinghausen, Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf or Aachen, sailing in Kiel and Warnemünde. In Cologne or in Essen, a new Olympic stadium for the athletics competitions would first be built up and then dismantled and finally removed; As part of the connected Olympic village for 16,000 people, which would subsequently alleviate the lack of living space as a new district. And the whole thing would not be particularly expensive either, at least if the income and profits are calculated. However, nobody wanted to give precise figures because the costs for such a project in such a long way were not seriously calculable. “NRW is the ideal place for the games,” said Wüst, “we have the sports facilities, we have the experience for the execution of large international events and we have the sports enthusiasm in the country”, from that also leads the motto of the application: “Powerhouse of True Sports.” Show: The dilapidated school halls, for example, or the empty coffers of the municipalities are an unsolved problem. In July the FISU World Games will take place in the region, the students’ Olympics, Düsseldorf should also be there. But the city gave up its competitions because of the “cost explosion in the area of event management”, as Wüst admitted on request. “But we will still have gigantically good Fisu World Games.” To make matters worse that cities names such as Berlin, Munich or Hamburg are also associated with ideas and emotions outside of Europe, Rhein-Ruhr sounds comparatively diffuse. Perhaps it is possible to find a “gripier name”, said Volker Bouffier, the board for special tasks at the DOSB and explained that “Cologne Cathedral will probably become a symbol of the application”. On Saturday, Hamburg will be the last of the four applicants to present his coarse concept, in September 2026 the DSOB will then choose the German applicant. Before the games for 2036 and maybe 2040 are awarded at some point between 2027 and 2029.
