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Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has said that he wants the English capital to bid to host the 2040 Summer Olympic Games.
London previously hosted the Olympics in 1908, 1848 and 2012. Another successful bid would make it the only city to host the Games four times.
Several of the facilities at the Olympic Park created for the 2012 Games are still used for hosting sporting events. The London Stadium became the permanent home of the Premier League’s West Ham United in 2016 and hosts the yearly London Athletics Meet, while the London Lions of the British Basketball League play their home games at the Copper Box Arena.
Khan, who has been the capital’s mayor since 2016, confirmed the desire to bring the Olympics back to the city in the 2024 Major Sports Events Impact Report that was released by London’s City Hall on Monday.
“We could knock it out of the park in relation to the Olympics, using the assets we already have in the aquatics centre, the stadium, the velodrome,” Khan told The Times ahead of the report’s release.
“When it comes to major sports events, the public and governments are not unreasonably nervous about a huge amount of money being spent on infrastructure. But the reason why 2040 makes sense for London is because we could do it in a brilliant way but also very cheaply.
“An Olympics in London wouldn’t cost a fortune, but the benefits would be humongous.”
The report stated that 480,000 fans attended seven major sporting events in London in the past year, including the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund and three NFL games — two at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and one at Wembley — while more than 200 million viewers tuned in globally.
The events generated £230million ($308m) for the city’s economy, per the report, with Khan describing London as “the sporting capital of the world.”
The report also said that Khan was in “positive discussions” to bring the NBA back to London with the help of a Basketball Taskforce. The NBA hosted regular-season games at the O2 Arena from 2011 until 2019, aside from in 2012.
Following last year’s Games in Paris, the 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles with the 2032 edition set for Brisbane, Australia. Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey are among the nations which have expressed interest in hosting the Games in 2036.
(Photo: Steve Rose/Getty Images)
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