The Swedish government has stated that it is supporting the Swedish Olympic Committee’s (SOK) bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympic and Winter Paralympic Games.
The Swedish government has pinned its support of the country’s bid on the economic benefits that it believes will come as a result of hosting the games.
The bid, while centered around the country’s capital of Stockholm, will see events spread out across the country with the municipalities of Åre, Östersund, and Falun all planned as event hosts should the bid be successful.
The Swedish government has said in a statement: “The government notes the great interest shown by Swedish businesses in a Winter Games in Sweden. A prerequisite for the government’s support for a Swedish Olympic bid is that the business community contributes to the sponsorship revenues calculated in the Games budget.”
Sweden has never hosted the Winter Olympics and would become only the second Scandinavian nation to do so after neighboring Norway hosted in 1952.
Sweden is the third country to announce its intention to bid for the hosting of the 2030 games, with both Switzerland and France revealing their submissions in the last month.
Switzerland’s bid, announced on October 20, would make it the first Olympic games to be hosted across an entire country, as Swiss Olympic outlined in its bid that a hosting would not be confined to one city.
France’s bid, announced earlier in November, aims for the games to be hosted in the adjacent Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regions of Southern France.
The host of both the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games will be selected at the 142nd IOC Session in 2024, with the 2034 host of the games to be expected to be picked from one of the failed bids for 2030, as well as Salt Lake City in the US which has prioritized 2034 over 2030.
In 2017, the IOC awarded the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics together to Paris and Los Angeles, respectively.
The 2026 Winter Olympics will take place in the Milan-Cortina region of Northern Italy, with the 2022 edition having taken place in Beijing, China.
