The Hungarian Olympic Committee (HOC) Thursday voted to form the Budapest 2032 Committee, a group tasked to explore the feasibility of a 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games bid.
An eight-member committee of key players in the Hungarian economy was unanimously elected to examine the possibility of bringing Hungary its first-ever Olympic Games.
“In 2021 we arrived to year in which the Hungarian Olympic Committee has to address the tasks preceding candidacy for and hosting the 2032 Olympic Games and has to set up a respective team, otherwise the Hungarian Olympic Committee would not do its job properly,” HOC President Krisztián Kulcsár said.
Budapest has unsuccessfully bid to host six previous Olympic Games, most recently for 2024 edition. The city withdrew from that race after a threatened referendum eroded political support for the project. That paved the way for the double awarding of the Games to Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles in 2028.
Hungary has won the most Olympic medals for any nation to have never hosted the world’s biggest quadrennial sport event.
“The exclusive objective of the committee is to thoroughly examine the possibility for Budapest to submit its candidature for the right to host the 2032 Summer Olympic Games,” Budapest 2032 President Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy said – the great-great-grandson to the first President of the Hungarian Olympic Committee, Albert Berzeviczy.
“The main task is to create a comprehensive feasibility and macroeconomic impact assessment, a complex task that is estimated to take one and a half years.
“Members of the newly founded committee are accomplished captains of industry whose membership guarantees the professional and scrupulous conduct of this study,” he added.
Last year Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán indicated support for a bid when he told reporters “I’d like to live to see Hungary hosting the Olympics.”
There is no set timeline for the election of the 2032 host region and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is currently focused on delivering the postponed Tokyo 2020 Games and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games. Typically the Games have been awarded seven years ahead of the opening ceremony.
Other regions that have been discussing bids for the 2032 Games include Brisbane in Australia, Jakarta in Indonesia, Doha in Qatar, a regional project in Germany, the Netherlands, a joint Unified Korean bid from Seoul and Pyongyang, a joint bid from Chengdu and Chongqing in China, and Istanbul in Turkey.
Many of the projects have been paused due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
As described by the HOC the committee members include: President Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, former President of the Budapest Stock Exchange, Gabriella Balogh, Directors Board Member of the Portfolio Group, the leading economic site in Hungary, Gabriella Heiszler, Chief Executive Officer of SPAR Hungary, Csaba Lantos, Chair of the Directors Board of the MET Group, a Swiss-based energy company, Sándor Nyúl, Chair of the Supervisory Board of Gránit Bank, a Hungarian commercial banking institution, Gábor Orbán, Chief Executive Officer of Richter Gedeon, a leading pharmaceutical company in Hungary, Anett Pandurics, Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer of Posta Biztosító, the subsidiary insurance company of Hungary Posta and József Váradi, Chief Executive Officer of Wizz Air, while Olympic Champion judoka and Communications Director of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant Antal Kovács will liaise on behalf of the Executive Board of the Hungarian Olympic Committee.
