Article & Journal Resources

Doha, Qatar, pursues the 2016 Olympics.

BY JONATHAN KOLATCH
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

When Doha launched its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics on Oct. 25, with a sound and light show on the Corniche overlooking the Persian Gulf, the world responded with a mighty O-h-h-h? Tokyo, Chicago, Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro and . . . the mouse that roared?

But to those of us who chanced to be in Doha, Qatar, in December 2006 for the 15th Asian Games--the second largest sporting event after the Olympics, attended by 8,060 athletes and 4,100 team officials from 45 countries representing more than half of mankind--the bid came as no surprise.

When I met with the energetic 36-year-old secretary-general of the Qatar Olympic Committee, His Excellency, Sheik Saoud Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, a distant cousin of the royal family and a New Mexico State graduate in engineering, he walked me through the rationale for hosting the Asian Games: (1) to put Qatar--with the world's third-largest natural gas reserves, but with low international profile--"on the map"; (2) to increase tourism by establishing an annual circuit of international sporting events in Qatar; and (3) to instill discipline in Qatar's young people by providing facilities to enable them to participate in sports. An Olympics in Qatar was a key ingredient in that vision, he added. Preparations had been in the works since 2004.

Qatar, the sheik told me, had put up $3.8 billion to build a state-of-the-art sports facility and to import some 25,000 foreigners to run the Doha Asian Games. What he didn't say, but numerous expatriates did, is that the reason so many foreigners were needed is that Qataris, for whom the good life has come easily, are not used to hard work. In any case, there weren't enough of them with the skills to do the job.

To the standard 28-event Olympic menu, the Doha Asian Games added 11 events, including kabaddi, a centuries-old Indian village tag game played barefoot, which is also popular in Pakistan and Bangladesh. You could learn as much about Qatar and its Olympic pretensions from the gold-medal match between India (35) and Pakistan (23) as you could about kabaddi itself. Although some 750,000 people live in Qatar--a peninsula-state about the size of New Jersey jutting into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia--only 170,000 are its citizens. The balance are Indians (the majority)--numbering more than 200,000--Pakistanis, Filipinos, Iranians, Bangladeshis and a host of other groups who come to Qatar in search of work and sometimes end up staying the rest of their lives. As at most events, very few Qataris were seen at the kabaddi hall, whose seats were filled mainly by the immigrants who do the work that keeps Qatar running.

The Doha Games were executed almost flawlessly. Chinese gold medal weightlifter Li Hongli was among the many athletes I spoke to who felt that the accommodations, the food and the competition facilities reached the highest standards. The complex transportation system to the venues, the media services, and the computerized information system all functioned seamlessly.

And in the most memorable moment of the superb Opening Ceremony--which lavishly traced the history of Qatar from antiquity until today--the captain of the Qatar equestrian team, Mohamed bin Hamad Al-Thani, the son of the Emir, galloped up a specially constructed ramp to the top of Khalifa Stadium to light the Asian Games' eternal flame. The Closing Ceremony, following the theme of "A Thousand and One Nights," raised the bar for future Olympic closing ceremonies.

Perfection . . .. But a catering company from England fed the Athletes' and Media Villages, a Dutch company ran the lnfo2006 system and Asian Games News Service, foreigners handled the accreditation, did the announcing at the competitions, and managed and operated the transportation system. Foreigners ran the Athletes' and Media Villages, as well as the scoreboards, the media centers, and the TV camerawork. Foreign janitors did the cleanup. And the 16,000 volunteers who complemented the paid staff were drawn overwhelmingly from Qatar's immigrant communities. Seven hundred Australians put together the Opening Ceremony program; even the horse at the Opening Ceremony was trained in Australia. Only in the security detail was there any identifiable Qatari presence. A simple "Keif halaq" ("How are you?") addressed in Arabic to a Doha Asian Games worker almost always brought a blank response. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies aside, there was little of the flavor of Arabia at the Doha Games. Qatar simply gave the go-ahead and wrote the checks.

To escalate from an Olympic Applicant City to a Candidate City, Doha must answer by Jan. 14, 2008, 25 questions posed by the IOC dealing with motivation and legacy, political support, finances, venues, accommodations, transportation, and security. The IOC Executive Board will use this application to determine next June if Doha is qualified to be one of the finalists. If chosen, Doha will prepare an elaborate "bid book." The 2016 host city will be announced in October 2009.

With the support of the royal family, Doha will have no difficulty satisfying the economic requirements. A price tag of $20 billion (Beijing's round-figure investment) was within budget, Sheikh Saoud said.

Where Doha will fall far short of the current host, Beijing 2008, is in popular participation, in what the IOC calls "sustainability," and in the legacy an Olympic Games in Doha will leave behind. Beijing has made a maximum effort to use local resources and, in the process, is learning the ways of the world. Its tourist services, its translators, its caterers, its computer technicians, its TV cameramen will all be better for the experience. Doha, on the other hand, would bring in almost everything from outside the country. Its thousands of mostly expat volunteers could never match Beijing's 70,000. At the end of a Doha Olympic Games, most of the imported skills will leave with the contractors.

Already, the writing is on the wall. When you click on the Media Centre tab at www.doha2016.org, up pop two contacts from the international image maker, Burson Marsteller. In Beijing, at the same stage in the application process, the public face was Chinese.

But the big unanswerable questionabout Doha's 2016 bid is "What after?" For the 2006 Asian Games, Qatar had 7,000 hotel rooms to accommodate 20,000 visitors. Beijing 2008 will offer more than 100,000 hotel rooms. After the Beijing Games, China will still have the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven to attract tourists to those rooms; Qatar only sea, sun and sand.

On balance, hosting the 2016 Olympics would be a tremendous boon for Qatar, well satisfying Doha 2016's bid slogan: "Celebrating change." At the extreme, it might force Qatar to deliberate whether a country whose citizens are a 20% minority can be viable. In time, this might force liberalization of Qatar's naturalization laws and, by example, influence other Persian Gulf ministates.

In analyzing Doha's 2016 bid, the International Olympic Committee needs to answer two essential questions: Is nation-building on the agenda of the IOC? Are the Olympic Games up for sale?

If the answer to these is "yes," Doha 2016 would put on a whale of a show.

Mr. Kolatch is the author of the just-published "At the Corner of Fact & Fancy" (Jonathan David).