The 2018 Winter Olympics will take place in Pyeongchang after the South Korean city won an overwhelming victory in today’s vote by International Olympic Committee members.
Pyeongchang won in the first round of voting in the IOC session in Durban, collecting 63 of the 95 votes to beat competition from Munich (25 votes) and the French resort of Annecy (seven).
It is the third time South Korea have bid for the winter Games and means they now have achieved the ‘grand slam’ of major sports events, including the summer Olympics in Seoul in 1988, the football World Cup in 2002 and the athletics World Championships in Daegu next month.
It is also another victory notched up for Mike Lee, the English public relations strategist, who previously worked on the successful summer Olympic bids for London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro 2016 plus the Qatar 2022 football World Cup bid.
Pyeongchang’s victory comes at its third attempt at winning the hosting rights to the Winter Olympics, having been beaten narrowly by Vancouver to the 2010 Games and by Sochi, the Russian resort on the Black Sea, for the 2014 event.
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The South Korean delegation, including Lee Myung Bak, the president, and Kim Yuna, the women’s Olympic figure skating champion, has secured Asia’s third Winter Olympics and the first since Nagano in Japan in 1998.
Each of the three candidate cities made a 70-minute presentation of speeches and films to the IOC membership this morning. Before the vote was taken the IOC’s evaluation commission, which has visited each venue this year, presented its report.