Give all nations a sporting chance

What do the Middle East, Central Asia, the Asian subcontinent, Africa and South America all have in common? Embarrassingly, none of these regions have ever hosted an Olympic Games.

For a supposedly global celebration of sport, the International Olympic Commission (IOC) has been remarkably lacking in geographical ambition. It has only been in relatively recent times that the Europe-North America axis been interrupted by the Far East but other parts of the world continue to struggle to get a look in. The omission of such vast and populous areas as India, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa rather makes a mockery of the idea of a "world games".

The football World Cup is little better: Asia has been poorly represented while Central Asia has never hosted and neither has the Middle East. Africa will get only its first World Cup next year in South Africa. The reason these giant sporting festivals keep cropping up on the same continents is that they require vast amounts of infrastructure to host. Hotels, transport, stadia and, of course, sufficient cash to pay for it all.

However, as the emerging economies become more ambitious and begin to play a larger role in world affairs, they will also demand a greater say in sporting affairs. China's Olympics in Beijing last year was a clear demonstration of this but other countries are also demanding attention. Rio de Janeiro is on the shortlist to host the 2016 Games and a whole raft of countries including even Indonesia are having a go for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Middle Eastern representation is still almost non-existent when it comes to bidding for these events and only Qatar, which successfully hosted the Asian Games two years ago, has bravely attempted it. Qatar's bid for the 2016 Games failed but, undeterred, it has now turned its attention to soccer and the World Cups of 2018 and 2022.

However, I think that Qatar will struggle to win hosting rights for either the World Cup or Olympics – assuming it bids again for the 2020 Games. The main problem is the weather. The Olympics are traditionally held between July and September – a period when it can get a trifle hot in the Gulf.

Qatar suggested pushing the event back to October but that ran into the European soccer and the US football seasons. The television companies objected and that, I understand, was the prime reason for Qatar's failure to progress further in the bidding. A bid for the World Cup might be easier as stadia can be air-conditioned and games can be played at night, which is certainly not the case with the marathon. The second problem for Qatar is infrastructure. The Olympics are bid for by host cities and Doha, even with its current building boom, lacks the scale to put on a modern Games. The soccer World Cup may be even harder to pull off as Qatar would need at least half a dozen stadia seating more than 40,000 people and at least one of over 80,000.

I have no doubt that the Qataris could build such facilities but why bother when the country would have little use for them afterwards. The country's small population might also make it difficult to fill all the seats for each match or event – a problem it experienced during the Asian Games.

That is not to say the Gulf will never have the opportunity to host one of sport's mega events. This weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix demonstrated that Gulf countries are capable of putting on a big show – and I'm sure that Abu Dhabi's Grand Prix later in the year will be just as spectacular. Dubai also hosts several large events and the Rugby 7s World Cup was judged to have been a great success. Qatar also pulled off a great Asian Games and will host the Asian Cup in two years. The ability is there, but not the scale. So perhaps the Gulf states should collaborate on a bid?

Joint World Cup bids are now common and it would be easy to imagine Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and Manama hosting a pool each. That would spread the infrastructure requirements and bring in more people to each game.

The Olympics is a tougher proposition as the IOC would need to be persuaded that it should change the rules to allow joint bids. It also needs to accept a different time slot for the Games to avoid the summer heat. At the moment, it does not appear that the IOC is willing to make either of those changes. However, neither the IOC nor Fifa, football's governing body, can continue to ignore huge regions of the world forever so I hope that the Gulf keeps bidding.



- The writer is a business correspondent with The Times of London