If you, dear reader, come from Doha, India, Istanbul, Warsaw, Budapest or Saudi Arabia and are therefore very interested in Olympic bids, then you can breathe a sigh of relief for the time being. Forget the media bleating that the Germans, and Berlin in particular, are ready for the Olympic Games. Let me explain to you how bad the conditions really are in the German capital.
This is just a current overview based on documents. I will expand on this in the coming weeks and months - with lots of documents.
So, a little German story - but of significance for Olympic plans in other nations.
The two cadres from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Iris Spranger (senator for the Interior and Sports) and Thomas Härtel (president of Berlin's Sports Association Landessportbund, previously State Secretary for Sports for an eternity) constantly claim that Berlin has most of the sports facilities needed for the Summer Olympics.
Härtel has been talking for a decade, since the campaign for 2024 failed in the starting blocks, about 70 per cent of the sports facilities being available.
Spranger is generously offering Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and others a number of events for future Olympic Games in a media-effective manner. On Monday, Spranger once again promoted the mega project on the fringes of the Paralympics at the Berlin Evening in the German House in Paris.
Message: We can do it. We are sustainable. We are cheap. We are so innovative. We have almost everything. We want to do it as well as the French. We are a cosmopolitan city. We are a sports metropolis.
In short, total nonsense.
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Jens Weinreich
Jens Weinreich
Nobody has to be afraid of Berlin or Germany in the totally non-transparent international competition.
Let's orientate ourselves on the facts. According to files from the Berlin Senate Department for the Interior and Sport (SenInn Sport), the NOC, the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) lists just a dozen potential venues in Berlin.
However, only a fraction of these dozen are currently suitable for the Olympics.
That is the German reality. And this is the funny list of 12 locations:
