BERLIN — Berlin formally presented its bid to rehost the Olympics on Tuesday in the same stadium where Jesse Owens starred during the 1936 Games under the Nazis.
Berlin sports minister Iris Spranger said the city wants to put on a sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2036, 2040 or 2044, making use of existing sports venues.
But her announced plans to include the former airport Tempelhof are likely to be resisted by locals who already opposed any development of the popular city park in a 2014 referendum.
Spranger envisaged beach volleyball at the Brandenburg Gate, and water sports in Grünau, a riverside locality which also staged water sports in 1936.
Otherwise, Spranger gave few details during the presentation, saying the bid was still at concept phase.
“You’ll have to be patient,” she told a journalist.
Berlin’s bid — titled “Berlin+” with support from the states of Brandenburg, Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Schleswig-Holstein — is to be presented to the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) before an end-of-month deadline.
It will be up to the DOSB to decide which Games to bid for. Los Angeles is hosting the 2028 Olympics and Brisbane the 2032 Olympics, so the next available edition will be 2036, the 100th anniversary of the Berlin Games.
The DOSB previously said a German bid for 2040 was also possible.
“I believe that the 2036 Games, regardless of where they take place, will also focus on the Nazi Games of 1936. That’s part of history and attention will be paid to it,” Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner said. “I have to tell you, I’m proud to be the governing mayor of a city that has changed in the last 100 years, that we no longer stand for dictatorship, exclusion, and mass violence, but that Berlin is now a cosmopolitan, international metropolis, a colorful, diverse city.”
Wegner said it was “important for Germany to make a bid. We’re making an offer here today.”
Wegner, Spranger and the governors from the other four states made their presentation in the same battle-scarred stadium, Berlin’s Olympiastadion, where Adolf Hitler watched Owens, the Black American athlete, win four gold medals in the 1936 Games, dealing a blow to Hitler’s notions of racial superiority.
Hitler was personally involved in the design and construction of the 100,000-seat track-and-field stadium after the Nazis assumed power in 1933, two years after the Games were awarded to the city.
