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SA to bid for 2022 Commonwealth Games- 3 Jun 2011 00:00:00

South Africa will bid to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games, after pulling out of the race to stage the 2020 Summer Olympic Games – according to the country’s Olympic committee president Gideon Sam.

Gideon Sam recently ruled out a bid for the 2020 Olympic Games after the government said it was not the right time, having previously stated that the Olympic committee would only bid for the Games with the full backing of the government.

The government confirmed that it wanted to focus on delivering basic services such as water and electricity to all its citizens, before entering an Olympic bidding process.

Sam said: ‘Immediately after the announcement of where the 2018 Commonwealth Games will be held, we will go in for 2022. It has never been to Africa and so we want to put in a bid’.

The host city for the 2018 Commonwealth Games will be announced in November, with Australia's Gold Coast competing with the Sri Lankan port-city of Hambantota.

Sam added that a bid for the Commonwealth Games would not be hampered by the same issues that affected a possible Olympics bid.

‘The scale of the Commonwealth Games is a lot smaller than the Olympics. We will have to have buy-in from a host city and from government, because of security issues, but we are not talking about the expense of an Olympics’.

Ahead of the International Olympic Committee Session in Durban in July, Sam also added that South Africa had previously stepped back to allow other African countries to bid for the Commonwealth Games – claiming the country stood back for Nigeria – who lost out to Glasgow for the 2014 Games.