Munich chosen as Germany's Olympic candidate, ending a seven-bid wait

Baden-Baden, Germany — The German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) has selected Munich as the country's candidate to bid for a future Summer Olympic Games, choosing the Bavarian state capital over the Cologne/Rhine-Ruhr region at an extraordinary general assembly held on Saturday at the Kurhaus in the southwestern spa town of Baden-Baden. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier formally announced the decision, and delegates in the hall rose to celebrate a result that had, until the final votes, been far from certain.

Munich now enters the international race to host the 2036, 2040 or 2024... the 2036, 2040 or 2044 Olympic and Paralympic Games, years in which the International Olympic Committee has signalled it is open to awarding a second Summer Games in a relatively short window. Delegates at the assembly were asked to choose between a Munich bid and a joint Cologne/Rhine-Ruhr effort, the surviving finalists of a field that at one stage contained four contenders.

That field narrowed dramatically just days before the vote. Hamburg, the northern port city that had mounted a bid for the 2024 Summer Games, pulled out in May after a negative public consultation left it without public backing. Berlin then followed suit on Thursday, declining to continue — and notably without putting the question to voters in the German capital. With those withdrawals, the contest came down to a straight choice between the Rhine-Ruhr megaregion, Germany's industrial heartland, and Munich, a state capital with a documented track record of staging the Games.

Bavaria's state premier Markus Söder, who took to the stage with the winning delegation, said the Cologne rival made the final stretch "really tough" and "pretty tense until the end." He framed the outcome as a national rather than regional project, arguing that winning the Games offers the chance of something historic and that the country should present itself "as a united country — from north to south and from east to west." The emphasis on unity is notable for a bid that is Munich-centred but must carry the entire weight of a federation of 16 states, several of which have no obvious stake in a Bavarian-hosted event.

The Munich proposal rests heavily on infrastructure that already exists. Its bid centres on the Olympic Park in the north of the city, built for the 1972 Games and substantially renovated in recent years, giving organisers a core venue campus rather than a greenfield construction project. That distinction tends to matter to international Olympic observers, who routinely weigh questions of cost, legacy and deliverability when deciding which city pairings they will put forward as preferred hosts.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who issued a statement moments after the announcement, welcomed the decision and said Germany now has an Olympic candidate. "Germany is ready for the Olympics," he declared, adding that the government would work "together with our Olympic candidate" to prepare for the event. The backing of both the head of state and the chancellor signals that the bid will be treated as a federal undertaking, with federal funding and diplomatic channels likely to be deployed alongside Bavarian and municipal commitments.

Public consent also underpins the campaign. Munich held a referendum in late 2025 on whether it should pursue the Games, and 66.4 percent of those who voted backed hosting, on a turnout of 44 percent. The outcome was a sharp reversal of German Olympic-voting history: earlier referendums in Munich for the 2022 Winter Games and in Hamburg for the 2024 Summer Games both failed to secure public support. Hamburg's later withdrawal from the 2036/2040/2044 contest was directly attributed to the hostile reception its bid received in a public consultation.

The next phase will be slow. The DOSB plans to open what it describes as a "continuous dialogue" with the IOC, a period of sustained engagement rather than a single submission, ahead of a shortlisting process in March 2027. The IOC is expected to designate one or more preferred hosts in late 2028, with the final host election to take place in mid-2029 — a timeline that means Munich's formal entry into the race is still years from any decisive verdict, and leaves room for rival countries to emerge or withdraw.

The stakes are heightened by Germany's record. Since the last Summer Games held on German soil in 1972, the country has launched seven unsuccessful bids to stage the Olympics again, a sequence of defeats that turned the Munich result into a point of pride rather than a formality. The last Summer Games were held in Paris in 2024.

If Munich ultimately succeeds, it would be only the third time Germany has hosted an Olympic Games. Berlin staged the 1936 edition while under Nazi leadership, a chapter still remembered for its manipulation of the Games by the Nazi regime. Munich hosted in 1972 as part of West Germany — a Games remembered for heroism and tragedy, when an attack on the Israeli delegation in the Olympic Village killed 11 members of the Israeli team. The only other Games held in Germany were the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

For a bid built on the 1972 legacy, the memory of those Games carries a particular weight. It is both the reason the Olympic Park exists in the form it does today and an enduring reminder of what hosting can mean beyond sport. Munich's organisers, backed by federal and state leaders, will now spend the better part of a decade attempting to persuade the IOC that a city associated with that history is ready, again, to stage the world's largest sporting event.