Kai Wegner, Iris Spranger and Kaweh Niroomand sat in the press room of the Red Town Hall on Thursday looking utterly dejected, while staff members stood around them with tears in their eyes. The withdrawal of Berlin’s Olympic bid is now official. The Governing Mayor, the Senator for the Interior, the Senate’s Olympic Commissioner: they had truly fought for their campaign – and lost. There are many reasons for its failure.
Berlin’s Olympic Bid: Lack of a Referendum Was a Problem from the Start
Public support was an important criterion from the outset in the renewed effort to launch a German Olympic bid. Berlin faced a problem, however: unlike the competing bidders – Munich, Cologne/Rhine-Ruhr and Hamburg – its Senate cannot call a referendum on the bid under the state constitution.
The Berlin campaign had always pointed to the resolution passed by the House of Representatives as an expression of public support. In the German Olympic Sports Confederation’s (DOSB) assessment matrix, however, the resolution was given a weighting of 0.5 compared with the referendums at the other locations, costing Berlin important points in the evaluation.
Lack of Broad Political Support
The same applies to the assessment of political support itself. The resolution in Berlin’s House of Representatives, for example, was passed with a two-thirds majority. This was significantly less than in the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament, where almost 94 percent voted in favour of the bid in November 2024 – a difference that was also reflected in the DOSB’s scoring. According to reports, the opposition from Berlin’s Left and Greens also unsettled the sports federations, which will make the final decision on the German bidder at the DOSB General Assembly on Saturday.
I would have liked us to talk more about the Olympics during the election campaign.
Kai Wegner, Governing Mayor
Senator for the Interior Iris Spranger (SPD) emphasised that she had sought broader support from parliament long before the election. “There were discussions between the parliamentary group leaders, the sports policy spokespersons and us, during which we presented everything again in detail.” Those efforts failed to convince them. According to Niroomand, a final attempt to persuade election winner Elif Eralp (The Left) to hold off until the DOSB decision on Saturday also failed during a phone call on Wednesday morning. This meant there was no lasting political stability for Berlin’s bid.
No Visibility During the Election Campaign
Supporters of the Olympics pointed out again on Thursday that several polls showed a narrow majority of Berliners in favour of the bid. But this did not help because they failed to translate this public support for the Olympics into votes for pro-Olympics parties in the Berlin election. It simply was not an issue during the election campaign, not even for the CDU and SPD.
“I would have liked us to talk more about the Olympics during the election campaign,” Wegner said. Following his withdrawal, however, his voice evidently no longer carried much weight in the campaign planning. Other issues therefore became decisive in the election, and the opportunity to turn the Berlin election into a kind of referendum on the Olympic bid was ultimately lost.
Timing of the NOlympia Campaign
The NOlympia camp never gained momentum in Berlin. The signature collection progressed slowly. By the final day of the bid, opponents of the Games had failed to collect the 20,000 signatures required for the first step of their campaign.
But they did not have to. The mere possibility that Berlin’s Olympic opponents could still derail the capital’s bid after the DOSB had selected a candidate created further uncertainty.
Construction of the DOSB Matrix
The results of the evaluation commission’s assessment using the DOSB matrix are not binding for the sports federations’ vote. Nevertheless, with Berlin ranked last, they naturally had an impact on the public debate. The DOSB had asked the law firm Freshfields to confirm that the evaluation process had been conducted fairly.
 "Kaweh Niroomand was the Berlin Senate‘s Olympic Commissioner.")
Berlin’s representatives did not entirely share that view. Although Spranger explicitly stressed on Thursday that she did not want to criticise the DOSB, she noted that the “broad support from the city’s civil society” had not been given sufficient consideration. Spranger also criticised the fact that the city’s focus on “inclusion, youth and sustainability” and the hosting of the 2023 Special Olympics had not been included in the assessment.
Niroomand had submitted a written statement to the DOSB saying that he disagreed with the criteria in the category of “international appeal”, an area in which Berlin’s bid was particularly strong. It made no difference.