Bold Ambitions, Austere Realities: On the Unfulfilled Plans for the Warsaw Olympic Games

Abstract

In the history of Warsaw, the initiative to build Olympic-sized sports infrastructure has been undertaken several times. None of those attempts resulted in the submission of an official host city bid to the International Olympic Committee. At no time in the twentieth century were there sufficient financial resources to build Olympic venues and hold the games in Warsaw, or at least there was no conviction about the existence of such resources and the legitimacy of their use. The effort to organize the Olympics in the capital city of the Second Republic of Poland (1918–1939) required elevating the project to the top of the hierarchy of investment priorities of the young state. The outbreak of World War II prevented the completion of the initiative. After the war the prospective development of an Olympic District in Warsaw turned out to be impossible due to the enormity of more urgent needs. The last attempt to organize the games in Warsaw was the project of The Vistulian Games in 2012 launched during the post-communist political transformation of the 1990s. This project did not gain political support, as at that time Poland was recovering from the economic and social crisis.