Friday's vote on 2022 bid a no-win situation for IOC

— -- The initial bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics looked promising.

Oslo, Norway, Stockholm, Sweden, and Krakow, Poland, three of the most enjoyable cities in Europe, put in bids to the International Olympic Committee. Oslo hosted the 1952 Olympics, while Lillehammer was the host of the spectacular 1994 Games, so the possibility of another Winter Olympics in Norway was especially enticing. But the Norwegian capital pulled out of the bidding last year. As did Stockholm. As did Krakow. And as did Lviv, Ukraine, due to the crisis in that country.

And so, this Friday, the International Olympic Committee will decide between the two remaining cities bidding for 2022: Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing. You're excited about seeing the Winter Games in one of those cities, aren't you? For that matter, have you even heard of Almaty?

The prime troubling aspect to the bids is that both China and Kazakhstan have well-documented human rights issues.

"Chinese and Kazakh authorities are openly hostile to media and activists who criticize the government and fail to protect freedom of expression, assembly, and association and other basic human rights,'' Human Rights Watch said in a release last week. "Discrimination and labor violations, and government failure to combat them, are serious concerns. Neither country provides effective, independent judicial mechanisms for people seeking protection from abuse."

This was also the case for Beijing when it hosted the 2008 Olympic Summer Games. Among the concerns were China's actions in Tibet, its forced eviction of residents from venue sites and freedom of expression.

The IOC issued new clauses last winter regarding discrimination, workers' rights and sexual orientation for host nations, but whether it can actually enforce anything remains to be seen.

"China hosting another Games might better conditions for human rights, as well as Kazakhstan, but we have seen countries make promises before,'' said Sophie Richardson, the China director for Human Rights Watch. "The IOC takes the promises at face value and then governments blithely ignore them and the IOC shrugs its shoulders and that's that.''

Granted, almost every country can be politically criticized, including our own, but the IOC needs to be better at holding bidders to a higher standard. Russia's actions after the 2014 Sochi Olympics should be a lesson. Or as Richardson says, "Would the IOC accept a bid from Pyongyang, North Korea?"

Another issue might be of lesser importance overall, but it is still an important one to the event: the atmosphere surrounding the Games.

The Summer and Winter Games are distinctly different. The Summer Games can be held in most any major city -- among the cities bidding for the 2024 Games are Paris, Rome, Budapest, Hungary, and Hamburg, Germany, with Toronto, Los Angeles and Istanbul possible bidders -- because there is a summer atmosphere nearly everywhere.

Winter Games are different. They require snow and mountains. Sochi, while close to the mountains, is a warm city on the Black Sea where residents wore bikinis and sunbathed on the beach some days during the 2014 Games. Even Vancouver had cherry trees blooming during the 2010 Olympics and had to airlift snow to ski areas in Whistler.

Beijing is a historic, important and compelling city, but it also is so heavily polluted that often you can barely see the sun through the "haze.'' It also has no strong winter sport tradition, though it hopes the Olympics would help build one. The mountain area for possible ski events receives a reported average of 39 inches of snow per year, which would require a heavy reliance on artificial snow.

Almaty, barely known to the West, is a more remote destination for travelers, but has a more favorable locale for competition. It has recorded snow as late as May, has surrounding mountains and the proposed venues are within an 18-mile radius. It could be the better of the two cities, but again, these are limited choices.

In addition to being held in countries with favorable human rights records, the Olympic Winter Games are best when staged in small resort towns tucked in the mountains near where needed facilities are already in place. For instance, sliding centers are so expensive (and rarely used after the Games) that there was talk of holding the bobsled, luge and skeleton competitions in Japan rather than paying the $100 million-plus cost of building one in 2018 host Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Larger cities can work as well, as long as they are sufficiently close to plentiful mountain snow (Stockholm's planned alpine venues were too far away, planned over 300 miles away in Are) and have a populace that is sufficiently passionate about winter sports to care about the Games in the first place.

We'll see which city the IOC chooses for 2022, and how that choice eventually affects living conditions, rights for its citizens and the overall enjoyment of those Games. And then let us hope that the list of 2026 Olympic Winter Games bidders does not include Doha, Qatar.