Durban has been chosen to carry South Africa’s bid to stage the first Olympic Games on African soil, but the practical questions around delivery, cost and timelines remain largely unanswered as the country enters a crowded international contest.
The announcement, made on Thursday, positions the east coast city as the main candidate for either the 2036 or the 2040 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. The International Olympic Committee will decide the host for 2036 in mid-2029, giving South Africa a window of several years in which plans on paper must be converted into a credible operational case.
Lwandile Simelane, acting president of the South African Olympic committee, announced the selection and framed the delivery model from the outset. Durban would be the main candidate city, she said, but the bid would probably take the form of a “multi-city bid” under which some events would be proposed for other cities. That structure spreads the operational load across venues and host municipalities rather than concentrating it in one urban centre. Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub, and Cape Town were also considered for the candidate role before Durban was put forward.
The choice of a lead city is only the first step in what implementers face. Officials said on Thursday that they were not yet able to provide any estimates of what it might cost South Africa to stage the Games if the bid succeeds. That gap between ambition and costing is a familiar one for the country’s Olympic aspirations. Durban was first touted as a possible Olympic host more than a decade ago, in the wake of South Africa’s staging of the 2010 World Cup, the first held in Africa. An official bid never materialised at that time, largely because of concerns over costs, and the same question of affordability now hangs over the revived effort before a single budget line has been published.
Meanwhile, the competitive field adds to the execution challenge. South Africa is one of seven countries bidding for the 2036 Games, alongside India, Qatar, South Korea, Germany, Hungary and Turkey. Each will be assessed on its ability to actually deliver the event, and the IOC has set 31 October as the deadline for national Olympic committees to formally declare their interest in bidding. South Africa’s declaration puts it inside that window, but the hard work of demonstrating readiness lies ahead of the mid-2029 decision.
For Durban, the designation revives a role the city has circled before. Its earlier candidacy foundered on the cost question rather than on capability, and the current bid team has yet to show how it will answer that concern this time. The multi-city approach may ease pressure on any single host, but it also introduces coordination demands across jurisdictions, transport planning and venue management that a single-city bid would not carry.
The reference report on the selection can be read at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/29/durban-selected-south-africa-candidate-olympic-bids-2036-2040.
What happens between now and mid-2029 will determine whether the bid moves from preference to proposal. The country has a named lead city, a stated preference for sharing events among several hosts, and a confirmed place among the contenders. What it does not yet have, by its own officials’ admission, is a cost estimate, and that missing figure is likely to shape both the bid’s credibility and the public debate around it. The 2010 World Cup proved that South Africa can deliver a major international sporting event; whether it can do so again, at Olympic scale and at a defensible price, is the question the next phase of planning must answer.