Doha rising

DOHA, Qatar -- Take a good look at this city's incredible skyline, especially at night. The architecture is so fantastic, the energy and purpose in the construction boom so obvious, that it makes you wonder if this is what it was like in New York City when the Empire State or Chrysler Buildings were first piercing the sky.

Wander around the extraordinary Aspire sports complex, inaugurated a few months before the successful 2006 Asian Games. It includes, among other features, 13 different indoor sports facilities. Thirteen. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

Now listen to the fervor of the fans who filled the Aspire Dome here over the past three days for the track and field World Indoor Championships, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Swedes -- apparently Doha in March is the Swedish spring-break version of Daytona Beach.

Which is why the conclusion would seem inescapable.

It's not if Doha, and Qatar, will play host to an Olympic Games -- or, for that matter, soccer's World Cup.

It's when.

Perhaps, if the country's current World Cup bid is successful, as soon as 2022.

It would seem inevitable, and the trends that point here ought to serve as a bracing reality check to the U.S. Olympic Committee as it weighs after Chicago's 2016 Games disappointment whether and when to get back into the bidding game.

The game is moving on, and in two regards -- both geographically and in the way governments, viewing sport as an instrument of social, economic, urban and even diplomatic policy, have stepped up with financial commitments in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

That traditionally has not been the American way.

It surely has become the way elsewhere, though.

In Asia, for instance, Beijing played host to the Summer Games in 2008, and spent somewhere north of $40 billion in preparations. Daegu, South Korea, will stage track and field's outdoor world championships next year; Osaka, Japan, staged the 2007 outdoor championships. The 2012 indoor track Worlds? In Turkey.

"We believe the Asian continent is very important in the future our world," Lamine Diack, the head of track and field's governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations, said in a news conference here before the 2010 indoor Worlds.

South Africa, of course, will put on this year's World Cup.

Brazil will stage the 2014 World Cup and then Rio de Janeiro the 2016 Summer Games.

Dubai will put on swimming's short-course World Championships later this year. The 2011 swimming long-course Worlds? In Shanghai.

Yes, London is the 2012 Summer Games host. But the British authorities are spending billions of dollars to re-develop the Olympic Park area in East London, using the Games as an instrument to effect in seven years urban planning that might otherwise take 30 or more.

In Russia, the central government is closely involved in the expenditure of billions designed to transform the Black Sea summer-fun resort of Sochi into a winter destination.

Here in Qatar, money is not an issue. The country is sitting on, for instance, an immense natural gas reserve. There's talk Qatar could right now be at the front end of an economic run lasting 100, 200 or more years.

The challenge -- a nice challenge to have -- is how to spend all that money. Here, sport is "one of the visions for the country," an investment pillar along with economic and educational initiatives, said Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the secretary general of the Qatar Olympic Committee.

"We don't just use sport to organize an event or host a big event," he said. "We think of sport as a means -- to use it as a tool to communicate with people outside Qatar, to put Qatar on the map of the world.

"Secondly, for the people living in Qatar -- you can use sport to connect them with health.

"...You can use sport to connect with the environment.

"We are trying to use sport to reach these many objectives and goals."

Doha put in a bid for the 2016 Summer Games. The International Olympic Committee, in a preliminary evaluation, ranked Doha ahead of Rio.

"They've got everything," Sebastian Coe, the head of the London 2012 organizing committee and an IAAF vice president, said in an interview while walking around the Aspire Dome. "In infrastructure, you'd really be hard put to find a critical mass anywhere in the world that would compare."

The IOC cut Doha for 2016 because officials here had proposed holding the Summer Games in October instead of the summer.

It's hot here, especially in the summer. Of course it is.

So what?

It was hot in Beijing -- ask anyone who sat through the opening ceremony in the stifling Bird's Nest. It was hot in Athens in 2004. It was hot in Atlanta in 1996.

There are ways to deal with the heat. You don't see millions of people pick up and leave Phoenix or Las Vegas every summer.

You just need a little imagination. They're talking here, for instance, about specially cooled stadiums using technology advances.

With or without that -- why not hold the heats (so to speak) in track and field, traditionally a daytime event, during the far-cooler evenings? That would probably stretch track and field over two weeks instead of one -- and wouldn't that spotlight the sport?

To say that Doha and Qatar can't play host to the Summer Games because of the seasons is like saying New Zealand could never play host to the Winter Games. Is that so?

Agreed -- staging the Summer Games in October summons memories of the lower U.S. television ratings produced by the 2000 Sydney Games, which formally opened Sept. 15 and closed Oct. 1. Agreed further -- U.S. television has served as the key financial driver since 1984 of the Olympic movement worldwide.

Query: Who says that's going to remain the case going forward? Or ought to be the case? Aren't extensive discussions already underway of how the movement's financial model needs to be reconfigured? Aren't there ways creative people might figure out how to make the thing run financially?

Once you're here, you see what might be possible. The trick for Qatari officials, sports and government leaders, is getting those who haven't visited to do so, or otherwise to understand.

And, as well, to get some to move past -- let's be candid here -- certain stereotypes and preconceptions about this part of the world. That's going to take more extensive outreach than Qatar has traditionally undertaken, in particular developing and furthering the sorts of relationships that animate the Olympic movement, a point that Sheikh Saoud and other officials suggested they have recently come to better appreciate.

"Bringing people to Qatar, going abroad, having that relationship with people, building solid relationships with people from all over -- it's basically a bridge," Sheikh Sultan Abdulrahman Al Thani, the international relations director for the Qatar 2022 soccer bid, said.

"What Qatar is trying to do with sports," he added a moment later, "is trying to build a bridge of understanding between East and West ... to showcase our country and our culture."

There are now roughly 230 million people in the region, a projected 400 million by 2022, half under age 24. Isn't the IOC looking to reach out in particular to young people?

"The event stirred the imagination more than any previous events I have competed in," Kalkidan Gezahegne, the 18-year-old who ran Sunday to gold in the women's 1500 meters before a deliriously loud crowd of fellow Ethiopians, said afterward.

"I felt so happy to have competed and won the gold medal running inside this amazing arena. This," she said, "will live on in my memory forever."