With the start of the Giro d’Italia cycling from Budapest on Friday, Viktor Orban’s Hungary adds a new world sporting event to the long list of competitions it has hosted. One more demonstration of the sports commitment of this Central European country.
Less than a year ago, Budapest already hosted four matches of the European Football Championship. Now you can boast of kicking off one of the main cycling events of the year, in a country in which the nationalist Orban has governed since 2010 and whose power was consolidated at the beginning of April with his fourth victory, largely achieved in the elections. legislative of the country.
The list of events that Hungary has hosted in recent years is very extensive and will continue to expand in the coming years.
The Swimming World Cup, for example, will be held in June of this year at the Duna Arena, inaugurated in 2017, also for a World Cup. The same event will be organized there in 2027, which will be the third time in just ten years.
In January, the semifinals and the final of the European men’s handball tournament were played in the brand new Budapest Arena, which is located between the airport and the historic center.
Next year it will be the turn of the World Athletics Championships, in the Hungarian capital and in a new stadium under construction on the east bank of the Danube: the National Athletics Center, a venue for 15,000 spectators permanently and temporarily, during the event , will see its capacity increased to 34,000 through provisional stands.
Budapest recently hosted two Judo World Cups, last year and before that in 2017, when Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to the event by Viktor Orban.
The Hungarian prime minister has been getting closer to the Russian leader since 2010. He also followed his example of multiplying the applications to host sporting events, something that in the Russian case has been stopped in its tracks since Russia attacked and invaded Ukraine in February, which led to a cascade of international sanctions.
But while Russia can boast of having hosted the World Cup or the Olympics in the past, Hungary has those two pending issues.
Budapest’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics was withdrawn a few months before the final decision in 2017. Opposition movement Momentum’s “Noclean” petition managed to gather 266,000 signatures against hosting that event, which was ultimately attributed to Paris.
Despite not being an Olympic city, Budapest is a place that has first-class sports infrastructure. In addition to the Duna Arena swimming pool and the future athletics stadium, the Hungarian capital also has the Budapest Sportarena (2003), which last year hosted the Final 4 of the Handball Champions League, and the majestic Puskas Arena for football.
Viktor Orban has not given up on his country hosting the Olympics one day.
“The possibility has moved away, for the moment. But hosting the Olympic Games is an eternal dream for Hungarians. A love that never ends,” the leader enthused last year in the pages of the Nemzeti Sport newspaper.
“Today, sport is a political weapon,” Lukas Aubin, a researcher in France, specializing in the geopolitics of sport and Russia, summarized for AFP.
“Even if it doesn’t work to improve his image abroad, it is a tool to legitimize his authority and justify the importance of his regime. In Russia, the president’s image has not been consolidated abroad but it has worked domestically.” , says Aubin, author of a book on Putin and his strategy with sporting events.
On Wednesday, in Hungary, a country with a weak cycling tradition, a crowd gathered in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square to attend the presentation of the Giro teams. The local idol is Attila Valder, who last year became the first cyclist from his country to wear the ‘pink jersey’ of the Italian round.
clv / dr / height
