At the annual general assembly of the Federation of Gay Games (FGG), the global sporting event of the LGBTQ movement has been awarded to the Spanish city of Valencia for the year 2026. This was announced by the co-chairmen of the association, the British Joanie Evans and the Canadian Sean Fitzgerald, on Thursday evening in the English seaside resort of Brighton. In addition to Valencia, Munich and the Mexican city of Guadalajara were last left from originally 20 interested parties.
The Munich applicants had calculated that they had a good chance of hosting the twelfth edition of the Gay Games in five years. But they took the defeat athletically. “We congratulate Valencia on their success!”, Said the Green City Councilor Beppo Brem, one of the initiators of the application: “It was an exciting competition and there could only be one winner. We take it with sporting fairness.” Brem proved immediately after the announcement that these were not just empty words: He was the first to rush to the dancing Spaniards in the Royal Pavilion of the conference hotel and congratulate them on their victory. His organizational colleague Martina Kohlhuber thought it was “a shame about all the work that our nearly 50-strong team has put into the application for years”. But she tried to gain a positive aspect from the whole thing: “We made it to the final of the last three applicant cities, that was a great success.”
The application from Munich was able to rely on the support of the city’s elite. Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter had already promised a subsidy of 2.3 million euros in the event of an award; BMW, Allianz and Siemens had also declared their intention to become involved as sponsors. Obviously that was just as inadequate as the flair of the Olympic Park, with which the Munich-based company had advertised. Before the presentations by the three delegations on Wednesday, Guadalajara was still considered a secret favorite: On the one hand, because the Gay Games had never taken place in Latin America, and on the other, because the Mexicans had already applied for the second time. Germany hosted the event back in 2010, back then in Cologne. The initiators of the Munich candidacy currently have no plans for a new application, for example for the 2030 Games.
When the Gay Games premiered in San Francisco in 1982, they were intended as a sports festival for homosexual participants; now they are the meeting of a movement that goes by the acronym LGBTQ – lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people and queer people. But basically, participation is open to everyone. The next edition of the Gay Games is to be held in Asia for the first time, and Hong Kong has been awarded the contract. However, the sports festival has just been postponed by a year, from November 2022 to November 2023, allegedly due to corona-related travel restrictions.