German president set for Olympic bid announcement, Goretzka gets vote

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be involved in next week's announcement over which city will bid for a future Olympic Games.

The German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) said on Wednesday that Steinmeier will be on stage with DOSB president Thomas Weikert to announce the results of the September 26 vote by the DOSB assembly in Baden-Baden.

Munich, Berlin and Cologne/Rhine-Ruhr are bidding to be Germany's candidate for the Games in 2036, 2040 or 2044. The year of the bid will also be decided by the DOSB assembly.

Germany football midfielder Leon Goretzka, who is a member of the DOSB, gets a vote. But the Aston Villa player is torn given Berlin is the capital, he played for Bayern Munich for eight years, and he is from the Rhine-Ruhr area.

"I will decide carefully which concept convinces me the most," he told the Bild newspaper.

"As a kid I loved watching the Olympics on TV. It is a huge pleasure to be able to vote on Germany's bid."

Whichever bid wins will face stiff competition globally when they try to woo the International Olympic Committee.

Berlin hosted the Games in 1936 and Munich in 1972. Since then, a number of German bids have failed or were stopped by referendums.

Munich and Cologne/Rhine-Ruhr gained big support in referendums for the latest bid. But a fourth city, Hamburg, dropped out after its effort was stopped by residents. There was no referendum in Berlin where the local parliament voted in favour of the bid.

Referendum results are one aspect in a wide-ranging DOSB evaluation of the three candidates in the run-up to the deciding vote.