Paraguay President Peña takes 2030 Youth Olympics bid to IOC in push to host more sports

Paraguay aims to host 2030 Youth Olympics and 2026 World Cup games, boosting international recognition through sports.

Pushing Paraguay to be a major international sports stage in 2030, President Santiago Peña came to IOC headquarters on Thursday (January 30, 2025) with his country's bid to be an Olympics host.

Paraguay wants to host the 2030 Youth Olympics in Asunción in the same year it will stage one of the opening games of the men's soccer World Cup.

“The idea behind this is to make Paraguay the centre for many of these major sporting events,” Peña told reporters after leading a delegation to meet International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach.

The scale of the Youth Olympics — which had about 4,000 athletes in 32 sports when last held in 2018 in Buenos Aires — is similar to the Junior Pan-American Games that Paraguay will host in August.

“We have the organizational capacity,” said the Paraguayan president for the past 18 months, who acknowledged his country of about seven million people is too little known globally.

“I would say that half the population never heard about Paraguay,” he said, suggesting it was “an exotic name” that perhaps intrigued people to discover more.

Hosting international sports can be a faster path to international recognition, and Paraguay also is bidding for the 2031 Pan-Am Games.