Explainer: Why does Beijing have the Olympics again?

The Beijing Winter Olympics open in just under two months and are now the target of a diplomatic boycott by the United States, with others likely to follow.

So how did Beijing land the Winter Olympics, so soon after it was host to the Summer Olympics in 2008? It will become the first city in Olympic history to host both the Winter and Summer Games.

The answer is simple. Potential cities in Europe — as many as six — dropped out of the bidding in the wake of the doping-scandal-ridden 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The widely advertised price tag for Sochi of $51 billion US also frightened away future bidders.

When it got down to the voting stage in 2015 in meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the International Olympic Committee was left with only two candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Beijing won narrowly 44-40, a close vote that was marred by what some at the time suggested might have been voting irregularities. IOC President Thomas Bach bristled at the suggestion.

It's a long list of rejections from cities across Europe. Oslo and Stockholm are the two high-profile cities that pulled out during the bidding process. They were joined by Krakow, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine, which also withdrew bids.

Two other areas with potentially strong bids — St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany — were rejected by the public in voter referendums. The German rejection was a stinging blow to Bach, who is from Germany. It's also notable that the IOC headquarters are in Switzerland.

Oslo and Stockholm, probably regarded as the preferred venues as the IOC attempted to return the Olympics to a traditional European winter venues, both pulled out because of costs and politics.

Bach acknowledged at the time in a 2014 interview that the Winter Olympics were a tough sell.

"The number of candidates for winter is already very limited by geography," he said. "Also we can't forget that this is a challenging time with regard to the world economy."

The choice for the IOC members came down to two authoritarian governments that did not require any public vote, and also had few constraints on spending: Beijing and Almaty. Beijing spent more than $40 billion US on the 2008 Summer Olympics.

In promoting their proposals, organizers in Almaty at the time said 79 per cent supported the bid. Beijing said 94.8 per cent in China were in favour.

Almaty tried to win the vote, reminding that it was a winter sports city surrounded by mountains and natural snow. It was a dig at Beijing, which has no winter sports tradition and little natural snow in the areas picked for skiing.

Beijing and some IOC members countered that skiers actually prefer artificial snow. The IOC also saw Beijing as a huge winter-sports business opportunity.