The IOC said Monday it will speed up rulings about whether cities bidding to stage the Summer Olympics can hold the games outside the traditional months of July and August.
IOC guidelines normally require the Summer Olympics to be held between July 15 and August 31. In 2008, however, the Middle Eastern city of Doha, Qatar, proposed to hold the 2016 Games in October to escape the heat of the summer months.
The IOC turned down Doha's request and omitted the city from the shortlist of finalists, which included Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo and eventual winner Rio de Janeiro.
Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director of the Olympic Games, said the decision on dates will now be made sooner in the bid process.
''Now we are saying if cities cannot organize the games during that period, instead of waiting for the first phase to tell them the dates are not very good, the cities have to make an application and the (Executive Board) will have to analyze the requests made and say, OK you can go into the competition or not.''
Doha was left out of the 2016 shortlist, even though it tied for third with Chicago and was ahead of Rio in an IOC evaluation report assessing the overall technical merits of the bids.
Another Gulf city - Dubai in the United Arab Emirates - is weighing a possible bid for the 2020 games.
As well as the dates issue, Felli said proposals from southern hemisphere cities to stage the winter games will also go through an early vetting process.
Other modifications to the bid process, he said, include streamlining paperwork and avoiding duplicating the information that cities needed to submit.
''We have decided to go to one process and two phases. It's not like it used to be that we finish a phase and then we start again for the second phase. Now it's going to be a continuation,'' he said.
Felli said more scrutiny would be made of government involvement earlier in the bid process, with technical and operational questions coming later.
Cities are also required to adopt rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency and accept the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport as prerequisites for a bid.
''It is important for the Olympic movement to have bid cities,'' Felli said. ''The bidding process brings a lot of acknowledgment of the Olympic movement.''
