Olympics

Con 1: The Olympics are a financial drain on host cities.

No Olympic Games since 1960 has come in under budget. [16]

Bent Flyvbjerg and Allison Stewart, both at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, say, “In the Games the budget is more like a fictitious minimum that is consistently overspent.” [17]

The delayed Tokyo 2020 Summer Games were already the most expensive Olympics in history, running at 200% over budget on Sep. 7, 2020 though not scheduled to begin until July 2021. Tokyo forecast $7.3 billion in their 2013 bid, but the actual cost was estimated to be $15.84 billion in Sep. 2020, with costs continuing to rise. A Jan. 2021 study found that losing foreign spectators because of COVID-19 restrictions could cost Japan as much as $23 billion. [60][61]

Each host city is responsible for these cost overruns, in addition to their original budgets. The average cost overrun for host cities from 1968 to 2010 was 252% for the Summer Olympics and 135% for the Winter, with the 1976 Montreal Summer Games running over the most by 796%. Montreal’s 1976 cost overrun took 30 years to pay off, and the people of Quebec still pay $17 million a year to maintain Olympic Stadium, which is still without a roof more than 40 years later and also needs $300 million worth of repairs. [17][18][19]

The 2014 Sochi Games ran between $39 and $58 billion over the $12 billion budget, an amount that is more than was spent on all previous Winter Olympic Games. [20] The 2004 Athens Summer Games’ 60% overrun worsened the 2007–12 Greek financial crisis. [17][21][22]

Con 2: The Olympics force host cities to create expensive infrastructure and buildings that fall into disuse.

“Host cities are often left with specialized sports infrastructure that has little use beyond the Games” and that the cities must maintain at great expense, according to economics professors Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson. [9]

Many Olympic venues worldwide sit empty, rusted, overgrown with weeds, covered with graffiti, and filled with polluted water. The $78 million Olympic Stadium in Pyeongchang for the 2018 Winter Games was set for demolition before the 2018 Games even began. In Rio de Janeiro, the $700 million athletes village for the 2016 Games was turned into luxury apartments that are now “shuttered,” and the Olympic Park is “basically vacant” after failing to attract a buyer. Beijing’s 2008 Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium costs the city $11 million a year to maintain, and the stadium that seats 91,000 mostly sits unused. Sydney’s 2000 Olympic Stadium was demolished in 2019 in favor of a smaller, more useful venue. [23][24][25][26][27][28]

Sofia Sakorafa, Greece member of parliament and former Olympian, says of the 2004 Athens Games venues, “We are left with installations that are rotting away because we don’t even have the money to maintain them. A lot of entrepreneurs and property developers got rich very quickly.” [29]

Con 3: The Olympics displace and burden residents of the host country and city.

Lee Do-sung, a local restaurant owner, expressed concern about the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, “What good will a nicely managed global event really do for residents when we are struggling so much to make ends meet? What will the games even leave? Maybe only debt.” [32]

Residents near Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Olympic Stadium, whose homes were set to be demolished, were forcibly removed in a “bloody confrontation between police and residents” that reportedly involved the use of rubber bullets and percussion grenades. [31]

“To make way for Beijing’s 2008 Olympic infrastructure, an estimated 1.5m[illion] people were forcibly evicted from their homes with minimal compensation. The neighborhoods were destroyed and residents removed to the outskirts of the city far from friends, family and places of work,” according to Bryan C. Clift and Andrew Manley, lecturers at the University of Bath. [30]