Games should rotate host cities
In the lead-up to the Rio Olympics, which began a year ago Saturday, there were widespread fears of impending disaster.
It certainly didn’t help that, in the weeks before the Games began, local emergency responders held up a sign at the Rio de Janeiro airport that read: “Welcome to Hell: Police and Firefighters Do Not Get Paid, Whoever Comes to Rio Will Not Be Safe.” But while hell was promised, it mostly didn’t materialize.
Rampant crime was a concern before the Games. But save a stray bullet or two — one of which ripped through a media tent, another of which shattered a window in a media bus — crime didn’t end up becoming an outsized part of the plot line during the Olympic fortnight.
The Zika virus was a concern before the Games and kept more than a few athletes away. But as much as organizers had clearly prepared for the threat — as evidenced by the pallets of bug repellent that could be seen in abundance inside the Olympic bubble — there were plenty of areas of the city where it was difficult to find a single mosquito.
Terrorism has been a concern at every Games since 1972. Brazil didn’t turn out to be a target.
As it was, the hiccups that did occur — a green swimming pool, a contaminated sailing venue — were more embarrassing than earth-shaking. For all the doomsayers who’d laid out forecasts of catastrophe going back to the eve of Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 World Cup of soccer, the fact remains that Brazil hosted the world’s two biggest sporting events in a two-year span without a major snafu.
Still, that’s probably not the way the Rio Olympics will ultimately be remembered — as a grand time had by most, this scribe included. Rio will likely be remembered as yet another cautionary tale about the financial perils of buying into the money pit that an Olympic Games so often becomes. It will be remembered for underlining a lesson we’d probably already learned — that unless you’re residing in one of the world’s handful of exceptionally well-equipped cities, the Olympics coming to town is almost certainly going to be a bad deal for your citizenry.
You don’t need to be an economist to come to that conclusion, but as economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson wrote in a 2016 study, “in most cases, the Olympics are a money-losing proposition for host cities.”
A year on from hosting the first Olympics on South American soil, Rio is so financially strapped it’s been late on paydays for police and teachers and other public employees.
Its Olympic sports venues are mostly lying vacant — although a few of its Olympic-focused developments, including a new subway line and a rejuvenated port area, are being heralded as relative successes.
Still, that doesn’t sound like a residual value worthy of the estimated $13-billion price tag. And when organizers recently asked the International Olympic Committee’s executive board for help in paying off a reported $30 million to $40 million in lingering debt, the IOC’s executive board declined to offer assistance.
That helps explain why, in recent years, cities have been pulling out of the bidding process en masse.
Budapest, Rome and Hamburg, to begin a long list, mounted short-lived bids for the 2024 Summer Games. Toronto, which had contemplated entering the race, ultimately fore- went the process altogether.
In the end, Paris and Los Angeles emerged as the only two contestants. Perhaps because there was no guarantee that there’d even be a bidder for the 2028 Olympics, last month the IOC announced that Paris and Los Angeles will host the 2024 and 2028 Games, respectively.
L.A. looks like a shoo-in to run an outlier of a fiscally successful Olympics — it is, after all, the city that turned a reported $234-million profit back in 1984. And its bid played up the fact that it’s already in possession of the vast majority of the required facilities.
The Paris bid promised that some 93 per cent of its infrastructure will either be existing or temporary, the exceptions being an yet-to-be-constructed aquatics centre and a $1.44billion plan for an Olympic Village that is slated to be developed as a public-private partnership.
The appeal of those bids, especially Los Angeles’s, raised a question: Why doesn’t the IOC stick to award- ing Games to cities with proven track records of both fiscal and logistical success?
L.A., for instance, has billed itself as an “eternal Olympic city” — a boast it can clearly back up given its plethora of existing infrastructure, including an embarrassment of riches of stadia and television studio space.
Maybe Vancouver could make a similar claim as a winter host.
Certainly it would make more monetary sense to slate a future Games for Vancouver, which hosted a successful Games in 2010, than to send one to Calgary. And yet Calgary is exploring a bid for the 2026 Winter Games, even if the structural remnants of its 1988 turn as host would require major upgrades, not to mention plenty of additional facilities built from scratch — hardly inviting prospects for a cashstrapped province.
Why not stick to a rotation of proven Olympic cities rather than a gamble on so many unknown quantities?
If only sound logic and reliable accounting more than occasionally prevailed in matters of five-ringed madness. Just when it seems like there isn’t a nation on earth foolhardy enough to take the risk of hosting an Olympics, history suggests at least one will emerge. And sure enough, it was only a couple of months ago that India’s Olympic committee asked its government for permission to bid on the 2032 Olympics.
The Olympics are built on the human urge to aspire, to be sure. Let’s just hope India is fully aware that aspirational displays of international arrival can come at a steep price. Last week Rio’s Olympic velodrome was damaged after it was set ablaze by a small handmade hot-air balloon — the likes of which, though illegal, are apparently commonly launched into Rio’s night sky for recreational and ceremonial purposes.
It was an apt metaphor for the city’s Olympic-hosting experience one year on — lasting damage incurred by a fleeting flame that seemed like a good idea at the time.