Rising Games costs result of IOC’S reform delay, study finds

• The Olympic Games’ cost overruns in recent decades are a result of the International Olympic Committee’s delay in undertaking deep reforms, and it is now paying the price, said the lead author of new Oxford University research.

The study, Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up, claimed all Olympics since 1960 had run over their budgets at an average of 172 per cent.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics have also gone above the initial budget with almost US $13 billion already spent, according to organizers, before their costly delay by a year to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many cities in recent years have been scared off by the mounting price tag of hosting the Games, and the 2022 and 2026 Winter Olympics were left with only two bidders each after several cities dropped out.

The 2024 and 2028 summer Olympics were directly awarded to Paris and Los Angeles before a complete overhaul of the bidding process by the IOC.

“Far more in terms of reform needs to be done,” professor Bent Flyvbjerg at Oxford told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. “Over a period of about 25 years the IOC has not been able to be more inventive and more intelligent, because they are not paying for the event. So they are not concerned about it.”

Host cities take on the financial responsibility of staging the Olympics with the

IOC providing more than $1 billion to the Games’ budget, among other contributions. Host cities are responsible for covering any losses incurred.

“This is now coming back to bite the IOC,” Flyvbjerg said. “They have been slow and careless about these issues for decades.”

The IOC said it had neither seen the study nor had it been contacted by the authors.

“The ( Oxford University) researchers have not requested any kind of data from the IOC over the past few years, saying that they cannot rely on numbers provided by the organizers, the IOC or governments,” the IOC said in a statement to Reuters.

“This leads to the question of where the numbers used in the study have come from and how they have been validated.”

The IOC also questioned some of the findings, citing a study conducted by the University of Mainz and Sorbonne University that found on the operations side that organizers had broken even or made a profit at every Games in the past 20 years.