The Olympics are not worth the cost
If hearing the term “Beijing Olympics” gives you a sense of déjà vu, you can be forgiven. After all, it was less than 15 years ago that the city hosted the Summer Olympics, in what was billed as China’s coming out party to the world. Well, it came out all right. Unfortunately, despite hope that the 2008 Games would give the country’s Communist government a greater respect for human rights and international co-operation, the opposite has been true. But if anyone was going to be stuck with the tab for an extravagant spectacle like the Olympics, I can’t think of a nicer bunch than Beijing’s authoritarian leaders.
Like last year’s Summer Olympics, these Games will be much more subdued than the last time Beijing hosted them, thanks to the pandemic China unleashed on the world. There will be no ticket sales. Athletes and attendees will be confined to a strict Olympic bubble. And the rest of the city could find itself under a stringent lockdown due to China’s ongoing commitment to a “ZERO-COVID” policy, at a time when many other countries are trying to figure out how to start living with the virus.
Beijing does, however, get to claim the distinction as the only city to host both a Summer and Winter Games, and it’s not just because of its climate, which produces hot summers and cold winters. The bidding process for the 2022 Games took place between 2012 and 2015, and originally included a number of European cities. But they all dropped out due to the high cost of hosting the Games, leaving the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to choose between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan — both of which are ruled by decidedly undemocratic governments.
At the time, many questioned whether democracies would even be willing to foot the bill for large sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup going forward. This spurred the IOC to make its bidding process more flexible, in order to reduce the cost of bidding and to allow for single bids to be diffused across multiple cities, or even countries. It seems to have worked: the next four Games after Beijing will take place in France, Italy, the United States and Australia. But none of those events has generated a whole lot of interest.
Five cities originally placed bids for the 2024 Summer Games, but three dropped out due to financial considerations or because of significant domestic opposition, leaving only Paris and Los Angeles in the running.
The IOC eventually settled on a compromise, assigning Paris the 2024 Games and Los Angeles the 2028 Olympics. Numerous cities also initially expressed interest in hosting the 2026 Winter
Olympics. Yet all but two dropped out, including Calgary, where a majority of voters rejected the idea of seeking a second Olympics in a 2018 plebiscite.
Canada has played host to the Olympics three times in the past, and I was lucky enough to have lived in Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010. Although I didn’t attend a single event, I have fond memories of Calgary ’88 as a child, and Vancouver provided a great excuse to go on a two-week bender. The pre-pandemic experience of a whole city coming together and taking over the streets, and the pubs, to root on their Olympic athletes is an experience I would highly recommend. But it is not one I would want to pay for.
Though the cost of staging the Olympics has increased significantly in recent years, thanks in large part to the added security costs deemed necessary following 9/11, the 1976 Summer Games in
Montreal is a case study in how hosting the Games can turn into a financial boondoggle. A 2016 University of Oxford study estimated that the total sports-related cost of staging the Games (i.e., not including infrastructure upgrades to the rest of the city) was US$6.1 billion (in 2015 dollars), which represented a cost overrun of 720 per cent, the largest in modern Olympic history. The $1.5 billion debt incurred to build the Olympic Stadium was not paid off until 2006, 30 years after the Games and well after it had been abandoned by both the Expos and the Alouettes.
Calgary, on the other hand, is generally considered to be one of the few financial successes in modern Olympic history. But it still cost $899 million ($1.8 billion in today’s dollars), including $425 million ($846.5 million) from the taxpayers. And 34 years later, much of the infrastructure that money paid for is considered out of date or has been left in a state of disrepair.
The ski jumps at Canada Olympic Park were closed down in 2018 — forcing our Olympians to train in Slovenia — and now serve as an expensive starting off point for “North America’s fastest zip line.” The sliding track was suspended the following year and has not been reopened. The Olympic Oval is also in need of significant repairs, having been forced to shut down temporarily in 2020 due to mechanical problems. And then there’s the Saddledome. Despite becoming an iconic part of the city’s skyline, it’s apparently still not good enough for the NHL, which has been trying to swindle taxpayers into buying a new arena for years.
Though the Calgary Flames said they would continue playing in the Saddledome after a deal to replace it with a $600-million multipurpose event centre fell apart in December, it does seem a little ridiculous that a state-of-the-art arena that was opened in 1983 and renovated a decade later would no longer be considered sufficient to host professional hockey games.
Vancouver can at least boast newer facilities than Calgary, which should serve our athletes well into the future. Its organizers were also wise enough to place a joint bid with Whistler, B.C., instead of building a brand new, provincially funded ski resort, as happened in Calgary. And the city itself received some much-needed infrastructure upgrades, such as the Canada Line Skytrain connecting the waterfront with the airport. But it all came at a significant cost.
According to a report released shortly after the 2010 Games, the Olympics cost B.C. taxpayers an estimated $925 million. On top of that, the federal government spent nearly $1 billion on security. The city itself was on the hook for $554 million. And those tallies don’t include the $1.9-billion Canada Line, whose construction disrupted businesses on Cambie Street for years, the $600-million upgrades to the Sea-to-sky Highway or the $900-million convention centre.
More recent estimates put total government expenditures for the 2010 Games at $6.4 billion. Which is a lot of money in its own right, but looks like a steal compared with the estimated US$28 billion ($35 billion) it cost to stage last year’s Games in Tokyo.
Although the IOC’S reforms managed to attract enough free countries to host the next four Olympiads, given the exorbitant cost of staging a modern Olympics and the dubious economic benefits that come with them, it’s getting harder for democratic governments to make the case that taxpayers should foot the bill. But maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t want my hard-earned money paying for the Olympics, but I’m perfectly happy for Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to pick up the cheque, while I watch on TV.
I DON’T WANT MY HARD-EARNED MONEY PAYING FOR THE OLYMPICS.