The games rarely bring lasting gains

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Please be sure to include your name, address and telephone number. The right to edit submissions, which should be no longer than 200 words, is reserved. Pseudonyms will be published only in exceptional circumstances. THE Rio Olympics have not yet proved to be the disaster some had feared. Zika still lurks about, but we haven’t heard the kind of humiliating tales of catastrophes small and large that dogged the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

The best case, however, is still a disaster – for the host. Brazil has spent an estimated $12 billion (R160 billion) on the games, and while much has gone to upgrading infrastructure, much is the sort that doesn’t have great long-term payoffs. This by a country whose economy has been rocked by the bursting of the global commodity bubble.

“Disaster” is not hyperbole. When I was in Greece last year to report on the elections and the refugee crisis, virtually everyone I spoke to agreed that the Olympics had dealt a painful blow to Greece’s economic condition. Local boosters frequently argue that the Olympics will produce a wave of economic benefits. The reality is that prudent city governments should run screaming from any proposals to host the Olympics.

Start with all those custom facilities, which have to be built quickly and to a hard deadline. Add in the need to transport people between the venues, requiring costly infrastructure upgrades. Toss in that after the Olympics all those sites will need to be maintained, or turned into something else.

And the economic benefits? Cities that host the Olympics don’t even necessarily see a burst of tourism. Although the Olympics certainly attracts a lot of sports fans, it scares off a lot of other tourists who want to avoid the traffic and associated headaches.

According to The Economist, “Beijing and London both attracted fewer visitors during their summer Olympics in 2008 and 2012 respectively than they had in the same period a year earlier.”

Improvements

And while some of the infrastructure improvements, like investment in roads, may pay off, the fact that these investments are concentrated on moving people between Olympic venues, rather than to places they go to when the Olympics is not in town, makes even this potential upside dubious.

The debt to finance these “investments”, on the other hand, is permanent and can be a heavy burden. The long planning cycle necessary to stage an Olympics means that a country like Brazil can take on the obligations during boom times, then be forced to cough up billions later on, when the economy is going through a rough patch.

We could, as Megan Greenwell recently suggested in Wired, hold the Olympics in multiple cities, so the pain would not fall too heavily on any one place. Allow various cities to invest in permanent venues for one sport they do particularly well, which would both minimize the cost and allow countries to get really, really good at hosting their one sport.

But this sort of gives up on the idea of the Olympics, which is supposed to be a great coming together of athletes from every country and many sports.

There’s another alternative: we have a traditional Olympics. As in, we hold it in the same spot every time. Somewhere like … Greece, where the original Olympics were invented.

That is the suggestion of Paul Glastris, editor of the Washington Monthly. Olympic Games, after all, do not just involve a lot of investment in physical capital; they also involve developing human capital, which is completely wasted when the Olympics leaves town. (I should disclose that Glastris is, himself, of Greek extraction. But that doesn’t make his proposal less sensible.)

Picking a single city sidesteps this problem. And making it Athens sidesteps a lot of the problems of choosing a city, which will inevitably be fraught with political bitterness between north and south, east and west. Greece, unlike the rest of the international community, really does have a uniquely strong claim to become the permanent host of the games. Granting that claim would let the rest of us off the hook for quadrennial white-elephant exhibitions. That’s a bargain, any way you look at it. – Bloomberg View