Price tag for delayed Tokyo Games comes in at $13B
TOKYO — The final price tag for last year’s Covid-delayed Tokyo Olympics was put at $13 billion (1.4 trillion Japanese yen), the organizing committee said Tuesday in its final act before it is dissolved at the end of the month.
The cost was twice what was forecast in 2013 when Tokyo was awarded the Games. However, the final price tag presented by organizers is lower than the $15.4 billion they predicted when the Olympics ended just under 11 months ago.
“We made an estimate, and the estimate has gone down lower than we expected,” Tokyo organizing committee CEO Toshiro Muto said, speaking through an interpreter at a news conference. “As a total amount, whether this is huge or not — when it comes to that kind of talk it is not easy to evaluate.”
Accurately tracking Olympic costs — who pays, who benefits, and what are and are not Games’ expenses — is an ever-moving maze. The one-year delay added to the difficulty, as did recent fluctuations in the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen.
When the Olympics opened on July 23, 2021, $1 bought 110 yen. On Monday, $1 bought 135 yen, the dollar’s highest level against the yen in about 25 years. Organizers chose to use a rate of $1 to 109.89 yen to figure the dollar price, which organizers said was the average exchange rate for 2021.
Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross who has written extensively on the Olympics, suggested by email to AP that most of “the expenses and revenues are in yen, so the exchange rate changing the dollar amounts doesn’t affect how the event ‘feels’ to the organizers.”
Matheson and fellow American Robert Baade researched Olympic costs and benefits in a study called “Going for Gold: The Economics of the Olym-* pics.” They wrote that “the overwhelming conclusion is that in most cases the Olympics are a money-losing proposition for host cities; they result in positive net benefits only under very specific and unusual circumstances.”
Muto said there were savings because of the absence of fans, which cut down on security costs and venue maintenance costs. He talked vaguely about “squeezing” costs and “simplifying” operations to reach the reductions.
However, organizers lost at least $800 million in income from ticket sales because fans were banned due to COVID.
Japanese government entities, primarily the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, covered about 55% of the total expenses. This amounted to about $7.1 billion in Japanese taxpayer money.