Posted on 02/24/2014 12:54:05 PM PST by SeekAndFind
As soon as the Winter Olympics draw to a close tonight in Sochi, another sport will begin: debate over whether the city will actually benefit from hosting the games.
“If costs are the benchmark for ‘successful’ Games,” says Janice Forsyth, Director of the International Center for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, “Sochi is the most unsuccessful games in history, bar none.”
The Sochi organizing committee spent an estimated US$51 billion on the Games, surpassing the next most expensive Olympics (Beijing Summer Games, 2008) by about $8 billion.
The problem is that “rarely, if ever” do Olympics turn a profit, says Mauro Guillen, Professor of International Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s expensive and the venues are normally hard to use after the games.”
Moreover, Forsyth says, “The Games are always a loser for the public, who pays for the majority of the costs.” National and local governments are often left paying down the debts from the Olympic spending for years, if not decades. “The Games work best in authoritarian states, where the government can use public funds however it chooses to make the Olympic project work, without public input.”
Plus, the International Olympic Committee provides no backing. It can’t. Its charter states “The IOC shall have no financial responsibility whatsoever in respect of the organization and staging of the Olympic Games.”
“Nifty little clause isn’t it?” asks Forsyth.
“The only Games where the Olympic industry can actually say there was a profit, and the public didn’t pay, are the 1984 Games in Los Angeles,” says Forsyth. “The mayor (Tom Bradley) assured the public none of their tax dollars would be spent on hosting, and he held true to that promise.” Instead, the Los Angeles games were financed through corporate contributions.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Could not care less about the olympics. Just hope it doesn’t come to FL.
50 billion spent?
Sochi?
I’d rather go to Newark.
With the exception of the bobsled track, many cities already have the facilities to host the Winter Olympics without having to spend $5-50 Billion. They need to stop picking places where it is warm in the winter. I am sure a lot of the $50 billion Russia spent did not end up in the bobsled track. More likely in Putin’s Swiss bank account.
Denver did not want the 1970 winter Olympics because they did not want to bankrupt the city. They already had the mountains and climate.
Several cold climate cities like Salt Lake and Calgary have been successful in hosting the Olympics. Even small towns like Lake Placid ,St. Moritz and Squaw Valley have done OK.
Structures can be built anywhere. However, you can not replace the Swiss/French/Austria Alps or the US/Canadian Rocky Mountains for cold weather and natural snow in February.
They say 50 percent spent on the games went to graft, corruption etc.
Ya gots to know that’s about all the games have become, a way to soak em.
Not many cities have the facilities to host all these sports at the same time WITH massive TV coverage. Plus an Olympic village and tons of hotel space.
Not sure why you keep saying they need to stop being someplace warm, Sochi was the closest they’ve had to a warm weather Winter Games site and it was still plenty cold.
Denver might have had the mountains, but in 1970 that’s all they had.
Structures are where the expensive part of hosting an Olympics is. Nobody already has the ability to run 22 major sporting events simultaneously. They might have 1 good sized ice rink but for the Olympics you need to be able to run hockey, figure skating, and two different types of speed skating roughly simultaneously, 1 rink won’t cut it.
As long as there’s mountains nearby that will get snow (Vancouver really tested the concept of “nearby”) and room to build all the buildings you can run one. But then there’s the will to spend all that money.
I heard one commentator say that Russians have always went to Switzerland if they wanted to ski and that now they will be able to stay in Russia and go to Sochi.
Well Russia’s loss of the Kiev Street Riot event will be good for the Ukrainians —
How about holding the games in the same spot every year.
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