Name: How The Olympics Became So Expensive For Host Cities
Uploaded: 2021-06-30T11:46:07.000Z
Duration: 18 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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When the final games were played in the 2016 Rio Olympics, it was

one of the most expensive summer games ever. In 2018, it was

estimated that the total cost was over $20 billion, far beyond

the Rio organizing committee's initial estimate of $2.8

billion. Rio had big stadiums, impressive athletic villages and

top of the line training facilities, all of which

significantly impacted the game's bottom line. But that big

spending didn't just end with the cost of just hosting the

games. The city of Rio had to pay for a new subway lines or

renovated shipping port, a doping testing lab and

environmental cleanup costs in the Guanabara Bay. But just

seven months after the games, the once grand Olympic venues

look like this. These crumbling facilities left vacant are the

byproduct of a city struggling with debt and colossal

maintenance costs, often billions of dollars in overrun

costs. Most of the facilities built for the Rio Games were not

supposed to last longer than the lifecycle of the games itself.

But the change in local government left the venues in

Now the question of the venues and especially those that are

that are still up there in the park. We're not supposed to be

cities going over budget when hosting the Olympics isn't

unique to just Rio. According to the Council of Foreign Relations

since 1960. Every Olympics all significant overrun costs, all

except one, the Summer and Winter Games have struggled to

stay within their estimated costs of hosting the Olympics.

Winter Games have done a better job of managing that. However,

the Sochi games was an outlier. And economists argue hosting the

games does very little for the betterment of a city.

If you're looking at this as an investment, you don't want to

make an investment something where you have a one chance at a

10 to have the outcome that you're looking for. That's not a

good investment. That level of risk is ridiculous to undertake.

Well, other experts believe that the games are vital for the

better roads, maybe it's Metro having a development of the

metro or it could be the Hoss having housing that's put in

As overhead costs become a growing concern. several cities

withdrew their 2022 Winter Olympic bids. So how did the

Olympics grow from its humble beginnings into a massive and

expensive international event? And how can the Olympics prevent

even more potential host cities from withdrawing their bids? In

1896, the Olympic Games became a truly international competition

as a modernized becoming what it looks like today, a bi annual

event with Summer and Winter Games. in its infancy, the gains

were relatively small, how cities would use public funds

for the games with ticket sales generating revenue to offset

Very first Olympic Games were in 1896. No women were able to

compete in those games and certainly over time now as we

look at his recent 2018 on the games look a lot different feel

This is Dr. Nicole Forrester. She's a former Olympic athlete

in track and field who competed in the 2008 Beijing games.

The Olympics is like the the pinnacle or the Everest of that

sporting experience, both for the athlete and also for the

The Olympic Games didn't see a rise in popularity until the

evolution of telecommunications. The 1936 Berlin Summer Games

were famously the first to be live broadcasted. At the time,

only about 50,000 viewers were able to watch from a nearby

Stadium by 1948. The radius grew even wider for the London Summer

Games. 500,000 people watch live up to 125 miles away in the

1960s. With the Rome games, they were the first genuinely

international broadcast, reaching millions worldwide. By

1968. About 17% of the world's population had access to the

game's cost balloon. As viewership grew over the years,

more prestigious white whales were being built to showcase a

country's national pride, draw and tourism, create jobs and

bolster local businesses. Since the 1960 games in Rome, both

Summer and Winter Games saw over one cost on their estimates,

things began to get dire in 1976 with the Montreal games. Andrew

Zimbalist is an author and economics professor at Smith

College in North Hampton. One of the things he specializes in is

Famously, the mayor of Montreal declared that the Olympics This

is before the games started, but he declared the Olympics can no

more have a cost overrun than a man can have a baby. Well, it

turned out that the Montreal Olympics had a cost overrun that

was almost tenfold over the initial price.

The Canadian government shelled out $1.5 billion in overhead

costs in the Montreal games well over their estimated cost of

$120 million. The Canadian government finally paid off that

At that time in Canada, we were under a cultural war of sorts.

The other issue that happened is the price of steel had

skyrocketed. And then the year before the games are hosted, you

had workers walk off on a strike, which then cause more of

a delay, and then again added to the cost itself of posting these

By 1984, no country wanted to host the games, only the United

States kept their hats in the ring for the 84 games in Los

Angeles, it became the first and only Summer Olympic Games to

have an operating surplus of $215 million. The reason as the

only bidder, Los Angeles had the leverage to negotiate its

contract with the IOC. And the infrastructure was already

together with with the fact that Los Angeles, the second largest

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How The Olympics Became So Expensive For Host Cities

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