Olympics is such a massive waste of money that nobody except politicians who want to show off with taxpayer money or industrials benefiting from government contracts would be for it.
Every Olympics held in the United States has been profitable for the host city (and all but one in Canada) in large part because the infrastructure already exists.
Los Angeles is looking forward to having the games in 2028 because it gives them extra money to pay for infrastructure that they've been planning to build anyway.
San Francisco really wanted the 2028 games as well because it would have allowed us to finish building BART/CalTrain around the Bay, and we would have already had all the venues necessary with the various pro and college facilities around the Bay.
> Every Olympics held in the United States has been profitable for the host city (and all but one in Canada) in large part because the infrastructure already exists.
> As a result, in 1979 Los Angeles was the only city to bid for the 1984 Summer Olympics, allowing it to negotiate exceptionally favorable terms with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
> The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were the only games to produce a surplus, in large part because the city was able to rely on already existing infrastructure.
As the costs of hosting have skyrocketed, revenues cover only a fraction of expenditures. Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics generated $3.6 billion in revenue, compared with over $40 billion in costs, and London’s Summer Games in 2012 generated $5.2 billion compared with $18 billion in costs. What’s more, much of the revenue doesn’t go to the host—the IOC keeps more than half of all television revenue, typically the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.
Atlanta 96 was a great case study in this. Atlanta built a ton of infrastructure that continues to serve the city well. Many of the venues built in downtown and especially on the Georgia Tech campus went on to be very productive and useful. Georgia Tech has a world-class gym and still uses some of the olympic village as dorms as part of that legacy. There is one big exception - a massive tennis center built out in the suburbs. It was too far outside the city, never got much use and was demolished in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain_Tennis_Center
We benefited from it in London, I think we all wanted it too. Even if it kind of was an austerity Olympics compared to before it and after it? Sure we wasted some money here and there (was who the fuck needs a giant slide) but overall it turned an industrial wasteland into a useful area for East London.
The Olympics in London cost 11.3 Billion and generated revenue of 3.3 billion which doesn't exactly seem hugely beneficial.
Of course in the usual London fashion most of the money came out of UK govt coffers, national lottery funding etc - so it was just a form of London sucking cash out of the rest of the UK to build infra, via the handy "Olympics" excuse, so I can see how a londoner might argue it was good as it was a means of extracting resources from the rest of the country.
In the aggregate, it was just a giant waste of money especially for the 90% of the UK population that isn't in London.
I don't disagree with any particular point here but I'd like to point out that there are some second order effects from that investment money, it wasn't just "gone" and it didn't just go to the koffers of building contractors either.
I can give some examples;
1) Newham was a very impoverished area before the olympic stadium was set to move there. Now Stratford and Newham are desirable.. More desirable than Hackney which has been "up and coming" for as long as I lived there.
2) Internet in London is/was _abysmal_. Genuinely awful. I even wrote a exasperated blog post about it[0]. This was due to degraded and faulty ADSL being he only option and grossly oversubscribed even if it worked well- and the large providers only followed each other with fibre installations.
When the olympics rolled in there was an enormous infrastructure improvement - I even remember talking to some Telecity employees about it. -- That infrastructure was later sold on to last mile providers who expanded it a bit and I went from speeds worse than dial-up with frequent route drops to symmetric gigabit and IPv6 using a new company called "Hyperoptic". That was a real improvement for everyone in my area because they had given up on home internet. (no netflix, youtube, only basic banking websites possible).
It comes from London frequently having money lavished on it that other areas don’t (eg - check public transport [1]) - and usually accompanied with a self-fulfilling prophecy about how other areas don’t generate tax income (which of course is because they don’t have good infra and investment). And this situation has been very much engineered by the UK government over the last 40 years, it isn’t some state of nature.
I just want to chime in here and agree with this wholeheartedly.
There is a lot of self-fulfilment when it comes to London spending vs London generation of revenues.
It's famously the case that London props up almost the entire rest of the country. Scotland itself being a net-loss in terms of GDP.
I come from a City called Coventry, "investment" in the city is non-existent; the only investor right now is the University which has essentially bought the entire City over the last 10 years.
Why? Because "Coventry doesn't make money". Why does Coventry not make money? -- well, companies would never headquarter there because the infrastructure is not good enough and the networking connections are not compelling; even if you think it will save you money because it's cheaper to hire in Coventry (somewhere in the order of 1/3rd london salaries, 1/5th London commercial rents) it's still awkward because navigating the city requires making use of the awful public transport or buying a car[0] (which the city is close to capacity with already!)
Birmingham, Britains "second city" has only moderate investment compared to London (though insanely more than most other UK cities), but also feels destitute in the majority of areas, _especially_ when compared to London, the infrastructure is marginally better than Coventry but the prestige/networking/access is nearly no different.
This is many decades in the making, there is absolutely no way to compete with a city like London which is reaping the rewards of many decades of incredible investment which creates network effects which only serve to increase the gravitational pull of the city.
Born and raised in Coventry and still have family there.
Coventry has fought (as I see it) 2 major issues which have held it back.
Firstly as the center of the UK car industry and the Detroit of Britain its economic successes and failures have been tied closely to the ups and downs of UK car production. The collapse of that industry from the 1980s through to the early 2000s resulted in huge numbers of unemployed skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing workers. Manufacturing of that type and scale is not something governments can will into existence (and generally the efforts to do so have been at best non-ideal - see Rover's sale to BMW).
The other issue with Coventry is the well-intentioned but disastrous rebuilding of the city center following its flattening in WWII. The city center remains an uninviting concrete jungle with few non-retail businesses and almost no housing. Though the 1980s the inner core became a no-go area after dark and continues to have a bad reputation. Outside of University housing there is little reason for anyone to live anywhere but the suburbs (or in a neighboring town or city).
I would argue that Coventry does have excellent infrastructure and that is no part of why companies haven't wanted to move there. There are multiple trains per hour to London (and Birmingham) and is served by major motorways to London, Birmingham and Oxford (M6/M45/M69). Compared to most UK cities traffic seems manageable.
The expansion of Coventry University and University of Warwick (which despite its name is located in Coventry) may have been the best possible result for the city. How else could the UK government have spent money in the city to attract the size of employers that the city needs?
One the most frustrating things to me, and I say this as as a Southerner, was why they decided to build HS2 first, instead of linking up Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield first (HS3). Then building HS2 if it was necessary.
But now there is, yet another, infrastructure project that is connected to London.
Spreading investment around the UK would be a good thing, it would take the heat out of Southern property prices, if everyone wasn't compelled to find jobs in the same geographic area.
> The Olympics in London cost 11.3 Billion and generated revenue of 3.3 billion which doesn't exactly seem hugely beneficial.
Except it is one giant international PR and brand recognition event for the host country. TV ads cost in aggregate billions too and don’t bring any revenue immediately, doesn’t mean they are a waste of money.
Not to mention Olympics getting people interested in doing sports, which amid a global obesity upsurge, could also be worth more than nothing.
If this is true, why is there no evidence? Tourism in cities that have hosted the olympics doesn’t have an increase - certainly for london it didn’t. There’s no economic benefits in the years following for the host country that have been observed. It is doubtful that these second order benefits exist at all.
Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
How well can companies evidentiate their brand awareness campaigns? How well can an actress calculate returns from having attended a talk-show? Evidence of absence cannot reliably be inferred from an absence of evidence.
> Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
Familiarity is not the same as salience. Coca Cola is known by virtually the entire world, that doesn't make them stop the ads or branding campaigns.
> If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
Conceivable doesn't mean doable. There are many direct and effective ways of improving a great many things in the world, yet they don't happen.
Just like a great startup idea doesn't translate to a billion dollar revenue, political implementation doesn't spring into existence just from good ideas either.
>How well can companies evidentiate their brand awareness campaign?
Remarkably well actually. You can do things like ask people questions about the olympics and the sponsor city and then put them into cohorts based on their answers. From that, you can look at how much spending occurred in the target city from each cohort.
Of all the boroughs I've lived in, in London, the East Village (a.k.a. Olympic village) and the adjacent Queen Elizabeth Park is by far my favourite, and it's still improving. It has also had an impact on the surrounding areas which, negative in terms of gentrification and ridiculous house prices, but very positive in terms of the flourishing local economy and community.
Sure, I mean if you have the entire UK lavish money on a small area of London, that small area will benefit! Nobody would deny that nobody has benefitted from the olympics - a very small area of the country and a small number of companies contracted to build things benefited greatly, at the cost of the rest of the UK.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how other countries do it, but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site. There's been a bunch of apartments, etc, built around there since then because it basically became a suburb where you could live.
> but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site.
Why would you need the Olympics to have land repurposed. They were waiting for a good excuse? No need to have big expensive party if you could have done that in any other context. But then again you'd need to whole country to accept paying for making new apartments just in Sydney.
I am a bit split. If I’m reading it correctly, Wiki’s source is a journal’s comparing their simulation of what Sydney’s economy would have been without the Olympics, and the numbers published officially, with a twist on additional costs they think should be added to the official estimates.
> We simulated the behaviour of industries, households and government resulting from hosting the Games for each of eight Australian regions over the years from 1997 to 2005. Our results revealed that rather than producing an economic benefit the Sydney Games actually reduced Australian household consumption by $2.1 billion.
For comparison there are later reviews of the economics of the town with the 6 years after Olympics, with less simulation apparently, which come to a different conclusion https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/10360
I honestly don’t know which one is more trustworthy
Definitely not true. However, post hoc I am forced to admit it was not as colossal a waste of money as I'd expected, and honestly there was an astonishingly positive societal response. So, I was wrong, but I was not alone!
An astonishingly positive societal response which lasted how long? Do you think there have been long lasting benefits from that or was it just a nice few weeks? If the latter, which is my impression, I don't think that represents value for money at all.
You can never say that for sure because the money spent on organizing Olympics could have been used somewhere else (or not used at all, therefore decreasing taxation). It was certainly a waste for anyone not living in London in any case.
Watching the soccer made we think maybe we could get used to watching athletes compete in beautiful locations with no stadiums and crowds. Maybe you could do olympics really cheap with no tourists
Or do the Olympics always in the same place, instead of wasting energy building new installations around the globe every 4 years that will never be re-used.
The sentimental in me really appreciates what the Olympics stand for. There are many things bad in sports, but the idea of all the humans in the world sending delegates for a global sports competition is a good reminder of all the progress we’ve made. (I’m also a Eurovision fan)
I completely agree. The Olympic Games are a huge waste. The stadiums built in Rio for the 2016 games are standing there unused and unmanaged and slowly degrading. I think that it was a shame that Rio was chosen to host the Olympic games. Their country should have spent the money on the nearly 50 million people in poverty in Brazil. (source: https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/more-tha...)
