It’s not surprising that an increasing number of cities are saying no to hosting the games.
The promoters of the Paris Olympics claimed that it would be budget-conscious. And, compared with recent extravaganzas, it has been, although that’s a low bar. The New York Times reports:
The tab for the Games in Paris, the first city to fully test cost-cutting reforms that the International Olympic Committee introduced in 2019, is at least $8.87 billion. That isn’t an eye-popping bill compared with the $17 billion that London spent in 2012, the estimated $28 billion that Tokyo spent in 2021 or the $24 billion that Rio de Janeiro spent in 2016 — the three most expensive Summer Games to date.
But the figure for Paris is still more than $1 billion above the historical median cost of hosting the games. Surprise!
What’s more, the (“at least”) $8.87 billion is more than twice the original estimate, so far. Some of the details remain, uh, opaque. According to the NYT, “the latest cost estimate doesn’t factor in about 45,000 security personnel, compensation for shops shuttered for a week in parts of the city behind police cordons or the $1.4 billion project to make the Seine swimmable.” And even if the last of those items — making the Seine swimmable — might be justified with or without an Olympics, the other two, however appropriate, are attributable solely to the Games. We can be sure that there will be more such extras.
To be fair, Paris is hardly alone in overrunning its budget. According to the Times’ report, every Olympics held since 1960 has done just that. Why might that be? Add the extravagance, corruption, and unaccountability of a transnational bureaucracy — and that’s what the IOC is, the U.N. in a blazer — to the importance that the host countries’ governments attach to putting on a good show, and the result is financial irresponsibility on a gigantic scale. According to a 2024 Oxford University study, the average cost of hosting the Games has been three times the bid price. The only Games to turn a profit were those held in Los Angeles in 1984. USA! USA!
L.A. will, absurdly, be hosting the 2028 games. Lightning will not strike twice.
Assessing the cost of hosting the Games does not stop there. In a 2024 report, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that:
Economists say the games’ so-called implicit costs must also be considered. These include the opportunity costs of public spending that could have been spent on other priorities. Servicing the debt that is left over after hosting the games can burden public budgets for decades. It took Montreal until 2006 to pay off the last of its debt from the 1976 Games, while Greece’s billions in Olympics debt helped bankrupt the country. . . .
Impact studies carried out or commissioned by host governments before the games often argue that hosting the event will provide a major economic lift by creating jobs, drawing tourists, and boosting overall economic output. However, research carried out after the games shows that these purported benefits are dubious.
In a study of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, for example, Matheson, along with economists Robert Baumann and Bryan Engelhardt, found a short-term boost [PDF] of seven thousand additional jobs—about one-tenth the number promised by officials—and no long-term increase in employment. As a study by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development explains, the jobs created by Olympics construction are often temporary, and unless the host region is suffering from high unemployment, the jobs mostly go to workers who are already employed, blunting the impact on the broader economy.
Economists have also found that the impact on tourism is mixed, as the security, crowding, and higher prices that the Olympics bring dissuade many visitors.
As the British actor Ernest Thesiger reportedly commented when asked how he had found his time on the Western Front, “oh, my dear, the noise! And the people!”
Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that, given the chance of a vote, an increasing number of cities are saying no. That was not a risk that Paris’s mayor, urban wrecker, socialist, and climate fundamentalist Anne Hidalgo, was prepared to take. Asked why Parisians were not asked to vote on whether they wanted to host the games, she explained, “The answer would have been negative.”