Once a city is chosen to host, it has nearly a decade to prepare for the influx of athletes and tourists. Tokyo spent as much as $150 million on its failed 2016 bid, and about half that much for its successful 2020 bid, while Toronto decided it could not afford the $60 million it would have needed for a 2024 bid. The cost of planning, hiring consultants, organizing events, and the necessary travel consistently falls between $50 million and $100 million. What costs do cities incur for hosting the games?Ĭities invest millions of dollars in evaluating, preparing, and submitting a bid to the IOC. In an unprecedented move, the IOC chose the 20 venues simultaneously in 2017, with Paris and Los Angeles, respectively, taking turns hosting due to the lack of candidates. Boston withdrew from consideration for the 2024 games, with its mayor saying that he “refuse to mortgage the future of the city away.” The 2024 finalists, Budapest, Hungary, Hamburg, Germany, and Rome, also withdrew, leaving only Los Angeles and Paris. Beijing had little competition for its 2022 bid, with both Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden, back ing out upon realizing that costs would be higher than estimated. These costs have led to renewed skepticism, and several cities withdrew their bids for the 2022, 2024, and 2028 games over cost concerns. Costs spiraled to over $50 billion for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, $20 billion for 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, and $13 billion for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

However, these countries invested massive sums to create the necessary infrastructure. Countries such as China, Russia, and Brazil have been eager to use the games to demonstrate their progress on the world stage. In addition, as researchers Robert Baade and Victor Matheson point out, bidding by developing countries more than tripled after 1988. This allowed the IOC to choose the cities with the most ambitious-and expensive-plans. Los Angeles’ success led to a rising number of cities bidding-from two for the 1988 games to twelve for the 2004 games. The projected cost of $124 million was billions below the actual cost, largely due to construction delays and cost overruns for a new stadium, saddling the city’s taxpayers with some $1.5 billion in debt that took nearly three decades to pay off. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal came to symbolize the fiscal risks of hosting. In 1972, Denver became the first and only chosen host city to reject its Olympics after voters passed a referendum refusing additional public spending for the games. The killing of protesters in the days before the 1968 Mexico City Games and the fatal assault on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games tarnished the image of the Olympics, and public skepticism of taking on debt to host the games grew.

A 2012 University of Oxford study estimated an average cost overrun of 252 percent for each Summer Olympics since 1976, after adjusting for inflation.

The games were growing rapidly, with the number of Summer Olympics participants almost doubling and the number of events increasing by a third during the 1960s. The 1970s marked a turning point, writes Andrew Zimbalist, author of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. Instead, the games were publicly funded, with these advanced countries better positioned to bear the costs due to their larger economies and more advanced infrastructure. The events were held in developed countries, either in Europe or the United States, and in the era before television broadcasting, hosts didn’t expect to make a profit. When did the costs of hosting the games become a concern?įor much of the twentieth century, the staging of the Olympic Games was a manageable burden for the host cities. The multibillion-dollar bill Tokyo faces in the aftermath of the games is not unique: other former host cities still struggle with the debts they incurred, leading some candidate cities for future games to withdraw their bids or scale down their plans. The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo highlighted the ongoing debate over the costs and benefits of hosting such a mega-event, especially after the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic forced a year’s delay and sparked public opposition over going ahead with the festivities during a major outbreak.

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