Fair Games?

For seventeen days every four years, the world is briefly arrested by the captivating, dizzying spectacle of athleticism, ambition, pride and celebration on display at the Summer Olympic Games. After the last weary spectators and competitors have returned home, however, host cities are often left awash in heavy debts and costly infrastructure maintenance. The staggering expenses involved in a successful Olympic bid are often assumed to be easily offset by tourism revenue and an increase in local employment, but more often than not, host cities are short-changed, and their taxpayers are left settling the debt for generations to come.

Olympic extravagance begins with the application process. Bidding alone will set most cities back about $20 million, and while the official bidding process takes only two years for cities that make the shortlist, most cities can expect to spend a decade working on their bid, from the moment it is initiated to the announcement of the voting results by International Olympic Committee members.

Aside from the financial costs of the bid itself, the process ties up real estate in prized urban locations until the outcome is known. This can cost local economies millions of dollars in lost revenue from private developers who could have made use of the land, and can also mean that particular urban districts lose their vitality because of vacant lots.

All of this may be for nothing if a bidding city fails to appease the whims of IOC members. Personal connections and opinions about government conduct often hold sway. Chicago’s 2012 bid, for example, is thought to have been undermined by tensions over US foreign policy.

Bidding costs do not compare, however, with the exorbitant bills associated with hosting the Olympic Games themselves. As is typical of large-scale, one-off projects, budgeting for the Olympics is a notoriously formidable task.

Los Angelenos have only recently finished paying off the budget-breaking 1984 Olympics, while Montreal is still in debt for its 1976 Games. To add insult to injury, Canada is the only host country to have failed to win a single gold medal during its own Olympics.

The tradition of runaway expenses has persisted in recent years. London Olympic managers admitted that the costs of the 2012 Games might increase to ten times their initial projections, leaving taxpayers £20 billion in the red.

Hosting the Olympics is often understood to be an excellent way to update a city’s sporting infrastructure. The extensive demands of Olympic sports include aquatic complexes, equestrian circuits, shooting ranges, beach volleyball courts and, of course, an 80,000-seat athletics stadium.

Yet these facilities are typically necessary only to accommodate a brief influx of athletes from around the world. Despite the enthusiasm many populations initially have for developing world-class sporting complexes in their home cities, these complexes typically fall into disuse after the Olympic fervour has faded. Even Australia, home to one of the world’s most sporting populations, has left its taxpayers footing a $32-million-a-year bill for the maintenance of vacant facilities.

Another major concern is that when civic infrastructure developments are undertaken in preparation for hosting the Olympics, the benefits accrue to a single metropolitan centre, with the exception of some outlying areas that may receive renovated sports facilities. In countries with an expansive land mass, this means vast sections of the population miss out entirely.

Furthermore, since the International Olympic Committee favours prosperous "global" centres -- the United Kingdom was told, after three failed bids from its provincial cities, that only London stood any real chance of winning -- improvements to public transport, roads and communication links tend to be concentrated in places already well equipped with world-class infrastructure.

Perpetually bypassing smaller cities creates a cycle of disenfranchisement: these cities never receive an injection of capital, they fail to become first-rate candidates, and they are constantly passed over in favour of more secure choices.

Finally, there is no guarantee that the Olympics will be a popular success. The "feel-good" factor that most proponents of Olympic bids extol -- and that was undoubtedly driving the 90 to 100 per cent approval rates among Parisians and Londoners for their cities’ respective 2012 bids -- can be an elusive phenomenon, and one that is tied to the nation’s position in the medal table.

This short-lived thrill cannot compare with the years of disruptive construction projects and security fears involved in preparing for an Olympic Games, nor with the decades of debt repayment that follow. Greece’s preparations for Athens 2004 famously deterred tourists from visiting the country because of widespread unease about congestion and disruption.

There are feasible alternatives to the bloat, extravagance and wasteful spending associated with a modern Olympic Games. One option is to designate a permanent host city that would be redesigned or built from scratch specifically for the task.

Another is to extend the duration of the Olympics so that it becomes a festival lasting several months. Local businesses would benefit from the additional spending, and congestion would ease substantially as competitors and spectators came and went according to their specific interests.

Neither the "Olympic City" nor the extended-duration option really gets to the heart of the issue, however. Stripping away ritual and ceremony in favour of concentrating on athletic rivalry would be preferable.

Failing that, the Olympics could simply be abolished altogether. International competition could still be maintained through world championships in each discipline. Most of these events are already held in non-Olympic years anyway. The International Association of Athletics Federations, for example, has held a biennial World Athletics Championships since 1983, after its members decided that using the Olympics for their championship was no longer sufficient.

Events of this nature keep world-class competition alive without requiring Olympic-sized expenditure.