![]() 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. The Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse and the Importance of Infrastructure Investment ![]()
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