The Paris 2024 Olympic games has well and truly kicked off, with athletes set to compete for the honour of representing their nations to win gold, well they don’t earn any money from it unless they get a medal in most cases, making this an exercise in futility if anything else.
But what of the games themselves, history suggests that the Olympics has become a bloated mess of overpriced hosting costs. There are abandoned Olympic venues galore dotted throughout the world, Athens has abandoned softball stadiums a sport that whilst may be big in other parts of the world Greece isn’t one of those places.
Now whilst Greece’s 2004 Olympics plummeted the county into a recession and financial crisis it has struggled to get out of ever since, the ancient Olympics i.e. the original games were from Greece.
However, the IOC insistence on moving this show around the world has plummeted many cities and areas with facilities that struggle to make money or find zero use once the Olympics circus leaves town. Sure, the brilliant Paralympic games give these venues an additional two-week shelf life but that’s all.
The scare of the Olympic legacy you’ll see now where clearer than in its 2016 host Rio De Janeiro, the Brazilian city became the first South American host of the games and quickly regretted it, with venues incomplete in time for the games and facilities that were poor for it’s secondary usage for the Paralympics.
Even London 2012 which prided itself on legacy and turned a discarded piece of London’s former industrial docks into a sporting venue to rival any city in the world now has to face some questions over the financial cost of that legacy. The Olympic stadium now renamed the ‘London Stadium’ was losing the tax payer £29 million a year, this figure is pre pandemic and this is despite the fact that the stadium has a long term tenant in football team West Ham United.
The promise of affordable housing post games has also damaged the legacy of London 2012 with a failure to build the thirty to forty thousand new homes, only six thousand have been built thus far with only 39% being classed as affordable.
But what makes Paris 2024 and to a greater degree Los Angeles 2028 more affordable, well it’s because most of the venues already exist, the main stadium for both Olympiads have existed for years, the Stade De France and for Los Angeles the Memorial Coliseum which hosted the 1984 Summer Olympic games and one of the few games to make a profit.
Now there are many issues with Paris 2024, not everyone wants the Olympics in town, but it will be the cheapest Olympics to date until the 2028 games.
Here’s the question though, if it expensive to host the Olympics why do city’s keep bidding for it? The answer is they don’t, well at least not anymore, the bidding process for the 2024 games Paris went unopposed because the International Olympic Committee (the organisation in charge of the Olympics) convinced the only opponent of Paris to drop out and as a result gave them the games in 2028, killing two birds with one stone as it were.
We also know that the 2032 games will be hosted in Australia in the city of Brisbane, the plan for this one will see existing venues upgraded and temporary venues added to the Gold Coast region with only four new venues to be built which will host Swimming, Water Polo, Basketball, Boxing and canoe slalom.
To be clear this isn’t just a problem for the summer games, the winter Olympics suffers from the same issue, this is why we had the winter games stay in Asia for it’s previous two additions in South Korea in 2018 and China (People’s Republic) in 2022.
In fact, the winter games is set to do this gain with 2026 being held in Italy and then 2030 being held in France.
I will give credit to the IOC, which I might be the first person to do so. At least they haven’t gone down the FIFA route, as football world governing body seem to approach or accept bids from any cult of personality petrostate that’s dumb enough to host these alleged crooks.
So, what is permanent solution to the Olympic problem? Well, the games originally went around the world to spread Olympic message of fair play and blah blah blah, cause that’s what the IOC PR team will tell you. In reality, they needed countries to take part and felt holding it in one location would mean certain countries i.e. those not in Europe, wouldn’t take part in the competition.
In the modern day we all know what the Olympics is and you’re never going to lack for participants, it’s time for the Olympics to return to Greece and return permanently, the IOC has a lot on money in its bank account, enough to build permanent facilities in a selected city, Athens would be purists’ choice because the ancient Greeks gave us the Olympics. However, Greece isn’t the most financially stable of nations and does Athens have the infrastructure and security needed to host it, probably not.
The second and the only other choice from a purist perspective is Paris, the IOC was created in part by Frenchmen Pierre de Coubertin, he became the second IOC president after Greek businessman and ally Demetrios Vikelas. Pierre was the biggest proponent for the revival of the games, although it should be noted that he inadvertently helped the Nazi’s land the 1936 Olympics but Pierre gave his support to Berlin in 1930 before Hitler took charge.
It's also clear from a non-purist point of view that the American’s have a knack of making the Olympics profitable so whilst I wouldn’t want to see the Olympics move permanently to the United States, they make it work and would make financial sense for the IOC.
Whilst for the Winter Olympics, Switzerland is where the IOC is based and would make the perfect winter games host, primarily the Winter Olympics is designed for northern hemisphere nations and should probably just stay in the Alps, either Switzerland, Italy, France, Austria or Germany.
Whatever the future hold for the Olympic games, it’s clear to see that the previous Olympic bidding model doesn’t work, so we’ll have to wait and see if Paris 2024 make any sort of profit.
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