This reminds me of the stories that come out regarding World Cup and Olympics bids, where countries spend exorbitant amounts of money to build to infrastructure to host the games, with the promise that the long term impact of the projects are positive, only to find much of the infrastructure abandoned after the event ends. Many of the Athens 2004 events sites are now popular “abandoned porn” spots.[0]
I remember Brazil built huge stadiums for the World Cup and Olympics banking on their local teams moving into them, which wound up not happening because the teams didn’t like the lease terms. A $900M stadium became a bus garage[1]
Olympics is a once in a lifetime opportunity for a tiny groups of people in those countries ( contractors, politicians, all sorts of middle men,etc). The country decides to open money tap and everyone goes bananas. There are no long term planning (we'll sort it after the games), everything is built just to show we are better than the country before us and etc.. In most cases it's the ultimate Bentley parked just outside crumbling council estate...
The Olympics are actually significantly different than the corruption perpetrated by the cavalcade of asshats that were Governor Walker's cronies.
I mean, they actually hold an Olympics. It's not clear to me that anything meaningful will happen out in Mt Pleasant Wi. Not even anything worth the 1 billion we've already spent, and that's forgetting about what we're on the hook for if something does happen. It's put a lot of us in wisconsin in the awkward position of hoping everything there completely fails, so we can get out with just the losses we've already taken.
I attended a juggling convention at a former Olympic venue in Athens, which was in turn a hangar for their former airport. They didn't even have hot water for the showers.
Same thing happened in Sochi where everything has been abandoned and the cost to the taxpayers has been exorbitant:
A year after the $51 billion Winter Olympics, many of the key facilities built for Vladimir Putin's extravaganza have been barely been used.
While the pistes up the mountains are now often packed with skiers - the collapsing rouble means Russians have switched from the likes of Courchevel to the Caucasus - many of the key sites of the games appear to have little prospect of being filled again.
He complained that the Bolshoy Ice Dome - costing the Russian taxpayer £197 million - requires a budget of £9,900 a day to maintain, 'mainly for taking care of the ice'.
A company which owns some of the key facilities - hardly used since the games - and is close to the regional authorities, is on the very edge of bankruptcy, he reported, citing Russia's leading business newspaper Kommersant.
Sochi went from being a dump to being a somewhat popular vacation destination for middle class people.
There's room for argument on whether federal funds should have been used to make Sochi richer and nicer, but the article as written is basically fake news.
While I don't doubt that a Daily Mail article is full of lies, what you're saying (Sochi is a more popular and beautiful holiday destination) and what the gp is saying (many of the facilities are derelict) is hardly mutually exclusive.
I remember Brazil built huge stadiums for the World Cup and Olympics banking on their local teams moving into them, which wound up not happening because the teams didn’t like the lease terms. A $900M stadium became a bus garage[1]
0: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abando...
1: https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a15531/bra...