> “All Games, without exception, have cost overrun,” researchers wrote. “For no other type of megaproject is this the case, not even the construction of nuclear power plants or the storage of nuclear waste.”
Have these people been living under a rock? Literally ever megaproject—even much smaller ones—I’ve heard of in the past 10 years has had overruns much higher than 100%
The full quote: “Cost overruns are the norm for the Games, past, present, and future; they are the only project type that never delivered on budget, ever.”
Saw this somewhere else. Here's a map of the events from 1984 [1]; or at least many of them.
Two venues were built for the 1984 games; a velodrome at CSU Dominguez Hills, which operated for two decades until it was replaced by a new velodrome will also host (track) cycling and fencing for the 2028 games; the other venue was an olympic swim pool at USC, which was rebuilt 30 years later although it won't host the 2028 games; both venues had corporate sponsorship to help with construction costs.
Only one venue was built for the 1932 games, a swimming stadium that's still in use today, renovated in 2003.
Venues aren't fully confirmed for the 2028 games, but everything so far is either existing or temporary (these tend not to be very expensive). Although softball and canoe slalom are planned to happen in Oklahoma City in order to existing venues, since there apparently aren't appropriate venues in the LA area.
Stop trying to outdo the last host's opening ceremony. That boat procession in the rain was a disaster, and whatever they were trying to do with the masked man carrying the torch was absurd. Just have each county's athletes march around the stadium like they used to.
Focus on having good venues for the competition (that doesn't necessarily mean you have to build new ones) that's what it's about.
The ceremonies are table stakes... Burning even millions there isn't that big deal. The venues are the killer.
Expectations are way too high and their utilization after the events is just crapshoot. Maybe we should just go all digital. Do it in VR or 3D or something...
Second thing is infra in general that must be build to support these stations, that is often also enormously costly and will not be fully utilized afterwards.
The opening ceremony is a fashion show. It's fun to judge all the teams' costumes. Hard to do that when they're shoulder to shoulder, leaning on the rails of a distant barge, seen through a rain-soaked lens.
And then there was a concurrent runway show to distract from the athletes, which was more of the same featureless body positive chaff they've been bombarding us with for the last decade. It just looked like an American commercial.
When are we going to hand the keys to North Korea and let them show us how it's done?
I've always thought the summer games should be in Greece each time, with a different co-host country to set the theme etc. Much less waste (you're using the same stadiums and grounds etc), consistent viewing times, and scheduling. Not sure where the winter games could be but I think the same for that too.
Bent Flyvbjerg has made a career of analyzing very large projects and why they turn out so badly. Lest we get smug in this techie corner of the world, he found that large ERP projects are terrible even in the context of large projects. Anyhow:
This headline made me think, "So you're just now discovering this?" Montreal was a disaster; LA 1984 ran a surplus. Cities that already have the sports venues can do all right; other cities have learned by now that building a whole bunch of new stuff is foolhardy.
> To ensure true long-term viability of the Olympics, Matheson, Zimbalist and Phalin said it may come down to designating a single city or rotating through a couple of cities to serve as permanent hosts for the games.
Right: LA, London / Paris, Sydney. All of these could farm out some events to other places, like surfing in French Polynesia. Done.
> This headline made me think, "So you're just now discovering this?" Montreal was a disaster; LA 1984 ran a surplus. Cities that already have the sports venues can do all right; other cities have learned by now that building a whole bunch of new stuff is foolhardy.
Los Angeles 1984 had another plus besides having nearly all the sports venues already (they just needed to build a new velodrome and a new swim stadium).
They also already had nearly everything they needed for Olympic Village and to house the athletes and teams. They used student housing at USC and UCLA. It was summer and both of those schools have a large number of undergraduates who go home for the summer which left plenty of rooms available for the Olympics.
I had moved out by then, but I remember all this scare talk beforehand about how it was going to be the traffic apocalypse from hell. AFAIK it was no big deal.
It seems misomusie is much, much more prevalent than I thought. I know Rap enjoyers who listened to Gojira, Lennon and Piaf for the first their life and who were boulversed (I've seen people cry), and a few metal/classical music enjoyers who enjoyed the rap parts. 'Les machines de l' île' once again showed to me they were the greatest mechanical artists (sorry for Korean people: I've seen some of your art in Venise permanent exposition, it's really good, exceptionally good even, but live art will always surpass museum art in my mind). Also: people will now remember Parkour is a French sport, and video-games are now officially a legitimate art I think (I never played assassin's creed, but everybody recognized it, right?). One thing that I didn't like: the Algerian delegation shouldn't have had to bring their own flowers, it should have been an happening organized by Jolly. Still a beautiful, artful moment.
And the costs are 5 billion less than the Tokyo Olympics, so I guess it'll be OK.
The linked news article doesn’t describe how it arrived at its cost figures. Suppose a city widens a freeway before hosting the Games. The widened freeway is used afterward. Is this a “cost”? Does it make sense to count it as one?
Maybe the underlying paper discusses this. Hopefully it does as it’s an important question.
> Put a stadium bond or tax or whatever on the ballot
Yes, actually they should be put to vote rather than be decided by the city council or whatever. I’ll obviously vote against, but let the majority decide.
OTOH, if they are funded by public money, I would expect my ticket to be free or close to free, selection via lottery is fine.
> I would expect my ticket to be free or close to free
Why?
There are plenty of things that are partially subsidized by the government where private entities benefit. Or do you think all of those should be 100% free to you (which is a fine position to hold)?
Remember that while the stadium might be paid for publicly there are still many other costs which aren’t.
Why should I pay, via my taxes, to build stadiums that lead to profits for private team owners and other corporations.
> Remember that while the stadium might be paid for publicly there are still many other costs which aren’t.
This is why I also said close to free. I’ll accept if Box seats and some other close seats are paid with, say at least 50-60% being free and distributed via lottery.
Ads, concessions, TV rights etc are more than enough to pay for operational costs. If not, I’d like to see the financials and we can discuss how to cover the deficit.
> Why should I pay, via my taxes, to build stadiums that lead to profits for private team owners and other corporations.
You don’t have to! You’re welcome to not pay your taxes. It’s a very powerful political act.
Why should anyone pay, via their taxes, to do anything that leads to profits for other people?
Because people realize they don’t always get their way and if something is voted into action that they personally dislike, that’s one of the downsides (and upsides) of letting other people vote.
> You don’t have to! You’re welcome to not pay your taxes.
And here I thought we were having a rational discussion.
Interestingly the rest of your argument is talking about voting and outcome, which is what my whole original point was above that these stadiums etc need to be voted and not decided by the city/whichever council that is influenced by the lobbyists.
Yes, actually they should be put to vote rather than be decided by the city council or whatever. I’ll obviously vote against, but let the majority decide.
The lifetime of stadiums seems to be shrinking every decade. The billionaire owner asking for money to build that state of the art stadium will be asking for another new one in 20 years, when that money could instead be spent on fixing actual problems.
Fund your own stadium and maybe it will last longer than 20 years.
You would benefit if all members of the public bore the costs of your game tickets, but would you benefit if the same principle was applied to things that you didn't want?
I do not participate in or watch any sports, but this logic would preclude public investment in anything whatsoever.
I enjoy publicly funded museums. I hang out in publicly funded parks. I check books out of publicly funded libraries. None of these are used universally by all of the taxpayers whose money is used to fund them, but I don't feel guilty for that—I pay for things that they use that I don't use. That's part of the deal.
Whether sports need public funding is a good question that's worth exploring, but the mere fact that not everyone would enjoy them is not sufficient reason to not fund them.
There's a lot of economic activity generated by big sports venues -- hotel stays, restaurant meals, transportation, merchandise (official and otherwise), broadcasting and reporting work, miscellaneous things just related to having a lot of people in the area or from out of town. Same reason cities fund convention centers, performance art venues, and similar things.
No, at least in my city people drive into the stadium and drive home to the suburbs after. They have easy access to the interstates. The economic impact seems pretty middling to me.
You know this because you've done extensive research, surveying businesses around the stadium to find out what their books look like on days where there are sporting events and on days where there aren't?
Or are you just basing it on the fact that traffic is thicker to and from the stadium on days where there are sporting events?
The only businesses around the stadiums are a casino and refrigerated warehouses.
I’m basing this on going to games at these stadiums for 20 years, and never visiting the refrigerated warehouses afterwards. Everyone hops on the public transit if they live in the city or drives home to the suburbs afterwards.
Is there a reason why that has to be the case or is this just an observation of the way things have gone so far?
College sports stadiums are often (usually?) used to fund the rest of the school. I don't see any particular reason why that model couldn't be adapted by government bodies if there's demand for publicly funded sports.
Well, sure, one could imagine a structure where subsidizing sports stadiums makes sense. But when people talk about it being bad they usually mean in the world as it more or less exists.
Billionaires don't need assistance to fund their entertainment venues. When they do want public money to lower the horrible economic burden of supporting their money printer, the public should be equitably treated as an investment partner that gets a proportional share of all revenue.
Depends on what you mean by "publicly funded sports stadiums".
Stadiums that can only be used by a handful of local professional athletes? Hell no.
Stadiums that are part of local public infrastructure are a different story.
Facilities that can be rented in-full or in-part for a nominal fee by any resident in the community, and/or that during unused times are a center for community fitness? Hell yes.
Every city or ward in Japan has some kind of community center, and most of them have gyms and other fitness facilities, and overall they compare well to for-profit gyms -- which, admittedly, are absolute shit in Japan across the board, public, private, or otherwise[1]
[1] The average gym in Japan consists of approximately ten million treadmills and one squat rack, the latter having a reservation system, and being about as easy to book as an appointment with Elon Musk.
I cynically thought that the massive overspending was the reason it exists at this point, hosting the Olympics being one big money laundering operation to give an excuse to take out loans and pay the connected without even having to fit your graft into a normal budget. That so many kleptocrats want to host is a further strong hint. Which cynically might be the real reason behind the push for reduced building, it becoming an embarrassment like FIFA's corruption scandals from nearly a decade ago.
Arts and culture have never been financially beneficial. Neither are universal healthcare and making cities accessible. Sometimes the benefit is beyond finances.
Hmm, how much would 10 billion buy in culture? Or spend on promoting sports among general population?
To me it has long time seemed like Olympics does not have cost-benefit correct. Money spend could likely get more effective and bigger benefits in other ways. Then again getting money to waste without big ticket item is hard.
No, I still ROTFL at this. It would have made Greece's Olympics a model of stability. I think it would have ended up being cancelled if Boston was selected.
The bread and circus scam has always existed to grift tax money. It’s all one big money grab that people for some reason watch and get emotionally invested in.
So? The Olympics are really cool. And there’s always more money. Does anybody think the Olympics are what’s going to be the end of Los Angeles in 2028?
Probably not Los Angeles. It will be their third Olympics, their 1984 Olympics was well managed, and it looks to be on track for a well managed 2028.
But when a city/region/country tries to vastly increase prestige by hosting, it's often a big strain on their economy and can leave a legacy of waste.
It's one thing to use a big event to upgrade or build facilities that are in demand and will be used, but construction costs were hard to justify. But it's a waste when they're built and then not used after the games; which is unfortunately common.
You can often sneak in some infrastructure projects that will be of lasting benefit too. As I understand it, LA's network of highway information signage was built for the 1984 Olympics, and is sort of useful for other things. I read that Paris built some runoff storage/treatment facilities to augment their sewage system[1] so that they could run Olympic events in the Seine, but improving water quality will benefit residents and the environment after the games.
[1] Most old cities, including Paris, have a first to market problem with their sewage systems. When there was little concept of sewage treatment, it made sense to build combined sewers that manage rain water and sewage in the same system; you didn't want either in the streets, so pipe it all to the river. Over time, sanitary sewers required treatment plants to clean the water before discharging it into the river; but in a combined system, rain water will oftwn overwhelm the treatment plant capacity, and you get less treated or minimally treated discharges during sustained rainfall. It's difficult to build a second system in an established urban environment, but cities that grew in the 1950s or later tend to have separate storm and sanitary sewers. Of course, time has shown we should treat water from storm sewers too, when possible.
Have these people been living under a rock? Literally ever megaproject—even much smaller ones—I’ve heard of in the past 10 years has had overruns much higher than 100%